In addition to using the fake Russia election meddling narrative to try and delegitimize Donald Trump’s presidency, keep voters at each other’s throats and create in Americans’ minds the notion that Russia is an enemy, it is not-so-subtly being used in an attempt to gain greater federal control over elections.
Donald Trump fired the first salvo with his election commission, formed, ostensibly, to investigate possible election fraud. But the commission ran into immediate pushback from states and legal challenges from privacy advocates like the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Trump’s panel, headed by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, asked that the states turn over their voter rolls and include data like voter birth dates, last four digits of Social Security numbers, voting history and felony convictions. Forty-four states and the District of Columbia refused to provide some or all of the information, citing state laws forbidding it and privacy concerns. After getting push-back from the secretaries of state – even those friendly with the Trump Administration – and notice of lawsuit filings, the commission asked election officers to put a hold on submitting data.
It’s a terrifying concept to imagine the federal government in control of such data and what its agents could do with it, and how they could use it to gain even greater control over the process. Especially so when you consider how they might collate it with the trove of data they scarf up from electronic communications.
The Founders were prescient enough to reserve the control of elections to the states in the Constitution in both Article I and II. And there it should remain.
But the control agents are nothing if not persistent. And they never let a crisis go to waste; especially one they created. Hence we have a new Politico piece from globalists Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake (doesn’t rhyme with snake, but should) calling for federal control of elections on the pretext of making them safe from Russian meddling.
Never mind that no evidence has been presented that Russia hacked the election in any way. There is only the word of known perjurer James Klapper and known leaker James Comey – though neither has produced publicly any evidence to back up their claims. And the “intelligence community’s” own white paper on the subject could only find alternative media outlets for blame – singling out RT because it gave a platform to third party candidates.
The only agency implicated in any attempts to actually hack state elections and voter rolls was Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security.
Clarke and Knake are members of the Council on Foreign Relations. Each election cycle you are relegated to two “choices,” both already approved by the CFR, and CFR members are always chosen for top administration positions – especially positions like secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury — regardless of which party is in power.
Clarke and Knake write:

As with almost every other aspect of our culture, the emergence of the internet and the relatively recent advent of social media are profoundly disrupting our democracy. It is a new and open issue as to whether our kind of self-government can function successfully when: one, much of the electorate gets its news from social media easily employed by foreign powers, and; two, infrastructure of all types—perhaps including the voting system—can be infiltrated by sophisticated hackers based overseas.

If we decipher the doublespeak, what we see here is that the establishment recognizes that, because of the advent of the internet, they have lost control of the message – reflected in the fact that most of middle America is not buying the Russia collusion narrative – and they fear they may lose control of future elections now that people are recognizing the two major parties are essentially one in the same and are, in greater numbers, looking to alternative parties. (I don’t buy for a minute that Trump is an outsider and the establishment was surprised by his election. – BL)
What the establishment fears is not that “much of the electorate gets its news from social media easily employed by foreign powers,” but that more Americans are starting to see through the propaganda they are employing through state-run media and state-run social media bots  and paid trolls.
With the use of electronic voting machines the threat of hacking and other manipulation is definitely ever-present, so there should never be any voting machines used that do not also provide a paper trail. But if states choose to use them, that is an issue for that state’s voters to decide, not the federal government.