Miles Parks for NPR:

Bevin isn’t the first politician to question the results of a race after the fact, and occasionally, if infrequently, those concerns have been founded in reality.

After the 2018 midterms, then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott alluded to “rampant voter fraud” that was never borne out in his Senate race.
Democrats also have continued to blame the results of the Georgia gubernatorial election on election administration issues that they say suppressed turnout.

And in North Carolina, an election for a House seat did end up being nullified because of an absentee ballot scheme.

Even after winning the 2016 election, President Trump alleged that “millions and millions of people” voted illegally in the 2016 election, which he said was why he lost the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton.

Trump has never presented any evidence for that claim, and a group his administration assembled to investigate voter fraud disbanded less than a year after it was formed, with no major result.

Overall, there has seldom been any evidence of widespread fraud in elections.

All the same, Americans’ confidence in elections has been slowly eroding over the past 20 years — and democracy-watchers put some of the blame on political rhetoric.