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If Russia is trying to hack America, it is not to help Donald Trump win

Several prominent hacks have led some to accuse Russia of meddling in the US elections. If true, Putin’s objectives are likely part of a bigger play.

Americans know that a functioning democracy relies on a basic trust in the validity of the process. Russia, a country that has thoroughly undermined trust in its own democratic process, now appears to have every incentive to do the same to ours.

US intelligence officials told NBC News this week that Russian-based hackers have stolen data on thousands of registered voters in Illinois and unsuccessfully attempted to do the same in Arizona. They have suggested that the hackers in question may be directly tied to the Russian government.

These claims come in the wake of recent suspected Russian cyber-attacks on the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton Foundation and Washington thinktanks, as well as Donald Trump’s possibly sarcastic but alarming request for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

Claims of this nature are inherently murky, and it’s worth noting that cybersecurity experts have been warning that election infrastructure in the US is vulnerable to hackers with far fewer resources than the Kremlin. Still, stipulating that Russia may be behind a pattern of cyber-attacks, the question becomes: why?

It’s not clear that Putin is rooting for Trump. Putin is no fan of Clinton, but he’s also no fool, and he understands that a hostile but conventional Clinton administration is more predictable than a friendly but erratic Trump administration. He also understands, like anyone else following the latest polls, that Trump is very unlikely to win.

Consider the fallout from the DNC email hacks, released by WikiLeaks, which further established the Democratic party’s contempt for Bernie Sanders and clear preference for Clinton. While no one watching the primaries closely could have been very surprised by this, it nonetheless exacerbated the bitterness between Clinton and Sanders supporters on the eve of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia and was an unwelcome headache for the Clinton campaign.

This incident shows how easily Russian hackers could amass politically damaging information and distribute it to independent organizations like WikiLeaks to be released at sensitive moments.

Obtaining voter data is also useful for undermining public trust in the political process. The concern isn’t so much that Russia could meaningfully alter election results, as no one believes Illinois’s electoral votes will go to anyone other than Hillary Clinton. But even marginal interference with the vote count could be used to bolster Trump’s claims that the election in November could be rigged.

Arizona, for instance, is a state that typically votes Republican but that is considered a possible target for Clinton thanks to Trump’s unusual weaknesses as a candidate. If Clinton were to win Arizona by a slim margin, even the appearance of malfeasance could be used to undermine the legitimacy of her victory.

Russia has a habit of using cyber-attacks and misinformation campaigns to cause political chaos in countries like Estonia, Georgia and Ukraine – all former Soviet republics with which Russia has had major geopolitical disputes. To extend these tactics to the US would be bold, but the unprecedented unpopularity of both Clinton and Trump presents an opportunity.

Americans already distrust their leaders, and any bit of damaging information, true or not, that emerges only worsens this distrust, creating space for Russia to pursue its objectives with potentially diminished American interference.

The US, of course, is not above using hackers and misinformation campaigns. Any evidence put forward by US intelligence officials has to be taken with a grain of salt. And perhaps all is fair in cyberwarfare, and the only thing to be done is to bolster security measures against hackers. But bolstering voter’s faith in democracy? That is a whole other challenge.

Image: Reuters

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