I don't think anyone's claiming that the results were fully determined ahead of time, just that illicit methods were used to nudge them by a few crucial percentage points. I'm not claiming it happened, but it's plausible - certainly laws were violated, and presumably those violating those laws did so because they thought it would advantage their party/candidate.

If you look at the gerrymandering court cases you'll see that proposed districts get ruled illegal very often. If you think of "the law" as a boundary independent of individual judges then after factoring in human imperfections this shows there must be a number of districts whose layout is against that idea of the law but got through anyways. It's stretching philosophy to say that but arguments on the democratic/legal basis of democracy/law itself are never simple.