It is irresponsible to claim the election is “rigged” for the reason most of Trump’s media critics have suggested — namely, that by casting the result as illegitimate, Trump is ensuring it will be harder to unify the country afterwards.

Moreover, it is politically questionable to call an election “rigged” while it is still ongoing, because it suggests the candidate making that statement expects to lose. Alternatively, declaring an election “rigged” could be a way of motivating supporters to flock to the polls: that is how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mobilized support in 2015, when he warned that foreign-funded organizations were frantically busing Arab voters to the polls. (He later apologized — after he won, of course.)

As a factual matter, it is impossible to know whether the election result on November 8 will be “rigged” — that is, if it will be affected by ballot-stuffing, hacking, voter fraud, and so on. Past experience suggests that fraud does have an effect — just ask former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman how he lost to Al Franken in 2008 — but given the sheer variety of jurisdictions that run a typical presidential election, the nationwide effect of voter fraud may be much harder to measure, and probably small.