On Tuesday, the White House didn’t so much turn a blind eye the results of the Russian presidential election as it buried its head in the sand and hoped for the bad man to go away.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders first ignored a question from a reporter who asked if the administration believes the Russian election this weekend was a “sham.” A second reporter asked, “Would the White House call the elections free and fair?”
“Look, in terms of the election, we’re focused on our elections,” Sanders responded. “We don’t get to dictate how other countries operate. What we do know is that Putin has been elected in their country and that’s not something we can dictate how they operate.”
She added, “We can only focus on the freeness and the fairness of our elections. It’s something we’re going to do everything we can to protect, make sure bad actors don’t have the opportunity to impact them in any way.”
What stunning cowardice.
The Russia election this weekend was a farce, as anyone with half a brain can tell you that.
Former KGB agent and longtime president Vladimir Putin won re-election. Again. Putin took home a totally believable 76 percent of the overall vote, which is impressive until you remember opposition leader Alexei Navalny was barred from the election on what he claims are Kremlin-manufactured charges of corruption.
Putin’s closest competition clocked in with a mere 12 percent of votes overall.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said of the Russian election, “Restrictions on the fundamental freedoms of assembly, association and expression, as well as on candidate registration, have limited the space for political engagement and resulted in a lack of genuine competition.”
The BBC reported elsewhere that, “Video recordings from polling stations showed irregularities in a number of towns and cities across Russia. Several showed election officials stuffing boxes with ballot papers” and that an independent election monitoring group “reported hundreds of irregularities.”
These included “webcams at polling stations obstructed by balloons and other obstacles”.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the head of Russia’s Central Electoral Commission is actually defending the election by explaining “there were only half as many reported violations compared to 2012, and that none had been serious.”
Unlike the White House, Russian dissident and human rights activist Gary Kasparov wasn’t afraid to call shenanigans on the Putin regime.
“Stop calling it elections. It’s a charade,” he said this weekend on ABC News. “The only vote that matters in a dictatorship like Russia is Putin’s vote, so you’re right showing him voting for himself and that’s it.”
He added, “Turnout is the only challenge. It’s not only just because of apathy because many people are scared actually to show up and to demonstrate that they disapprove of Putin’s policies.”
Conservatives were right to rake former President Barack Obama over the coals in 2012 for congratulating Putin on “winning” re-election. After all, the Russian presidential “election” six years ago was an obvious farce, replete with dozens of documented incidents of voter fraud and abuse. Conservatives characterized the Obama administration’s response to the 2012 Russian elections as a moment of weak-kneed gutlessness. They’d be right to say the same for the White House’s response this week to the 2018 Russian elections.
