Manipulating an election while making it look proper free and fair is hard, yes. However, it does not require that much skill if you just want to overthrow it and don’t care about the looks, it only needs the low, local levels of bureaucracy being controlled by loyal people willing to pervert the law for the leader and the top judicuary as well and the army to stay out of it. The administration has been working on that since the start. This alone might have been the only reason why Trump’s coup against Biden failed. Back then he did not have that.