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From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!Two years after Russia interfered in the American presidential campaign, the nation has done little to protect itself against a renewed effort to influence voters in the coming congressional midterm elections, according to lawmakers and independent analysts.
oes anyone here have confidence that the American voting system is secure, stable, and designed to protect the voting rights of every eligible American voter?
There’s no good reason to believe that after more than two decades of Democratic spinelessness in the face of a consistent Republican assault on voting integrity. The Russians may be long-leggedy beasties, but it’s Republicans who have been going bump in the night for all these years, disenfranchising American voters unlikely to vote Republican.
How’s this for a proposition: the Democrats elected Donald Trump when they decided not to contest the election of 2000 and allow a partisan Supreme Court to decide the election without allowing a full count of the votes. That election floundered as a result of Florida governor Jeb Bush presiding over a state effort to purge and cage presumably non-Republican voters, especially non-white voters. The purge-and-cage effort made the election closer than it would otherwise have been and produced a fundamentally invalid vote result from a state-distorted electorate.
The Democrats rolled over then, fighting tactically rather than on principle, and here we are as a country, deep in denial about the integrity of our election system. Instead of addressing real and persistent Republican attacks on voting rights, we imagine nearly omnipotent Russian hacker ghoulies and ghosties somehow subverting a popular will that hasn’t been able to express itself fully in a long time. The reality of Russian efforts is at best uncertain, based on available evidence. But “Russian interference” remains an article of bipartisan faith, which serves as a convenient excuse for ignoring the real and present dangers American officials inflict on American voters year after year in state after state.
Possibly the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee and released damning emails to the public. And that’s bad because? The emails showed the DNC to be a corrupt enterprise. Whoever is responsible for the leak, its revelations should be seen as a public service. And it might have been seen as a public service had it led to actual change in the Democratic Party leadership, had it opened the party to the non-corporate voices it has suppressed at least since the Clinton presidency. The DNC emails made no cultural difference; the party is still at war with its progressive members, and that war puts the midterms at greater risk than they should be.
The mindlessness of “leadership” response to the Russian “threat” was neatly expressed, probably inadvertently, by Democratic senator Mark Warner of Virginia, co-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee on August 1:
Twenty-one months after the 2016 election, and only three months before the 2018 elections, Russian-backed operatives continue to infiltrate and manipulate social media to hijack the national conversation and set Americans against each other. They were doing it in 2016; they are still doing it today.Even if Warner is precisely correct, so what? First of all, free speech in a globalized world gets tricky. Does that mean we want to clamp down on free speech the way more authoritarian countries do? One hopes not. But of course there are those who fervently hope to control free speech to the point of extinction.
So how many Russian operatives does it take to hijack a national conversation? And let’s assume, despite evidence to the contrary, that a national conversation is actually happening on social media, where there are millions and millions of voices clamoring to be heard and a much smaller number actually listening….
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