Russian meddling remains a challenge
Congress finding it difficult to fully protect ’18 elections
With congressional elections just a year away, lawmakers are scrambling to stop Russia from hacking state election systems and using social media to create chaos and uncertainty among voters.
But Congress may be stymied by its reluctance to regulate private tech companies and by states’ traditional aversion to any federal control over their elections, analysts say.
The burden on the three congressional committees conducting investigations into Russian meddling has become much greater than simply trying to prevent Kremlin-linked groups from stealing campaign emails, as they allegedly did last year in cyberattacks against the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Recent revelations about the extent of Russian efforts — both past and present — to spread disinformation via Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites underscores how big a challenge Congress is facing as it heads toward the 2018 midterm elections.
“Congress may have begun its investigation looking for a nice, neat smoking keyboard,” said Eric Herzik, chairman of the political science department at the University of Nevada-Reno. “But this is not a case where you can call the vendor and get a patch to plug a security hole. This has become incredibly complicated.”
Adding to lawmakers’ alarm: Federal officials recently told election officials in 21 states that hackers possibly connected to Russia targeted their election sys-
“I don’t think the Russians have a favorite political party. They do have a preference for chaos and division.”
Jack Pitney, Politics professor at Claremont McKenna College
tems last year. Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee warned Wednesday that they expect the Russians to try again in the 2018 congressional elections, the 2020 presidential election and possibly even this year in the Virginia governor’s race.
“We need to be on guard,” said Intelligence Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va.
The biggest risk, analysts say, is not that the Russians will help one party’s candidates defeat the other’s but that they will succeed in causing Americans to doubt the legitimacy of election results.
“I don’t think the Russians have a favorite political party,” said Jack Pitney, a politics professor at Claremont McKenna College in California. “They do have a preference for chaos and division.”
A report released in January by the U.S. Intelligence Community concluded that Russia interfered in last year’s election to boost Donald Trump and hurt Clinton.
Facebook recently turned over more than 3,000 suspicious ads to the House Intelligence Committee. The ads were purchased by an organization that Facebook said was connected to Russian intelligence services during the 2016 election.
Sen. James Lankford, R- Okla., a member of the Senate Intelligence and Homeland Security committees, said Russians have been weighing in on Twitter on the recent dispute between President Trump and the NFL over whether players should be fired for refusing to stand during the national anthem.
“We watched ... the Russians and their troll farms and their Internet folks start hash-tagging out ‘take a knee’ and also hashtagging out ‘boycott NFL,’ ” Lankford said at a hearing of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The goal, Lankford said, was “to try to just raise the noise level in America and to make a big issue seem like an even bigger issue as they are trying to push divisiveness in the country. We will see that again in our election.”