A divided America is a gift for Putin

Russia is using a ‘drumbeat of disinformation’ to attack the American political system. That was the stark conclusion of the FBI director Christopher Wray in his testimony to the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee in September. One aim, he said, was to undermine Joe Biden’s campaign. But the main thrust of the attack — as we will witness in the coming days and weeks — is to undermine public confidence in US democracy itself.

To be fair, Russia did not create the problem. It was not Vladimir Putin who wrote the laws governing US elections, with their decentralised responsibilities, threadbare budgets and barnacled and opaque provisions. (Do you understand what the electoral college is and how it operates? Neither do most Americans.) Nor did he write the Constitution, which is meant to be the system’s backstop, but is ambiguous on vital questions about contested elections (the vice-president’s role, for example).