Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats urged Congress to form an oversight commission to keep an eye on the 2020 election.
He argued that a bipartisan commission should be established to reassure the public that the upcoming election is conducted in a fair and accurate manner. He said the commission could monitor the tools that are already in place to secure a free and fair election.
“I propose that Congress creates a new mechanism to help accomplish this purpose. It should create a supremely high-level bipartisan and nonpartisan commission to oversee the election. This commission would not circumvent existing electoral reporting systems or those that tabulate, evaluate or certify the results,” Coats wrote in a New York Times opinion piece published Thursday.
“But it would monitor those mechanisms and confirm for the public that the laws and regulations governing them have been scrupulously and expeditiously followed — or that violations have been exposed and dealt with — without political prejudice and without regard to political interests of either party,” he added.
Coats suggested that the commission should include members who are “elder statespersons,” such as retired governors, Supreme Court justices, or “business leaders from social media companies.” He said a failure of Congress to provide such oversight could lead to the demise of democracy.
“If we fail to take every conceivable effort to ensure the integrity of our election, the winners will not be Donald Trump or Joe Biden, Republicans or Democrats. The only winners will be Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Ali Khamenei. No one who supports a healthy democracy could want that,” Coats wrote.
The intelligence community recently warned that China, Russia, and Iran are seeking to influence the election.
Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana, was President Trump’s spy chief for the first two years of his presidency. He resigned in 2019.
