Election Meddling Is Surprisingly Common.
The U.S. and Russia aren’t the only countries that do this.
China has interfered in several Taiwanese elections, for instance, and the late President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela gave support to several preferred candidates throughout Latin America, but Levin said in an email that "from the available evidence that I currently have, the U.S. and the Soviet Union/Russia have been the most frequent performers of partisan electoral interventions since World War II.”
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The U.S. Has Been Meddling In Other Countries’ Elections For A Century. It Doesn’t Feel Good.
PHILADELPHIA ― Intelligence officials are shocked that Russia appears to be meddling in the U.S. presidential election, but for some supporters of Bernie Sanders, it’s just turnabout.
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“Active measures”: a history of Russian interference in US elections
One event, more than any other in the Cold War, was ripe for active measures: the assassination of John F Kennedy. The KGB variously planted stories that Kennedy was assassinated by a CIA plan or by a group of right-wing Texan financiers and industrialists, who wanted to make it look like a communist plot. More was to follow. One of the KGB’s most successful anti-American measures of the entire Cold War was its later fabrication, and dissemination, of the story that the AIDS virus had been “manufactured” by the US Army at a biological warfare facility in Maryland.
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The U.S. is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries
Update: President Obama on Thursday slapped Russia with new penalties for meddling in the U.S. presidential election, kicking out dozens of suspected spies and imposing banking restrictions on five people and four organizations the administration says were involved.
The CIA has accused Russia of interfering in the 2016 presidential election by hacking into Democratic and Republican computer networks and selectively releasing emails. But critics might point out the U.S. has done similar things.
The U.S. has a long history of attempting to influence presidential elections in other countries – it’s done so as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000, according to a database amassed by political scientist Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-us-intervention-foreign-elections-20161213-story.html
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Noam Chomsky on the Long History of US Meddling in Foreign Elections
The "foreign threats," as he had already discussed, were hardly real; the Soviet Union watched from a distance as the US subverted the 1948 election and restored the traditional conservative order, keeping to its wartime agreement with Churchill that left Italy in the Western zone. The "domestic threat" was the threat of democracy.
The idea that US intervention provided Italians with freedom of choice while ensuring that they chose "democracy" (in our special sense of the term) is reminiscent of the attitude of the extreme doves towards Latin America: that its people should choose freely and independently -- as long as doing so did not impact US interests adversely.
The democratic ideal, at home and abroad, is simple and straightforward: You are free to do what you want, as long as it is what we want you to do.
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Even more reason to protect our own country from election meddling.
Perhaps it's even time to make working with any foreign government in any way to manipulate our elections illegal as well.
Protect America !! We only have one.
"Everyone does it", is lame even for 6 year olds. When we are talking about conspiring with a foreign enemy to thwart the American electoral process such prevarications are merely childish diversions. A year after he left office and nine years after he was elected exactly zero ranking Obama campaign or administration officials were ever indicted by any prsecutor in any jurisdiction for any malfeaseance. Only 9 months in the indictments against Trump's campaign and administration have already begun. Conspiring to steal the mayorship of Bugtussle is a crime. Conspiring to steal the Presidency is TREASON. And, NO!, not everybody does it. Nobody is falling for that dodge. Trump and Company are obviously a bunch of traitors...
What a comical article. The Trump administration and his supporters begin with flat out denial, then as evidence trickles in, they shift to varying levels of admission, until they wind up with "yeah, so what? everyone does it."