Ex-US Intelligence Chief Urges Congress To Establish Election Oversight Commission

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 17th September, 2020) US Congress should create a bipartisan commission consisting of social media executives, political leaders, former security officials and justices to oversee this year's presidential election, former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Thursday.

"I propose that Congress... create a supremely high-level bipartisan and nonpartisan commission to oversee the election," Coats said. "Commission members... could include congressional leaders, current and former governors, 'elder statespersons,' former national security leaders, perhaps the former Supreme Court justices David Souter and Anthony Kennedy, and business leaders from social media companies."

Ensuring the credibility of the election to both Republicans and Democrats was essential if the US democratic experiment would survive, Coats wrote.

"Our democracy's enemies, foreign and domestic, want us to concede in advance that our voting systems are faulty or fraudulent; that sinister conspiracies have distorted the political will of the people; that our public discourse has been perverted by the news media and social networks riddled with prejudice, lies and ill will," he wrote.

The most urgent task American leaders face is to ensure that the election's results are accepted as legitimate. Electoral legitimacy is the essential linchpin of our entire political culture. We should see the challenge clearly in advance and take immediate action to respond, Coats said.

The commission should monitor electoral mechanisms and confirm for the public that the laws and regulations governing them had been fully followed without political prejudice and without regard to political interests of either party, Coats wrote.