The president has continuously dismissed the significance of Russian efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but that doesn’t mean that the threat posed by those efforts has dissipated. The same threat to free elections remains, and on Sunday, in the face of this threat, Russia had its own internal presidential election, which Vladimir Putin won, to the surprise of few.
Even though the president has dragged his feet when it comes to addressing Russian aggression — to say the least — other American leaders, like Republican Senator John McCain, have not. On Sunday, following the Russian presidential election, McCain did not hold back in his condemnation of Putin’s power grab, with the Sunday Russian presidential election marked by reports of election fraud of a more marked form than that which Russian interests perpetrated during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
In the face of the reports calling the integrity of the Russian presidential election into question, McCain posted a statement to Twitter reading:
‘That
#Putin had to work so hard to drive voter turnout shows the Russian people know his claim to power is a sham. The US stands with all Russians yearning for freedom.’
That #Putin had to work so hard to drive voter turnout shows the Russian people know his claim to power is a sham. The US stands with all Russians yearning for freedom. #RussiaElections2018 https://t.co/Ztj2KogmYn
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) March 18, 2018
McCain linked to a story from the Associated Press that explained some of the allegations of election fraud that have marked Sunday’s Russian presidential election.
The AP noted that there have been “widespread reports” of both ballot box stuffing and forced voting.
“Forced voting” was accomplished through “intense pressure to cast ballots,” which was described by a mechanic working for the Moscow government named Yevgeny, who described how he concluded his deliberation over whether or not to cast a ballot:
‘The answer was easy… if I want to keep working, I vote.’
Mayor of Yekaterinburg Yevgeny Roizman said, according to the AP, that “local officials and state employees all received orders “from higher up” to make sure the presidential vote turnout was over 60 percent.”
Authorities claimed in the face of these and similar reports that by about 5 PM Moscow time, turnout had reached 52 percent, a number that comes in the face of announced plans for a boycott of the election by supporters of opposition presidential candidate Alexei Navalny.
Navalny had been formally disqualified as a presidential candidate following his conviction in a fraud case that the AP explains is “widely regarded as politically motivated.”
That “politically motivated” silencing of Navalny is hardly the only recent instance of Russian governmental aggression against dissenters.
For instance, former KGB officer turned double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter were infamously recently found passed out on a British park bench recently, having been poisoned by a nerve agent that almost certainly came from the Russian government.
That incident was so glaring that even the infamous, obsessive Russo-maniac President Trump acknowledged that Russia seemed to be behind it.
There is little question, then, that the election of Putin to be another term as Russia’s leader should be regarded with suspicion.
You’d think that President Trump would be interested in addressing the fact that the electoral processes of a major world power had been so seriously corrupted, but instead, he’s stayed silent on the matter as of late Sunday afternoon.
McCain, for his part, has been at odds with the Trump administration time and time again over their continued capitulation to Russian interests.
Check out Twitter’s response to McCain taking on the issue below.
Featured Image via Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
