Sunday, March 3, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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We have a real national imperative.
At the heart of the American democracy is our sacred right to vote. Our free and fair elections have set the bar for democracies around the world with the United States’ model creating the gold standard. Our citizens being able to choose their leaders and the peaceful transition of government are the hallmarks of what our Founding Fathers so brilliantly created.
But our democracy is under attack by some bad people who are doing their best to undermine our way of life and our collective belief in a government of, by and for the people.
There isn’t a sane and thinking American who doesn’t believe the entirety of our intelligence community when they tell us that the Russians interfered with the 2016 presidential elections. And while some Americans may argue about the extent of that interference and the impact it had on the outcome, there is no question that it did happen.
Just ask President Donald Trump.
It recently came to light that per the president’s executive order, the United States military’s Cyber Command took down a Russian troll farm on Election Day, 2018. The Internet Research Agency, based in St. Petersburg, was completely shut down and out of internet access this past November as part of our defense effort to prevent the Russian operatives from interfering in the midterm elections and election results. This is the same group of Putin puppets who trolled the 2016 presidential elections, according to every intelligence agency in our country.
Clearly, there is far more that we ordinary Americans don’t know about the extent of the Russian efforts to influence the results of our elections, but what we do know is that America now has the capability to find and fix anyone who wants to elect someone to high office against the wishes of the American voter.
We can argue whether last Election Day was the best time to shut down the farm — the damage to the body politic through fake news let loose among those who were either willfully, woefully or unwittingly ignorant of facts to the contrary — because by voting day the die was cast. That leads some of us to believe the danger was directed more toward the voting machines and their ability give a square count, which should scare the heck out of us.
And therein lies the basis for immediate action.
Because if we can’t guarantee free and fair elections in the United States of America, what chance do other countries have who are trying to democratize the selection of their leaders? And what chance do we have here at home to convince those citizens who already think they have been marginalized that their votes actually mean something?
The surest way for Russia and others interested in subverting our democratic institutions is to cause Americans to lose faith in our ability to select our leaders at the voting booth.
The president can order the U.S. Cyber Command to shut down all foreign actors from now through Election Day 2020, which should have the intended result of preventing foreign adversaries from affecting our minds and our voting machines, thus adding a degree of certainty that our elections will remain free.
Certainly there are some caveats around such an all-encompassing directive that should be considered, but the one thing we shouldn’t do is allow too much time to pass before we do what we must to prevent Russian interference in our elections. They have done it before, they are doing it now, and they will continue to mess with us, trying to further polarize Americans toward the end that Nikita Khrushchev warned of almost 60 years ago.
The way to defeat America without firing a shot is to turn one American against another. And undermining our belief in our own ability to select our leaders through free and fair elections presents a clear path to do just that.
I can’t imagine a more pressing national imperative.
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun
