Prominent legal, business leaders create ABA group to bolster confidence in elections; Reuters, August 9, 2023

Karen Sloan, Reuters; Prominent legal, business leaders create ABA group to bolster confidence in elections

"The American Bar Association has launched a task force aimed at bolstering public trust in elections, headed by former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and former federal appellate judge J. Michael Luttig.

The 31-member ABA Task Force for American Democracy will look at ways to depoliticize how elections are administered, educate the public on democracy, and try to foster election innovations that address the causes of politicization, the ABA said on Wednesday when it announced the new effort. The task force comes a week after former President Donald Trump was indicted on criminal charges that he plotted to overturn the 2020 election and as the 2024 presidential race is heating up...

ABA task forces are limited by their nature in how much actual change they can effect. But the group hopes to at least expand the conversation about election integrity by holding listening tours, public conversations, and one-on-one and small group discussions with a cross section of Americans to hear about their concerns and experiences, as well as their ideas for restoring democracy, the ABA said."

Trump Wants Putin to Keep Meddling to Get Himself Reelected; The Daily Beast, July 19, 2018

Margaret Carlson, The Daily Beast; Trump Wants Putin to Keep Meddling to Get Himself Reelected

"From the gist of special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments, Trump knows how sophisticated, how costly the Russian actions were, and how likely they are to take place again. Yet he’s made no moves to deny Putin a glide path to a sequel, no elevating election security to a priority as he did for the calamitous separating children at the border, which has all the money and attention in the world.

To the contrary, the White House hasn’t spearheaded anything close to the kind of Manhattan Project that protecting our democracy deserves, not even the cost-free appointment of an election czar, or a request to Silicon Valley to help. Small efforts to counter voting machine fraud, bots, fake news (the real kind) go along at a snail’s pace at the FBI and Homeland Security. Congress has allotted a mere $380 million, a pittance to the cause. It’s likely that Russia is putting more money into interfering in 2020 than the U.S. is putting in to stopping it."

Stop calling it ‘meddling.’ It’s actually information warfare.; The Washington Post, July 17, 2018

Brian Klaas, The Washington Post; Stop calling it ‘meddling.’ It’s actually information warfare.

"“And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!” That’s the catchphrase that comes at the end of “Scooby-Doo” cartoons, always right at the moment when some monster turns out to just be a creepy old man in a mask. The zany adventures are over — until the next episode.

That’s the appropriate use of the word “meddling.” It is not, however, an appropriate word to use when referring to the ongoing Russian attacks on American democracy that gained prominence in the 2016 presidential election and will accelerate as we head into the November midterms. This isn’t “Scooby-Doo.” The stakes couldn’t be higher, and the monsters we face are real...

But that phrase is woefully inadequate. These continuing attacks are neither meddling nor “interference,” another euphemism. They’re a part of gibridnaya voyna — Russian for “hybrid warfare.” The best term for what we’re talking about would be “information warfare.

One of the jarring realizations of the 21st century is that democratic governments are only as good as the quality of information that their voters receive. Influence the information flow voters receive, and you’ll eventually influence the government."