This Politico effort may be the most egregious ode to both sides-ism to yet be produced this election cycle. Subtitled “Trump and Clinton feed the rigged-election charge to their peril,” it provides next to no justification for the and Clinton premise. It directly compares Donald Trump's campaign website assertions that "Crooked Hillary" is "Rigging This Election," his own suppositions of the same, and Alex Jones/Roger Stone-peddled lunacies not to equivalent Clinton theories, but to the American government's own intelligence suspicions of Russian hacking.
And the maddening thing is, it's by and large a good, well-written story. It reads exactly as if the reporter turned in a piece on the Trump-peddled notion that our entire election system might be too crooked to trust come November, only to have some mewling editor refuse to run it unless and until he wedged in some comparable claim about Hillary Clinton—no matter how silly or tenuous. It's almost satirical.
Trump’s campaign website is recruiting poll watchers to “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!” [...]
Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, has also repeatedly stoked supporters’ skepticism of the voting system’s integrity, telling a Georgia woman at a recent town hall that her concern about a fraudulent election was “well-founded.”
On the other hand, when it comes to whether or not Russian hackers are probing U.S. government and campaign sites, it's not even the Clinton campaign making the charges. Russian tech efforts to "troll" other countries by leaking—or, more often, inventing—embarrassing information, not for the purposes of destabilizing those countries so much as to cause minor humiliations for those governments, have been well known for years.
Which, again, results in an article that shoots down its own premise.
Clinton and many other election watchers are not flying blind in making this allegations. In a joint statement issued last Thursday, the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence committees cited their classified briefings to finger senior Russian officials for “making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election” and they even called on President Vladimir Putin “to immediately order a halt to this activity.”
A senior congressional aide explained that the Democratic administration is reluctant to finger Russia in the recent DNC hacking for fear of both emboldening Putin into ordering up additional hacks and to avoid being seen as taking partisan sides in an election where Trump and his associates have already made their own frequent claims that there will be voter fraud.
The comparison fails on every possible level. The whole article is itself a litany of reasons why the comparison fails.
A Washington Post/ABC News poll released earlier this month found nearly half of Trump’s supporters aren’t confident the votes will be counted accurately, compared with just 18 percent of Clinton’s backers who think the totals will be illegitimate. In August, Public Policy Polling found 69 percent of Trump voters in North Carolina think Clinton would only win if the election was rigged: 40 percent actually blamed ACORN, which officially disbanded in 2010, as the reason they expected mischief.
So Clinton voters do not think the election is going to be rigged, while somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of Trump supporters appear to (blaming ACORN is, truly, a masterwork of self-trolling); the Clinton campaign isn't accusing anyone of trying to throw the election, while the Trump campaign has made it a fixture of their website, and while there is absolutely zero information suggesting the election could be thrown by the voter fraud that the Trump campaign has borrowed from full-on, conspiracy-peddling lunatics, the one suggestion anyone from the Clinton camp has alluded to—that Russia may have been involved in campaign-related hacking that will not rig the election, but at worst was meant to embarrass one of the two candidates—isn't even their theory, but one being contemplated by American intelligence officials themselves.
The article indeed rightly notes that a foreign cyberattack on the election itself, whether from Russia or anyone else, isn't even a credible possibility because our elections are conducted in such a haphazard fashion. Neither the Clinton camp nor intelligence officials have made such a charge. Donald Trump is making the equivalent charge—that the campaign may be "stolen" by his "crooked" opponent—directly in his campaign materials.
As I said, I have to believe that this was originally an article about Trump campaign fearmongering that someone at some point decided needed to contain at least one comparison to Hillary Clinton in order to achieve that all-important mythical "balance"—even if it required considerable journalistic fudging to do so. It's embarrassing, and yet another symptom of just how stymied our press continues to be by a candidate who is both openly dishonest and who has tied himself to some of the most addled propagandists in the nation.