Need help voting?
Let me give you some advice, Vladimir Putin offers with a smile.
It’s not always easy to decide who is the best candidate, despite an avalanche of “vote for me” signs. So why not let someone else guide your choices in the voting booth?
Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett suggested that foreign powers — including Russia — have been working non-stop to influence American voters to support candidates who would serve the interests of unfriendly governments.
“There are adversaries foreign and domestic who want us to fail,” Hargett told The Rotary Club of McMinnville at its weekly luncheon earlier this month. Hargett named Russian President Putin as a troubling example of foreign influence in U.S. elections.
In America, elections are organized and run at the local level, with local officials in charge of the operations. That fact makes it technically difficult for direct intervention by either domestic or foreign interests.
Election returns from individual precincts are tallied in each of the state’s 95 counties and forwarded in physical documents to the Secretary of State’s office in Nashville. At no point in the process is the electronic voting machine connected to the internet, thereby making it impossible to breach the security of the system and manipulate the results, Hargett emphasized.
Foreign governments don’t hack the election machinery, Hargett said, “But they affect the minds of voters.”
In an interview airing on McMinnville Public Radio 91.3WCPI, Hargett says election officials are obliged to confront allegations of involvement in ballot fraud.
One case in particular underscores basic defects in some of those allegations, he tells WCPI. The complainant presented impressive-looking spreadsheets suggesting that votes “were flipped” from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton in the 2020 presidential contest. Never mind that Tennesseans by a wide margin voted for Trump anyway.
The document alleged to show such vote swapping in “all 95 counties” by internet hacking of local election commission websites. As it turns out, several Tennessee counties don’t even maintain web access to their offices, he stated. The spreadsheet was a scam.
“Tennessee remains a place where it’s easy to vote but hard to cheat,” Hargett assured the Rotary audience.
Nonetheless, Tennesseans are among America’s most apathetic when it comes to selecting government leaders. The state ranks “in the bottom 10th in voter registration and voter turnout,” he noted, then pointing to continual efforts by his office and local officials to encourage election participation on a wider scale.
The recorded conversation with Hargett airs on 91.3 this Tuesday at 5 p.m. with repeats Wednesday at 5 a.m., Thursday at 1 p.m., and Friday at 1 a.m.
