One of the claims that’s been repeated endlessly is that we can never know just how effective the Russian intervention in the 2016 elections was, so we shouldn’t concern ourselves about it. This is the conventional wisdom, but it’s false.
For one thing, there’s an entire industry devoted to influencing people and then measuring the results to see if they were cost-effective; it’s called advertising. So while we can’t know with certainty, we can know within error bars.
This article says as much. It reports on a proposal from some academics who want to do the work prove whether Putin’s posse made the difference. We need to do this.
To be clear, this isn’t about determining whether Trump’s presidency is legitimate. It’s not, regardless, because he cheated. When you get caught cheating on a test, you receive a zero. It’s the minimum fair punishment for trying to fake your way to a grade.
You get a zero even if your cheating, had it gone undetected, would not have made the difference between passing and failing, or even any difference at all. So whether the illegal help that Trump’s treason bought from Putin was enough to put him over the top, he’s still just a traitor and not the real president.
Still, we must know so that we can protect ourselves from further attacks, and also to hammer in the nail on his illegitimacy.