Merrill fighting the real election threat

Though it’s been some time since President Donald Trump has trotted out the canard about “millions” of illegal voters in the 2016 presidential election, it is abundantly clear that actual — not hallucinatory — forces are in fact trying to skew the outcome of our elections.

In dramatic testimony earlier this week in front of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, heads of America’s multiple intelligence agencies, including the FBI, CIA and Department of Homeland Security, concurred that Russia dove into the 2016 presidential election with malicious intent and intends to continue.

And on Friday, a U.S. grand jury indicted 13 Russian nationals for, essentially, posing as Americans and disseminating bogus information in an effort to undermine both confidence in and the operation of that election.

And this is not some nebulous, hypothetical, far away concern: Last September the DHS informed Connecticut Secretary of the State Denise Merrill that Connecticut’s election infrastructure had been targeted by Russian hackers, but that they were repelled by the system’s lines of defense.

It’s reassuring that adults at the helm of various American systems have taken the threat seriously and have not held their breath waiting for encouragement and direction from a White House that seems studiously determined to choose an alternate reality on the topic.

Merrill, in fact, along with other chief election officials from individual states, is in Washington this weekend for prolonged meetings with DHS and other officials to exchange ideas and information on protecting the voting process.

At last week’s intelligence committee hearing, officials said they had been meeting with state election officials and working out security clearance matters to expand the amount of information sharing that could take place.

Merrill has been in the forefront of protecting voter information, most notably, perhaps, when she refused to cave in to a bogus request from the short-lived, so-called Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which tried to obtain not only all public information on voters, but private information as well.

This White House effort to stem the fictional “millions” of illegal voters came while it completely disregarded the reality of a hostile nation actually participating in the election. Sort of like setting mousetraps to protect your pantry while disregarding the bear salivating at the door.

Merrill this year will ask the General Assembly to scrub voter birth dates from registration records.

A spokesman said it is yet another effort to protect the identity security of voters. The birth date, said Gabe Rosenberg, a spokesman who was accompanying Merrill in Washington, is the “gold standard” for criminals trying to piece together a phony identity.

We believe Merrill is doing a stellar job as steward of the electoral system in Connecticut. We’ll pause in judgment, though, of any measure that further reduces the amount of information available to the public.

But given her performance in the job, even this proposal is worthy of a full hearing in front of the legislature, with her opportunity to make her case.