One of the biggest looming threats to our democracy is not that a foreign actor will broadly change votes or registrations in the 2018 elections, but that Americans will use this to doubt election results they don't want to believe /1 nbcnews.com/politics/elect…
Suppose we discover around Nov. 6 that a foreign power breached election systems somehow somewhere in America; many, many people are going to wonder if we caught every case of interference & conspiracists are of course going to run wild /2
If there's a wave Dem election, GOP voters will wonder if it was legit; if Dems underperform, many Dem voters will wonder. Motivated reasoning is a really powerful drug, esp in heated, partisan times. Even one case of foreign vote-switching could unleash a powder keg. /3
What this means, in this unfortunate scenario of foreign election tampering, is that it's critical to have a credible source that could reassure people the effect was limited & other results are legit (as would be likely). So who can do that? /4
One source is state election authorities, but the downside (I speak only of perceptions here) is they're partisans, motivated to cover mistakes, & can only speak w/ 50 voices. Journalists lack expertise on this, have varying trust issues, & again can't speak in a unified way. /5
So here's a suggestion: Wouldn't it be valuable to have in place a bipartisan team of experts on elections, cybersecurity, forensics, etc., that could rapidly react to a case of foreign tampering & (ideally) give assurances the problem was limited & other elections clean? /6
Note that such a team would only come into play if such interference was revealed, to avoid amplifying the fear in the first place. But my basic point is that everyone talks about cybersecurity before the election, but not what happens after the election if there's a breach. /7
A good illustrative case is Mexico 2006, where the election loser claimed fraud & there was a buildup of disordered protests. A key turning point was the clean appraisal by international observers, after which the loser stood down. /8
We need to ask who would supply our signal on election health if there was serious (or unserious) reason for doubt, b/c people will claim they were stolen (just like Roy Moore continues to). Interested to hear if anyone has other proposals. /end
