The American Family Association’s Sandy Rios wondered this morning if the Department of Homeland Security’s announcement that it may designate electronic voting systems as “critical infrastructure” in order to guard against cyberattacks is in fact the “creepy laying of groundwork” for an Obama administration plot to blame Russian hackers for a Trump victory in November in order to overturn the results.
Rios, the AFA’s governmental affairs director and an American Family Radio host, asked the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky about the news on her radio program this morning.
“So this really is, honestly, it just seems like, oh boy, the creepy laying of groundwork for something that could be really bad,” she said. “Like, okay, I’m going to step off the plank here. Let’s say maybe the election ends up being really, really close and because they’ve already laid the groundwork that Donald Trump is connected with Putin, they’re best buddies according to—well, he claimed that he had a relationship with him and then they claimed, the left claims that he has a really good relationship with him and now they’re inferring that the Russians may mess with the election.
“So, gee, if it’s close, maybe it’s probably the Russians, then, that are messing with our election apparatus and so then the Justice Department and the executive branch come in to kind of fix it. Right, Hans, something like that?”
Von Spakovsky responded that while he “wouldn’t quite go so far as them blaming it on the Russians,” the Obama administration could use the DHS’s move to place “virulent left-wing partisans” from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in polling places to falsely claim that there is voter suppression taking place in swing states.
“So they would be in the polling places,” he said, “and they would be the ones coming out, maybe in a state that’s close, saying, ‘Oh, we saw all kinds of voter suppression efforts going on in that precinct, in that area, and therefore that throws in doubt the results of the election’ if their favored candidate loses.”
