Edward Lucas

A divided America is a gift for Putin

[Getty Images]

Russia is using a ‘drumbeat of disinformation’ to attack the American political system. That was the stark conclusion of the FBI director Christopher Wray in his testimony to the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee in September. One aim, he said, was to undermine Joe Biden’s campaign. But the main thrust of the attack — as we will witness in the coming days and weeks — is to undermine public confidence in US democracy itself.

To be fair, Russia did not create the problem. It was not Vladimir Putin who wrote the laws governing US elections, with their decentralised responsibilities, threadbare budgets and barnacled and opaque provisions. (Do you understand what the electoral college is and how it operates? Neither do most Americans.) Nor did he write the Constitution, which is meant to be the system’s backstop, but is ambiguous on vital questions about contested elections (the vice-president’s role, for example). The use of antique, hackable voting machines is not the result of a Kremlin plot.

Nor, most of all, is Russia really to blame for the crippling polarisation of American politics — a landscape in which both sides treat litigation as an extension of the campaign, and where supporters are so certain of the rightness of their cause that they regard civil unrest as the logical response to a defeat. That is the result of sustained economic, political and social failure, for which we can hold both parties responsible.

And it was Donald Trump, not Vladimir Putin, who systematically undermined the credibility of the election system. Long before this week, his party has promoted the myth of widespread electoral fraud, and created legal obstacles that discourage black and poor voters, or open their ballots to legal challenges. On the eve of polling day the president decried potential ‘fraud’ and ‘misuse’ in two swing states, Pennsylvania and Nevada, and said, ‘I think it’s a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election.’

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