The only way to wrestle against the temptation to illegitimize a sworn-in president is to examine the mystique that brings legitimacy, and give it just a touch of restorative skepticism.
Consider the implications of the democratic formula. If 50 million people vote for John and 50 million plus one vote for James, James is legitimate. But that is nothing more than a procedural covenant. There are abundant historical reasons to remind ourselves that the ballot isn't necessarily the agent of wholesome government. In 1836, a democratic Congress passed the gag rule forbidding so much as the filing of any document against the institution of slavery. Almost exactly 100 years later, a democratic vote elected Adolf Hitler leader of Germany.
Lincoln, at a grave moment in our history, intoned his solemn salute to the ballot. "When ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided (a political question), there can be no successful appeal ... except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace; teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by war -- teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war."
Any attempt to dismiss the election of George W. Bush as fraudulent invites the wrong kind of skepticism, as if to say that the priest hiccoughed and thereby invalidated the act of transubstantiation. The right kind of skepticism should rest with the acceptance of electoral results in well-intended democratic exercises as conclusive -- until, as Mr. Lincoln put it, successful appeals are brought by succeeding elections.