Donald Trump's election may have shocked the American political establishment, but he is far from the only candidate for high office in the United States who has cast serious doubt on the integrity of the system and campaign tactics.

Over the past 16 years, since the epic 36 day presidential showdown in Florida, 2000, which was not resolved by a full recount of the votes, but by a supreme court split along partisan lines, accusations of vote rigging and out-and-out theft have become increasingly common among partisans on both sides, and the electoral process has become ever more politicized, rancorous and fraught with mistrust.

Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the election was rigged. Many in the GOP are convinced Barack Obama was elected only because community organizing groups such as Acorn, which is now defunct, registered extraordinary numbers of ineligible or nonexistent voters in the inner cities.

8 years before Trump ever publicly uttered the words "rigged election," Obama's first Republican opponent, John McCain, said in a presidential debate that Acorn was "on the verge of perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, possibly destroying the fabric of democracy."

The 2004 election, which saw George W. Bush reelected despite the mounting unpopularity of the Iraq war, created an explosion of unfounded conspiracy theories that Republicans were aligned with the manufacturers of electronic voting machines and would never lose an election again.

A core of Bernie Sanders supporters remains convinced that the senator from Vermont was cheated out of the Democratic presidential nomination by the underhanded maneuvering of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

American history is hardly lacking in examples of real voter manipulation and electoral skullduggery, especially in the segregation era, deep south. To this day, the U.S. electoral system is widely viewed as an anomaly in the western world because of persistent problems with the reliability of its voting machinery, frequent bureaucratic incompetence, the lack of uniform standards from state to state or county to county, the systematic exclusion of more than 6 million felons and ex-prisoners, and the tendency of election officials to adopt rules that benefit their party over democracy itself.