We can repeat the 2020 election the “most safe and secure” election ever. Funny how Russia and China sat that one out huh? Guess they’d let the other team win one.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that if Russia/China get involved they are guaranteed to decide the outcome of the election. That is absolutely not the case.
There are hundreds of factors that will ultimately decide who wins on the day.
My understanding is in some states the laws are written with a Catch-22: you need evidence of hacking to kick off an investigation. So I wouldn’t be that confident.
If I were China I’d probably go with a hardware supply chain attack. These machines can sit around for years.
I think DARPA’s SSITH program is a step in the right direction. At the very least, I’d feel a lot better with bug bounties on publicly available demonstrators from all manufacturers.
The safe and secure claim was largely around the conduct of the election itself, whereas US adversaries largely deployed disinfo and propaganda tactics to interfere in the election.
So, not sure they sat it out as much as the U.S. was a little better prepared. For instance, social media platforms did a better job of not being completely owned as fire hoses for propaganda and disinfo.
Of course, some then complained that this constituted "censorship" by the platforms.
Safe to say that $46K ad spend was a drop in the bucket versus their overall effort, but sure, Facebook not accepting those rubles in 2020 counts as a small example.
I have no problem with the U.S. government working with American communications platforms to prevent adversarial propaganda, disinformation and disruption of US elections. These are foreign governments engaged in psyops against American citizens. Falls pretty squarely (and obviously) within government purview to defend against it.
The US government didn't stop there though. They used their influence to censor US citizens' tweets. That's censorship, and that's what happens when you give the government this power. Put censorship in quotes all you like, you support it.
Twitter is infested with trollbots and sock puppets, and can't even agree with itself on its count of real users. So, if some real user accounts that parroted disinfo were swept up in bans or whatever you're calling "censorship" during the disinfo fight, then so be it.
And, in any case, if they're parroting the same disinfo as foreign adversaries who are working to destroy us, then they don't get special dispensation just because they're U.S. citizens.
This is why the First Amendment famously has limits.
"Most safe and secure" referred to the counting of the votes, in response Trump's claims.
"Interference" refers to China/Russia state-sponsored targetted propaganda on social media and the like.
Was it really the "most safe and secure" and is "interference" an accurate way to describe these type of activities? Well, one could argue about that. But you're mixing up two mostly unrelated things here.
There are hundreds of factors that will ultimately decide who wins on the day.