Sohn: What's in a recount? America's faith

People cast ballots at the Brainerd Recreation Center in Chattanooga.
People cast ballots at the Brainerd Recreation Center in Chattanooga.
photo Staff file photo by Dan Henry / The Chattanooga Times Free Press.

To recount or not to recount.

Why not recount? And not just in three states - but in all of them.

After a presidential campaign year when everything seemed hinged on smoke, mirrors and deflection, Americans aren't soothed by talk of "peaceful transition of power" or simply accepting the fact that Hillary Clinton was elected president by the people's votes and Donald Trump became president-elect with an archaic, elitist Electoral College count.

Nonwtheless, that result is real - until we legally amend it. We get that. It's the other murkiness that must be overthrown: The Russian meddling in the election with hacked emails and fake news and maybe more; the Supreme Court's gut of the Voting Rights Act that allowed states to reshape the field of voters; the constant suggestions by Trump that the election was rigged with illegitimate votes from minorities or immigrants.

Sour grapes? Yes, but not because of the election's outcome. The real angst is the growing nag and distrust that all of the aforementioned meddling has created.

If President Barack Obama, President-elect Donald Trump and former candidate Hillary Clinton really want Americans to have faith again in our election process, they should join Jill Stein in working to ensure that faith with a complete recount and audit.

Further, if we can have eight congressional investigations of Clinton emails, let's have one bipartisan congressional investigation now to explore what the Russians did, then take action to ensure it stops.

Again, this is not a call to upend the vote. This should be an endeavor to better protect our nation and voters in the future.

During the campaign, American security agencies found evidence that Russia and Vladimir Putin himself orchestrated sophisticated cyber attacks into U.S. democracy. In October, the U.S. formally accused Russia of hacking the Democratic National Committee and Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta. In November, The Washington Post detailed how a Russian propaganda effort helped spread "fake news" during the campaign to damage Clinton. Some of those fake and false stories were read more than 8 million times.

Malcolm Nance, a terrorism analyst, said Russia applied "every aspect" of its propaganda and intelligence operations machinery against this U.S. election, including their state organizations known as Sputnik and Russia Today, as well as paid trolls who operated out of St. Petersburg to create thousands of pro-Trump organizations, Facebook feeds and Twitter feeds.

Was it to get Trump elected or to diminish worldwide respect for our democracy?

"I would like to think that an organization of the FSB's [the successor of the KGB] magnitude, led by a former KGB officer and director of the FSB [Putin], would only want to create mayhem in the U.S. electoral system, but the process was so deliberate and they only favored one candidate and that candidate was elected," Nance said.

The only hacks that occurred to members of the GOP were against Lindsay Graham, a stanch opponent of Russian aggression in the Ukraine; John McCain and Colin Powell, Nance added. Powell, of course, would have been the most noteworthy of the conservatives who would have endorsed Hillary Clinton.

"This was Watergate 2.0, only they [the Russians] got away with everything," Nance told MSNBC last week.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., also is a proponent of learning more - preferably with a congressional investigation.

"If [the Russians] get away with it then what we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg. We know that the Russians were trying to penetrate voter files. Penetrating voter files is the precursor to actually being able to manipulate Election Day results. That's the next step for the Russians, if they don't feel there were any repercussions here," he said.

Murphy also suggests the U.S. place sanctions against the Russians - as we did when Russia worked to manipulate the elections in the Ukraine.

So let's put aside the smoke and mirrors of flag-burning tweets, designed certainly as deflection.

Let's clear the air about illegal votes and hacked voter files and computer analysts' questions about mathematical truisms that defy results in key battleground states.

Show us that Russia didn't hack voting machines in tiny counties in the Midwest.

Show us that, as Trump claimed in order to excuse his loss in the popular vote, 3 million illegal immigrants didn't vote.

Show us that legal voters weren't turned away at the polls in urban areas because their new driver's licenses didn't precisely match their last election voting record or because they had no photo ID.

Will it be expensive? Sure. But we've certainly spent dumber money.

Democracy is worth it, so give us the unequivocal ability to trust the Election Day count four years from now.

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