Horowitz: Alarm Bells Ring on Russian Election Interference

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Rob Horowitz, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Bob Mueller

By far the most important takeaway from former Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s testimony last week was the prospect of stepped-up and even more dangerous Russian interference in the 2020 elections.

Mueller emphasized that Russia’s “sweeping and systematic efforts” to interfere in our elections, carefully documented in his report, did not end with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. As Mueller told the House Intelligence Committee, “It wasn't a single attempt. They're doing it as we sit here. And they expect to do it during the next campaign.” The former special counsel called Russian interference in our elections, “among the most serious challenges to our democracy” he had seen in his long career.

Echoing Mueller in sounding the alarm last week was FBI Director Chris Wray and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Testifying at a Senate Hearing the day before Mueller’s appearance in front of two separate House Committees, Wray warned that the Russians were still at it and our actions are not sufficient to deter them from their ongoing efforts to meddle in our elections.

Most disturbing, the Senate Intelligence Committee revealed last week that Russian hackers made efforts to penetrate elections systems and voter data in all 50 states in 2016 with substantial encroachments occuring in 21 states. The Intelligence Committee provided specific examples of these hacking efforts, reporting that “Russian cyber actors had successfully penetrated Illinois’s voter registration database, viewed multiple database tables, and accessed up to 200,000 voter registration records.” While hackers were in a position to change votes, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, there is no evidence that actual votes changed. It appeared to be more a probing initiative, gleaning information for potential activation in future elections.

But this information, which is contained in part one of a 5 part bi-partisan Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, the rest of which will be released over the next month or so, demonstrates how vulnerable our decentralized system of maintaining voter data and counting votes remains. As the report states, “Russian efforts exploited the seams between federal authorities and capabilities, and protections for the states. State election officials, who have primacy in running elections, were not sufficiently warned or prepared to handle an attack from a hostile nation-state actor.”

Taken together, these highly credible warnings add up to a five-alarm fire, striking at the heart of our democracy. With the general election only a little over a year away and primaries beginning well before then, we are running out of time. Yet, President Trump continues to lean on the Republican leaders in the Senate and the House to oppose all legislative efforts to meaningfully address the problem before it is too late. In fact, on the same day Mueller testified, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) at the president’s behest blocked votes on two election security measures that had passed the House. These common sense bills required all states to have hack-proof paper ballot backups as well as meet certain technical requirements and to make it mandatory that candidates and campaigns report attempts at foreign interference to federal law enforcement authorities.

In all the coverage of the optics of Mueller’s performance last week and its impact on whether an impeachment inquiry will ever move forward, the critical issue of protecting our elections and democracy from foreign interference received short-shrift. More attention by the media, Democratic elected officials and the few Republican elected officials willing to stand up to the president are required, if we are going to be able to do what needs to be done in sufficient time.

It will take a much more aggressive and proactive approach to overcome the president’s stubborn refusal to do his basic job and stand up for the national interest. That is the task ahead for the rest of us. There is simply nothing more important.

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.