To: Democratic primary debate participants and Diane Lubarsky
Unite to Make Russian Electoral Threat the Focus of This Week's Debates
Recent testimony of Mueller and Wray has brought into sharp focus the clear and present danger of Russian attack on the 2020 election. We urge you to seize this moment to unite and make this threat to American democracy the primary focus of this week’s debates. Emphasize the urgent need to enact protections to our electoral system. Cite bills passed by the House and blocked by a united Republican party led by McConnell.
Why is this important?
We are working to select a strong candidate for the 2020 election. We cannot proceed without uniting to address the fact that our electoral system is under “sweeping and systematic attack” and we are poorly defended. Many states are completely dependent on hackable electronic voting systems with no paper back-up to verify questionable results. The Senate intelligence committee reported that in 2016 Russian hackers targeted election systems in all 50 states and “were in a position to delete or change voter data” in the Illinois voter database. NYT writes “the committee described ‘an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure’ intended largely to search for vulnerabilities in the security of the election systems.” We can expect to see the fruits of that Russian search for vulnerabilities in the 2020 election. We urge the candidates in the Democratic debates to unite and focus squarely on this overwhelming threat to the foundation of our democracy, cite the legislation passed by the House to prevent these attacks as well as Republican action to block passage of this legislation.