How accurate are claims that the US election is rigged?

There is a well-documented tradition of voter suppression to disenfranchise minority groups

Question: How accurate are claims that the US election is rigged?
Position1 of 3›: Claims that the US election is rigged are very accurate
Argument‹4 of 6›: There is a well-documented tradition of voter suppression to disenfranchise minority groups

Claims that the US election is rigged are very accurate. Some actors may use sophisticated microtargeting software to specifically focus on suppressing certain groups of the population.

The argument

In the 2016 election, the Trump campaign team incorporated a strategy to deter millions of African-Americans from voting. This included a group of people that the administration hoped would not show up to vote. Social media platforms and the internet have made it easy and affordable to reach massive amounts of people very quickly and anonymously. Some actors may use sophisticated microtargeting software to specifically focus on suppressing certain groups of the population.

Premises

[P1]In 2016 the Trump campaign reportedly ran a strategy to deter millions of African-Americans from voting. [P2] Social media makes it cheap and easy to reach huge numbers of people anonymously, with microtargeting software used to suppress specific groups. [C] Therefore, because there is a well-documented tradition of voter suppression to disenfranchise minority groups, claims that the US election is rigged are very accurate.

Counter-arguments

It is easier than ever before to register to vote, and especially to vote in the US. The term "voter suppression" was made up to defame legal activities such as voter ID laws and suggest that they are illegal. The Democratic administration's concerns regarding voter suppression are manufactured by them, and amplified by the press. Such concerns are invented to criticise the integrity of American presidential elections. Sore losers may use the term voter suppression to detract from their own loss and suggest that it could only have been caused by conspiracy.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise and the conclusion are about different things. Suppression is a claim about who is prevented or discouraged from casting a ballot; a rigged election is a claim that the count itself is falsified. The 2016 material was reported from campaign sources describing deterrence messaging rather than established by an adjudicated finding, and even taken at face value, discouraging turnout through advertising is not the fabrication of a result. [Rejecting P2] Microtargeting is available to every campaign and serves persuasion and mobilisation as readily as discouragement, so its existence identifies neither suppression nor a rigged count. The premise also drops the "well-documented tradition" the title promises: the history it gestures at — poll taxes, literacy tests, and the modern litigation over identification and registration rules — is exactly the evidence the argument does not supply, and it is a case about barriers written into law and contested in courts and legislatures, not about falsified totals.

Proponents cited

Greg Palast
“This country [America] is violently divided. There simply aren’t enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate. The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guys—and they did so by tossing black provisional ballots into the dumpster, new strict voter ID laws that saw students and low income voters turned away—the list goes on.”
Barack Obama
“Even as we sit here, there are those in power are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the Postal Service in the run-up to an election that is going to be dependent on mailed-in ballots so people don’t get sick.”