By Robert Pembroke
I am in the process of reading Last Hope Island: Britain, occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood that Helped Turn the Tide of War by Lynne Olson and have just finished the chapter about Allied intelligence agents in occupied Europe during World War II. These fighters had ingenious ways of sabotaging the Nazi war machine.
Present-day Russia also has intelligence agents, but these agents do not use guns, bombs and underground newspapers to shorten their war with the United States. Instead, they use hackers and social media gurus as their weapons of choice.
America is now in a battle to protect its freedoms and liberties. While I was watching a Senate Intelligence Committee meeting the other day, the director of the National Intelligence Agency, Dan Coats, said, “Elections are critical inflection points that present opportunities for Russia to advance its interests, both overtly and covertly.” Yes, we are at war with Russia.
It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the Russians could do something like this: They could create sleeper cells of Americans who, during an election, would get their names on ballots. Russian hackers could then manipulate the election to make sure the Russian minions were elected and, in an instant, America would become a satellite state of Russia. The financial costs would be minimal and there would be no loss of Russian lives.
Now here’s a puzzlement: Russia is also using fake news sites on social media to meddle in elections here and in Europe by criticizing and debunking candidates in thousands of elections across the world and yet our media are acting like ostriches and hiding their collective heads in the sand. They should be manning the barricades and calling all to arms to identify these sites and counteract them.
Our elected officials are not without fault. Richard Nixon used spies to break into Watergate offices to get lists of the Democrats’ supporters. The Obama administration has been known to spy on its Republican opponents, and Utah Republicans are using sneaky guys to influence our local elections.
Utah Republicans, for decades and decades, have been using a disturbing antic called gerrymandering. Utah Republicans have drawn the election maps so that the resulting districts are very unfair to Democratic candidates. With the use of big data and artificial intelligence, Republican officials are drawing election maps that put voters, who lean Republican, into districts that guarantee that the Republican candidates will be elected. “Voters should choose their politicians, not politicians choosing their voters,” says the website of Better Boundaries, an organization formed to battle gerrymandering in Utah.
Thankfully there is a light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to gerrymandering. Recently, the courts have told states that their election maps are illegal and must be redrawn. American citizens are signing petitions to put amendments to state constitutions on ballots that would make gerrymandering extinct.
Pres. Trump could help mitigate the Russian dilemma by just picking up the phone and calling Putin to tell him to stop interfering in our elections. Trump must also then draw a red line in the sand by describing the consequences if Putin fails to act. Unlike Pres. Obama, who didn’t follow through when telling the former president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, to stop using poison gases on his people, Trump must follow through on his declaration. Another thing that Trump should do is fight fire with fire. His troops should hack Russia’s electoral system and create fake news sites.
Writing software programs to eliminate hacking of our election system by the Russians is a momentous task. There are thousands of unique voting districts in the United States, all with their own IT departments using voting machines from different manufacturers. In all voting systems, the software allows an administrator to go in and tweak the system to add candidates’ names.
Have no fear, there is a simple solution to this dilemma. We just need to revert back to paper ballots and use volunteers to count the votes. When I began voting many years ago, computers had not been invented and Harry Truman and J. Bracken Lee were still elected. The old is forever new.
Robert Pembroke is the former chairman and CEO of Pembroke’s Inc. in Salt Lake City.