Editorial Board to NRCC: “national party organizations must act against deceptive tactics, not participate in them.”
It’s been more than a week since DCCC Chairwoman Cheri Bustos challenged NRCC Chairman Tom Emmer to join her in pledging to never use hacked or stolen materials in campaigns. And while the NRCC has tried to avoid taking a position, pressure is mounting on them to — at bare minimum — take a stand against Russia’s infiltration of America’s elections.
“Russia has attacked America’s freedom before and the refusal of leaders like Chairman Tom Emmer and the NRCC to join me in disavowing hacked and stolen material invites more attempts to infiltrate our elections in the future,” said DCCC Chairwoman Cheri Bustos. “This is a matter of national security and I invite my Republican colleagues to wake up and recognize that fact before it’s too late.”
Read the Washington Post Editorial Board’s call for Republican national party organizations to “act against deceptive tactics, not participate in them” below.
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Foreign operatives are trying to divide America. Let’s not do their work for them.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
“KIRKPATRICK FOR Congress,” read the top of the page in a big, bold, red-and-blue font. “Donate,” read a similarly styled button at its bottom. But the website, which appeared ahead of the 2014 midterms, was not designed to support Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona. It was manufactured by the National Republican Congressional Committee to oppose her.
The Federal Election Commission voted last week not to act on the five-year-old discovery that the NRCC had created more than 30 websites that looked at first blush like the pages of Democratic candidates but were really stuffed full of information attacking them. The pages, which led at least one unsuspecting American to donate mistakenly to the NRCC, appeared during the 2014 midterms — but the scandal feels distressingly current. Disinformation has become a defining factor in U.S. elections, though the field of play has evolved beyond just sleazy websites to include hack-and-leaks, troll farms, bots and doctored media. To counter the tide, national party organizations must act against deceptive tactics, not participate in them.
The good news is that Democrats, including the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and almost all of the 20 Democratic presidential candidates, have sworn off using hacked materials in the upcoming election, and they’ve challenged their Republican counterparts to do the same. The bad news is that the challenge has gone mostly unanswered, though RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has called breaches “an affront to all of us” and stressed the importance of safeguarding future elections. Absent a written nonaggression pact for committees and candidates to sign, it is also unclear exactly what behavior each is vowing to refrain from. The DCCC’s pledge so far is the most concrete; Democratic Party chairs in the four early-primary states are working on a more far-reaching agreement that would include forms of manipulation besides stolen material.
There is a need for better cybersecurity protecting our elections, as well as for laws that strengthen disclosure requirements for political advertising and spending. But there is also a need for norms to fill in the legal gaps. Candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president are already the targets of aggressive disinformation attacks on social media, many of them carried out by foreign actors seeking to play on U.S. polarization to tear this country apart. Their job is made much easier if Americans tear each other apart at the same time.
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