In the weeks since the November 3 elections, we have been arguing that both Republicans and Democrats have an interest in investigating claims that significant fraud plagued the process. We have noted that many Americans – over 75 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of Democrats(!), according to a Rassumusen poll – believe that fraud permeated the process and have pointed to numerous irregularities in the vote.
To be sure, there is much debate over the significance of the irregularities – whether they were sporadic or widespread, whether they were sinister or merely glitches, whether they could conceivably have affected the outcome, etc. – but few will deny that they were present. And it seems that hundreds of thousands of ballots were also counted in Pennsylvania without any meaningful supervision, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
So in order to avoid the aura of illegitimacy that would surround a Biden presidency, we have urged a thorough investigation of what happened as being in the interests of all sides. Unfortunately, the courts have declined to play their traditional role, citing procedural impediments to going forward or, oddly, that there is not enough evidence on the public record of widespread fraud. We find the latter argument particularly troubling since the amount of evidence on the public record is actually quite significant, and the whole point of going to court is to make use of it as a fact-finding forum with teeth.
The mainstream media hasn’t been any better. Typically, Trump’s legal challenges to the election results have been spun as a frolic by a sorely-disappointed candidate who just can’t let go. But this dismissal of his efforts cannot be accepted at face value, something underscored by the recent discovery of massive hacking of U.S. agencies in the months leading up to the November elections under the very noses of federal election security officials who proclaimed them the “most secure in American history.”
Within hours of a claim by President Trump that the election was stolen from him, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – which is responsible for helping states secure the voting process – distributed a statement by an unofficial coordinating council of federal, state, and local election official that claimed that the election was the most fair in history and that no systems were found to have been compromised (as if external interference, as opposed to internal interference, was what Trump’s team were alleging).
The public endorsement of the council’s rebuke of Trump by one of his own agencies – “Election Officials Directly Contradict Trump on Voting System Fraud” was the way the New York Times reported it – went viral, as expected, and added to skepticism over Trump’s claims. Yet here is what soon followed:
A little over a week ago, a massive foreign penetration of federal agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and parts of the Pentagon, was belatedly discovered. According to The Times:
United States officials did not detect the attack until recent weeks, and then only when a private cybersecurity firm, FirmEye, alerted American intelligence that the hackers had evaded layers of defenses.
It was evident that the Treasury and Commerce Departments, the first agencies reported to be breached, were only part of a far larger operation whose sophistication stunned even experts who have been following a quarter-century of Russian hacks on the Pentagon and American civilian agencies.
The National Security Agency – the premier U.S. intelligence organization that both hacks into foreign networks and defends national security agencies from attacks – apparently did not know of the breach in the network-monitoring software made by SolarWinds until it was notified last week by FireEye.
Two of he most embarrassing breaches came at the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, whose Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency oversaw the successful defense of the American election system last month.
For the N.S.A. and its director, Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, this breach ranks among the biggest crises of his time in office. Nakasone was intensely focused on protecting the country’s election infrastructure in the 2020 vote. But it now appears that both civilian and national security agencies were the target of this carefully designed hack, and he will have to answer why private industry – rather than the multibillion enterprises he runs from a war room in Fort Meade, Md. – was the first to raise the alarm.
So how closely could the feds – or anyone, really – have been monitoring the elections if they were oblivious to the massive hacking all around them? And with the ultimate revelations, how confident can we be that there were no material breaches of election security? Isn’t it reasonable to believe Rudy Giuliani is really on to something – at least enough to go forward in the courts?
Who won the election is just one of the issues, even if perhaps the most obvious. At stake also is whether a Biden administration will be hobbled by lingering skepticism about its legitimacy, as was the case with the Trump administration. It is also whether we can ever again have a free and fair democratic election.
Plainly, if there were malfeasance in the course of the election and it remains undiscovered – or ignored by state legislatures and governors or barred from getting a hearing in court – the perpetrators will only be encouraged to do what they did, again.