Biden joins global effort to prevent election interference
Leaders from around the globe, including former Vice President Joe Biden, are banding together in an effort to thwart attempts at interfering in elections.
The Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity will aim to “fill a void in transatlantic coordination, identifying and plugging gaps and raising awareness from governments to citizens; and it will look into the level of risk exposure across Western countries and ask how technology can address the problem,” according to the news release.
Biden spokesman Bill Russo confirmed that the former vice president plans to attend the first meeting, which is scheduled for June 21 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Michael Chertoff, who was homeland security secretary during the George W. Bush administration, is a co-chair of the commission.
“NATO, EU and other democratic countries will go to the polls in over 20 elections before the US Presidential Election in 2020, giving multiple opportunities for election spoilers,” the news release said. “Yet, governments and institutions have yet to provide an effective response to this growing challenge. This is why leading figures in politics, tech, media and business are joining forces to launch a Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity.”
After the 2016 campaign, the US intelligence community concluded Russia meddled in the presidential election. And in February, top national security officials testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that they also saw Russia as a threat to the 2018 elections.
The Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity is an initiative under the nonprofit Alliance of Democracies Foundation, which according to its website “is dedicated to the advancement of democracy and free markets across the globe.”
“The Western world is far too vulnerable to efforts, led by Russia, to undermine our democracies from within,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, founder of the nonprofit, a co-chair of the commission and a former NATO secretary-general and prime minister of Denmark, said in the news release. “We have taken unprecedented collective steps to protect ourselves from conventional attacks — especially in Eastern Europe — but these efforts have not been matched by vital protections to our democratic processes.”
