It is far more obvious that 2000 was stolen than 2016. Within a year, the country rallied around Bush and his ratings were near 905 - ironically just as the FLorida newspapers had completed a detailed count that showed had all of Florida been recounted, Gore would have won. This in spite of:
1) a poorly designed ballot in Democratic stronghold Palm Beach, where Lieberman (believe it or not) was a superstar!
2) The felons list that FL had a Texas company, allied with Bush create, that included many African Americans with no criminal record.
3) Suppression of the Haitian American vote
There is no doubt that Florida was stolen that year - and with it the Presidency.
Where there was wide spread knowledge that 2000 was stolen, you could argue that the Republicans stole Ohio in 2004. Here, the Republican Secretary of State allocated fewer voting machines to major Democratic majority cities for the general election than they had for primaries. This led to lines in the cities that were 4 to even 10 hours long! How many city residents with family or job constraints came out to vote but could not stay - in the rain - to get to the front to vote? Not to mention, Cleveland - like Palm Beach - had a strange ballot problem that likely cost votes. In all likelihood, had every vote been counted as INTENDED and all people who actually came to the polls been able to vote within the reasonable amount of time that most of us encountered, Kerry would have won. (Yes, I know he would have lost the popular vote - but if the popular vote were what won the elections, he would have spent far less time in swing states and had major rallies in places like NYC, DC, Boston etc. )
Yet within two weeks or so, when the Bill Clinton library opened, Clinton praised Bush for the campaign he ran and spoke of how he liked both Bush and Kerry. The NYT and WP could not have praised the Inaugural address more - even though Bush spoke of "spreading democracy" as the goal in Iraq - even though he had denied as lies that this neocon reason was why he attacked Iraq. The country not just moved on -- very few ever registered that anything odd had happened.
One argument you make that it is unlikely that all the key states moved in the same direction by about the same amount is not a strong argument. Look back to the 2006 midterms - as the election approached, more and more states moved from a Republican being favored, to a tight race, and on election day - EVERY Senate seat possible, other than the one Corker won over Harold Ford in TN were won by the Democrats.
Note that the reason that Nate Silver was out of line with everyone else giving Trump a higher chance was he spoke of the fact that the moves would likely be mathematically correlated -- ie all would move in the same way. So far, we have shown that RUSSIA hacked the Democrats and helped the Republicans use anything that could be used against Clinton. We know that Comey's announcements hurt Clinton and - no matter what he wanted to do on Russia - THOSE announcements are what seemed to have shifted the numbers. (Here, it could also be that the high number of undecided were really Republicans repulsed by Trump who in the last few weeks opted to "hold their noses" and vote for Trump because of the Supreme Court. It was observed that in Wisconsin, while Clinton had polled ahead - she never polled above 50%.
No one will know whether the extra stress of dealing with the Russian provided Wikileaks noise was a decisive factor. However, was it worse than the lies of the birthers or the swiftboat liars? Was it worse than the Citizens United allowed massive amount of negative ads in Wisconsin that buried not just Clinton, but Feingold, who had very few of the negatives people attribute to Clinton. All of these - as dishonest and bad for our democracy as they are - were legal.
Another factor was the two Comey announcements, which brought up negatives issues of Clinton. Comey was wrong to make those two announcements, but this went back to a Clinton misstep. In March 2015, we knew that email could be a negative and no one thinks that her campaign handled the issue well. In addition, she created this problem when she thought she was better off not leaving the work email, already requested by Congress while she was Secretary of State, with the State Department.
Another problem was that Clinton was very unlucky in getting pneumonia when she did. I suspect the campaign radically cut her schedule in the last two months - because any sign of illnesses or even fatigue - would have been a killer after she fainted. If she would have had a few more rallies in Democratic strongholds in those three states, it could have made a difference.
One silver lining is that because Russia could have had an impact, 2016 will be more controversial than 2004 and even 2000. There will be a real investigation and the issue of a foreign country interfering in our election. This is something that did not happen after 2000 or 2004.
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