Game on! The first votes of 2020 get cast within a week, in Iowa. And game in: The gaming of the American election system begins in earnest, too, with the social media manipulation, voter roll purges, Russian meddling, nutty conspiracy theories and incendiary rhetoric.
The body politic is sick; how can it be healed? The doctor is in: Richard L. Hasen, the election law expert and professor at UC Irvine's law school. His new book, "Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy" offers a diagnosis and some cures. Hasen has been slagged by the right for truth-busting the "fraudulent fraud squad" and its cynical hollering about bogus voting, and slammed by the left when he criticized Stacey Abrams and her supporters for talking about the election for Georgia governor as being "stolen."
In this country, we don't run a single election. We run, he says, "nine or ten thousand" _ local, regional and state elections, with many, many links and many vulnerabilities, technological and human, on the chain that holds the republic together. We hope.
