Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state who is now a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, writes in a Christian Post column today that Democrats may be raising the specter of Russian tampering with election results in order to create “grounds to challenge the election” if Donald Trump should win.
Even if this is not the case, Blackwell insists, Democrats may be using hacking fears as a pretense to increase federal oversight of elections.
Blackwell is just the latest conservative activist to suggest that election security concerns are part of a ruse to reverse a Trump victory or justify a federal takeover of elections.
Blackwell:
The Democrats are now playing the Russia card. As Donald Trump rises in the polls against an increasingly unpopular Hillary Clinton, Democrats are raising the specter of the nefarious Vladimir Putin. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s famous reset of relations was a bust, but we are supposed to trust her to handle Putin in the future. More important, the Democrats are sowing grounds to challenge the election, relying on their unnatural ability to squeeze, as if by magic, extra votes from the courtroom.
There may be an even more insidious objective, however, than swaying the 2016 result. Outgoing Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, never a fan of election fair play, warned of Russian tampering and called for an FBI investigation. This followed warnings by Jeh Johnson, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, of potential cyber-attacks come November. He indicated he was considering designating the election system “critical infrastructure.”
This would be followed by a Washington campaign to “assist” and “protect” balloting, which inevitably would turn into control. The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky warned that Johnson’s action “may be a way for the administration to get Justice Department lawyers, the FBI, and DHS staff into polling places they would otherwise have no legal right to access, which would enable them to interfere with election administration procedures around the country.” That would dramatically, and permanently, transform the constitutional balance between the national and state governments.
