Or will the "votes" of one Vlad "The Impaler" Putin override yours, if necessary, to guarantee the continuation of the Trump Reich which is very much to Putin's advantage?
Who can tell?
But what we can tell is that the Republicans in the Congress are not at all interested in the integrity of American elections, nosir. Not even after hearing Robert Mueller's warning in his testimony yesterday about Russians certainly planning to continue their intervention in US elections:
While the Senate Intelligence Committee’s findings were bipartisan, they came on a day when Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, moved again to block consideration of election security legislation put forward by Democrats.Mr. McConnell has long opposed giving the federal government a greater hand in an institution of American democracy typically run by the states.
And despite the warnings about the Russia threat, he argues that Congress has already done enough — passing $380 million worth of grants for states to update their election systems and supporting executive branch agencies as they make their own changes. Some administration officials have suggested that the issue is not getting enough high-level attention because President Trump equates any public discussion of malign Russian election activity with questions about the legitimacy of his victory.
The findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee, referred to in the first sentence of that quote, came out today. They tell us that the Russians targeted the election systems of all fifty US states!
To then suggest that they did nothing more but left their footprints there (a Kilroy-Was-Here-stunt?) is irrational. Either Russia did affect votes in 2016 or the 2016 hacks were a dress rehearsal for something far bigger, perhaps to be staged in 2020.
It's the latter possibility, combined with the utter reluctance of Mitch McConnell&Co to do anything at all to safeguard democracy*, which worries me.
But I am also worried by this new world in which we have to tiptoe around the psychological problems Our Supreme Leader suffers from. For an example of that, read the last sentence in the above quote again: Election integrity is not getting the attention it is begging for (on its knees) because that attention would hurt Trump's feelings.
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* Fighting for the integrity of elections is one of my non-negotiable items, because without such integrity democracy (even in its current flawed form) will die.
It should be among the non-negotiable items for all voters (and non-voters) who believe in democracy, even for the Republican voters. Once it is known that the US allows election hacking by foreign powers many other countries might join Russia in that hacking enterprise, and not all of them would try to tip the scale toward the Republican Party.