I probably won't surprise you that I disagree. And I've run campaigns, done lots of polling, and watched elections carefully.
Yes, both election fraud and mistakes happen. At very very low levels. My educated guess from about 4 elections is that election results in California are accurate to about 0.1% or 0.2%. When I say "accurate", I mean: they reflect what voters really wrote on their ballots, be it at precincts on election day, or when they mail ballots. A different question is that quite a few voters (several percent) don't even know what they are voting for. In candidate elections, they may confuse Bob Miller with Charlie Smith, and wrote for the wrong guy. In non-partisan elections they may think "no" means taxes go up instead of down, and check the wrong box. This is not elections being dishonest, it is voters being stupid.
What are the real sources of elections being inaccurate? In my observation, the #1 cause is votes being intentionally suppressed. Typical cases include: one spouse gives their ballot to the other spouse to bring it to the post office; the other spouse instead throws it into the trash, because they know their spouse will vote "the wrong way". Or: landlord and tenant share a mailbox, landlord gets to the mail first every afternoon, throws the tenants ballot materials away. Some of these cases can be cured by campaign volunteers (for example communicating with the voters directly, and having them drop off their ballot in person, or pick up new ballots at the elections office). In some cases, volunteers can personally take the voter (typically abused women) to the registrar's office on election day to fix the issue; the standard ruse that doesn't cause abusive husbands to lash out is that a female friend takes the voter to a shopping trip in the big town, which happens to be where the registrar's office is located.
The other category of criminal election fraud is voters deliberately registering in districts they don't reside in, usually using some friend's address, to be able to vote in local elections they care about. For state-wide and national elections, that tends to come out in the wash. There are also rare cases of double voting; they can be caused innocently by voters registering multiple times with differently spelled names. For example, Bob F. Miller doesn't remember whether they're registered, sends in another registration form as Fred B. Miller, gets two ballots, votes them both. Or I had a case of both Gus Smith and Constantine Smith being registered, they are the same person (in that case, the voter called up our campaign to ask what they should do, having just voted twice by mistake, and we directed them to the registrar's phone number to have one of the votes invalidated).
Voting by non-citizens fundamentally never happens, because registrars are very good about checking against immigration records. The number of non-citizen voters who are mailed ballots is vanishingly small, and most will not send their ballots back, since they know that voting would be a serious crime.
I've only once seen a case of a dead person voting, and it was perfectly legit: the voter signed their ballot, mailed it a few weeks before the election, and then passed away. The law is that you must be alive at the time the vote is mailed, not on election day. And since registrars of voters are notified of death certificates immediately, it is extremely rare that a person who is already dead is mailed a ballot; I've only heard second-hand about this happening (and it tends to be pretty traumatic when the family receives mail for their recently deceased relative).
In other states, there may be a lot of voter suppression by over-eager purging of voter rolls. This is not an issue in California. And if anything, this is something that is pushed in republican-run states to cement their rule over those states.
Finally, the whole idea of "deep state" is laughable. Yes, there is way too much bureaucracy, and I'll give you CARB as the prime example of an agency that has outlived its usefulness and today does more harm than good. But the notion that a deep state ignores or drives elections is ridiculous paranoia.
But I do totally agree that more people need to volunteer in elections, and help with counting and watching. Many hands make fast and accurate work of elections. And getting involved in local politics (of whatever party one identifies with) is always a good idea. If you want to cause change, the best thing you can do is to stop foaming at the mouth and raving, and instead volunteer with a campaign of your choice, and go door to door (or make phone calls) to convince people to vote the way you believe in. I've done thousands of hours of this.
Primers have come down, but powder and projectiles are up. 
, I’d like to hear it.
"What a long strange trip it's been".
