Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I'm in charge of forging a presidential election, how difficult is it for me to use realistic, "ugly" numbers to sell it more effectively?
Not difficult at all. Just pick the approximate numbers you want and then introduce a random error of a few percent. (Normal, uniform, doesn't really matter). This is also not hard for statistics experts to detect, but it's much harder to prove (aka you've got plausible deniability). One wonders why they didn't even bother to do fraud slightly better.
Unless done carefully this will almost certainly fail Benford’s Law.
Manipulating statistics is harder than you think.