No, they weren’t. Elections prior to the electronic age were rife with illegal voting, and shenanigans. That’s why it’s so easy for Trump to convince people that cheating is going on now, because there was so much of it in the past.
Now that they’re using voting machines and having machines count the ballots, instead of hand counts, plus voter ID, it’s much much harder to cheat.
But Trump’s threats in the summer before the election that the courts would be deciding the election, was is a clarion call to secretaries of state to make good and sure that their state’s results were correct. None of them wanted the embarrassment of having the courts overturned their states results.
As for the electoral college, the two presidents that the college has inflicted on the American people in the past 20 years were two of the worst Presidents in American history. This was the very thing that the college was designed to present – the people being duped into voting for an unsuitable candidate.