The tricks that were pulled involved denying people voting rights on dubious grounds in Florida, and maybe some electronic vote fraud in Ohio. But there are limits to how much you can get away with doing that sort of thing. If the polls say that one candidate is winning a state by 12%, and on election night it comes back with the other candidate winning by 8%, that looks fishy as hell. Plus nowadays people are insisting on paper trails, so it's possible to check the electronic vote. (And I voted by mail myself.) You can't have the vote from fantasyland. There's always a margin of error, so you can get away with shaving a percentage point or two sometimes (although even that's risky), but that's about it.

So the answer is that we do know in the ballpark of where the vote was in 2004, just as we do every year. Bush didn't win honestly either time. Without the dishonesty, I don't think he would have won in 2000, but I'm not so sure about 2004, which was not quite as close. And I'm equally sure that JFK didn't win honestly in 1960. But those were all really close elections. No amount of fraud would have given the win to Goldwater in 1964 or Mondale in 1984. And there's no way that McCain is going to be able to steal this one, either, because it's just not close enough, even if he were willing to try.