I ain’t ‘fraid of no post: the real Russian threat to our electoral system
Not to come off as a complete contrarian, but I’m not all that worried by the kind of threat posed to our electoral system by the brigade of bots and trolls that Russia mobilized on Facebook and Twitter to try to tip the 2016 presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor.
It’s not that I’m saying that this type of meddling should be excused or ignored. To the contrary, I think that we should take prudent steps to reduce the ways that foreign governments might use social media to sway U.S. voter perceptions. But I don’t think that interference using social media had much effect on the outcome of the past election and I doubt that it will have much effect on any future election, either.
More to the point, I believe that the real and immediate threat to the integrity of our elections comes from a direct attack on our voting systems and voter registration rolls through concerted efforts to hack and modify the election systems that the states and other local governments have in place. That these attacks are already happening came to light as a result of the leak of a top secret NSA report by the Intercept in June of last year.
First, to deflect the contention that Russian social media meddling really was the cause of Hilary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016, I would suggest that anyone making such a claim take a number and get in line behind the variety of competing claimants.
These claimants include those who feel that Trump’s victory can be attributed primarily to one of the following causes: a reaction to political correctness run wild as epitomized by Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” condescension; James Comey’s letter to Congress about Clinton’s emails three days before the election; a failure of the Clinton campaign to reach out adequately to African-Americans voters; a failure the Clinton campaign to reach out adequately to disaffected, working-class white men; a failure of the Clinton ground game in key precincts of Midwestern swing states in the closing days of the race; the reluctance of Jill Stein supporters to come to their party’s aid on election day. The list goes on and on.
As far as I’m concerned, trying to divine a primary cause for the Clinton defeat in 2016 is like trying to identify the single cup of water responsible for the demise of a drowning man. It’s a fool’s errand.
I would even go so far to say that the millions of posts and tweets pumped into the American social media cloud by Russian trolls and bots during the 2016 election were hardly a drop in the bucket compared with hundreds of millions of posts and tweets — of identical political content — pumped into the very same social media cloud by bona fide American supporters of Donald Trump.
Perhaps the Russian posts changed the mind or motivation of someone here or there, but, to the extent that they were shared or retweeted, it was mostly by dupes who were already squarely in the Trump camp, that is if the man-on-the-tweet interviews that accompanied Robert Mueller’s indictment this week of Russian meddlers are to be believed.
In this regard, the problem we face is not so much reducing Russian social media meddling as it is the much more daunting challenge of reducing the number of dupes who are participating in political exchanges on Facebook and on Twitter. These are people — on both the left and the right — who rush to like, share, or retweet anything that confirms their suspicions about the political world, all without assessing the reliability of the source of the information or applying a shred of critical judgment in determining the validity of its claims.
Vastly more damage is being done by home-grown purveyors of misinformation on social media than will ever be done by foreign meddlers. Again, this fact does not excuse the Russian meddling, but it should moderate the attention and resources with which we choose to respond.
Meanwhile, Reality Leigh Winner, a former American intelligence specialist and, I believe, a heroic whistleblower, languishes in prison awaiting trial relating to charges that she was responsible for leaking the NSA report on direct Russian attacks on our election infrastructure, including hacking a voting software supplier and sending spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before the November 2016 election.
And, unlike the current news frenzy created by the indictment of Russians for interfering with our social media conversation, the far more important and far more dire consequences of the Russian effort to rig our voting machines and modify our voting registration rolls are scarcely being discussed.
No doubt, this is being buried, in part, due to a genuine concern for national, since sensitive American intelligence operations have been, and are being, used to detect and counteract these Russian intrusions. But the fact of the matter is that the discussion of these attacks and of what election officials in U.S. states and territories are doing to respond to them needs to see the light of day.
We shouldn’t be distracted by the high-drama but low-consequence Russian social media meddling being spotlighted right now. Instead, our attention should be focused on securing the nuts and bolts of our electoral system from Russian and other agents who are working to undermine it at its core. Voting in the party primaries for the general elections later this year begins as early as late April. Time’s a-wasting.
