Interesting discussions going on here. I'll just throw one more theory into the mix.
I was thinking of how the Democrat politicians and other public officials that have publicly schemed against Trump (and cheered by e.g. the celebrities) the last four years actually did a very poor job, an almost comically lousy job. As I was watching the impeachment hearings I remember thinking things like "Are these people (Dems) really
that stupid?", "If they'd had at least a few
really smart individuals, they could have done a much more convincing case", and "They are all following such a moronic script that it feels like a parody or theatre."
I'm not saying it's so, but maybe the Democrats have a true shortage of smart people? Their masters (maybe faction C by Neil) are definitely not stupid, but as they will not get their hands dirty on the grass root level (which would also expose them), they are forced to rely on these morons to do their job. It's like the classic cartoon show of a group of villains: you have the 'mastermind' who is pretty sharp, and then the group of 'idiots' who follow his orders.
So, maybe the order from the higher ups was to "Fix this election! I don't care how you do it, just get the Orange Man out!". And then as the idiots get to their work they end up doing their usual lousy job. They had a 'smart' plan of rigging the votes, the usual way, through the computer systems – and they thought they were 'really smart' by having a backup plan with the mail-in ballots. But when the results are starting to come in they realize that they hadn't anticipated (because of their stupidity and wishful thinking) how enormous the support for Trump actually was. So even with their plan A and B, they realized that even that would not be sufficient, so the new order by the bosses on the lower level (where the actual dirty job was conducted) that evening was "Do whatever you can! Make new ballots out of toilet paper if you have to !". And as the brain washed minions were even more stupid, they left visible trails of their cheating.
I'm sure the truth is much more complex than this, but I hypothesize that the above might have happened to some degree at some places.