President Trump clearly places a high priority on US relations with Asia. His 12-day trip to the region beginning this weekend – the longest by a US president since George H. W. Bush’s 1991 marathon – attests to that. 

And it’s a priority the American people share with the president: Surveys consistently show that Americans consider Asia more important than any other region for furthering US security and economic interests.

But much less clear nine months into the Trump presidency is what policies and overarching vision will guide US relations with Asia, home to most of the world’s fastest-growing economies and responsible for more than 40 percent of global economic output.

President Obama had his “Asia pivot,” but Mr. Trump knocked the legs out from under that policy when he withdrew the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the 12-nation trade deal designed to secure US economic leadership in a region increasingly dominated by China and its hybrid statist-capitalist economic model.

But if TPP and the “pivot” are out, leaders at every one of the stops Trump will make – Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Da Nang and Hanoi in Vietnam, and Manila, with regional summits adding more leaders to the mix – will want to know what is “in.”

With no clear policies as guideposts, leaders will be watching the unconventional American president for clues on key questions: What does “America First” mean for relations, particularly economic, with Asia? What will Trump’s preference for bilateral relations mean for America’s traditional leadership role in multilateral arenas? Will a Trump focus on North Korea suck the air out of every other issue of interest with the US?

Lee Jin-man/AP

South Koreans hold banners with pictures of President Trump during a rally in Seoul on Nov. 3 to welcome him to the country. Two US supersonic bombers flew over the Korean Peninsula for bombing exercises that are also a show of force against North Korea ahead of the president's first official visit to Asia.

And underpinning them all: Is American leadership waxing or waning in Asia?

“I think the region is just very confused… [it] wants the United States engaged in Asia-Pacific affairs generally, but they don’t want us there only as a military power,” says Matthew Goodman, senior adviser for Asian economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington and a former National Security Council director for international economics.

“They want us there engaged in all forms of affairs,” he adds, “and they want us to have some sort of vision.”

'America First' in Asia

Under Trump the US has been more forceful on security issues – countering China by sending out more freedom-of–navigation operations in the disputed South China Sea, for example, and above all jettisoning the Obama administration’s “strategic patience” approach to North Korea in favor of more saber-rattling and diplomatic pressure.

But what the US under Trump hasn’t offered is an encompassing regional policy. It’s almost the inverse of the Obama approach to Asia, some regional experts say. 

“The Obama administration packaged its Asia policy in a manner that was compelling and spoke to the region with the ‘pivot,’ but then in many respects they didn’t follow through,” says Michael Auslin, a fellow in contemporary Asia at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in Washington.

“This administration is being more assertive in demonstrating a strong security role in the region, but what the Trump people have to do is clearly articulate all the facets of US Asia policy under this president,” he adds. “They need to use this trip to allay the fears out there that this administration is backing out of Asia.” 

Obama’s Asia “pivot” or “rebalancing” of US assets and interests from the Middle East to Asia stood on three pillars – enhanced security relations, deepened economic and trade ties, and closer engagement with Southeast Asia. Of those three, only the security pillar has been fully retained under Trump, experts say.

“The [economic] pillar … is gone with the withdrawal from TPP,” says Amy Searight, director of CSIS’s Southeast Asia Program. “I don’t see any economic leadership emanating from this administration.”

Trump has spoken of replacing TPP with a series of bilateral trade deals with Asian countries, and has won a renegotiation of the US-South Korea free trade deal after threatening to withdraw from it. But that approach has rattled a region that has prospered under security and economic multilateral frameworks – frameworks the US moved to strengthen and expand over the last decade in particular. 

“A bilaterally focused, transactional, America-first economic policy is completely antithetical to what the Obama administration was trying to do, and what the region aspires to in terms of economic engagement,” says Dr. Searight, who recently served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia.

As for Trump administration engagement with Southeast Asia, experts call it mixed. The president has underscored the region’s importance by lavishing attention on its leaders – but sometimes in ways that have left them unsure of the breadth of US policy and where their region fits in it.

After phone calls in April with a number of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders, Trump suggested Secretary of State Rex Tillerson invite ASEAN foreign ministers to Washington – which he did. But then the ministers were treated to a brief meeting focused on North Korea’s threat to the region rather than on clarifying US engagement in Asia.

“You had the foreign ministers fly to Washington for an hour-long meeting with Secretary Tillerson, and 55 minutes of that hour-long meeting were spent on North Korea,” says Brian Eyler, director of the Stimson Center’s Southeast Asia Program in Washington.

Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service/AP

This undated file photo distributed on Sept. 3 by the North Korean government shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (2nd r.) at an undisclosed location in North Korea. Security and trade will loom large during President Trump’s first official visit to Asia. North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapons program is likely to dominate the first part of his trip, which includes stops in Seoul and Beijing as well as Tokyo.

“It ended up confirming the doubts about the administration’s bandwidth for the many other issues Southeast Asian leaders are worried about,” he adds, “and it added to the questions about US leadership in the region.”

'Indo-Pacific' policy

Senior officials counter that the administration has already taken numerous steps to underscore Asia’s critical importance to the US, including Trump’s meetings with a number of key leaders – those include Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe – and Tillerson’s recent Washington speech laying out US priorities for what he called the “Indo-Pacific” region.

Senior administration officials subsequently adopted the “Indo-Pacific” phrasing for press briefings on the president’s trip – raising questions about the signals the White House is trying to send.

For some Washington Asia experts, the use of “Indo-Pacific” is simply a way for Trump officials to differentiate their policy from Obama’s “Asia-Pacific” vision. Others say it signals Trump’s intention to raise India’s prominence in US Asia policy, an idea favored by US ally Japan, suggesting an effort to counterbalance an increasingly aggressive China with the region’s democratic and market-oriented heavyweights.

Michael Green, a former senior Asia official in the George W. Bush White House now at CSIS, says he hears three strains of Asia policy coming out of the administration: Tillerson’s “Indo-Pacific” view, emphasizing working with allies and building an open and transparent economy to counter what Tillerson has called China’s “predatory” economics; another he describes as the “dark sovereignty, America-first transactional ‘We only win when others lose’ perspective”; and the third, which surged briefly after President Xi’s visit with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in April, which is the idea of a “strategic partnership” with China.

Judging by administration officials’ comments, it’s the first option – the more traditional, “deepen relations with allies and partners” option – that appears to have the wind in its sails as Trump embarks on his trip.

But at the same time, the spectacle of “clashing themes within the administration” and Trump’s “unpredictability” will have the region watching every step of the nearly two-week journey for clues to where US Asia policy is headed, Mr. Green says. In particular, all eyes will be on the speech Trump is to deliver at the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit in Da Nang Nov. 10 – a speech a senior administration official says will “present the United Sates vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific region.”

That may sound like the harbinger of a traditional multilateral and highly engaged US Asia policy. But as Green notes, the lingering sense of US “unpredictability” under this president “has the Chinese a bit nervous; it also has friends and allies a bit nervous as well.”

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

A year after a presidential race roiled by allegations of attempted Russian meddling, the Monitor is seeking to answer the question: Just how vulnerable are the mechanics of American elections? In a three-part series that begins today, we examine how an attack by hackers might happen, the tensions between preventing fraud and securing voters’ rights, and the means to safeguard an accurate vote.

Election officials in Florida have apparently tapped into the regenerative powers of Ponce de León’s fabled Fountain of Youth.

The proof is available on voter rolls in Broward County.

Among those on the official list of registered voters is Henny M. Nelson, age 131.

So is Lillian E. Nicoletti of Davie, at 128 years old. And Sophie C. Golub of Sunrise, 118.

The oldest known living person on Earth is believed to be 117. So something truly remarkable must be afoot in the voting precincts of Broward County.

Lawyers for a conservative election integrity group say there is a more plausible explanation: Broward’s voting rolls are bloated with deceased voters, duplicate registrations, and people who moved away long ago without notifying the elections office.

In a court case in Miami, officials with the American Civil Rights Union charge that the county’s supervisor of elections is violating a federal law that requires the county to maintain “accurate and current” voter rolls.

The case is significant because it seeks to establish a national standard for the maintenance of voter registration lists as a way to guard against election fraud. Voter list maintenance is no small issue. The US Supreme Court is set to take up a similar case from Ohio early next year.

But the case is significant for a second reason. It arises at a time of intense national concern over alleged Russian-backed efforts to meddle in the November 2016 presidential election. A special prosecutor is investigating election interference, including whether there was any collusion with Donald Trump’s campaign. At least one former campaign adviser is cooperating in the probe. In addition, Senate and House committees are also investigating that politically explosive charge.

Against this backdrop, The Christian Science Monitor set out to examine key vulnerabilities in the US election system and whether they might allow someone to secretly manipulate the vote. What we found was an election system whose very modernity and reliance on voter-friendly technology has made it staggeringly vulnerable to manipulation. In the same vein, we found that at least a partial solution may be remarkably simple. But a year after the presidential election, little has been done to effectively address these threats.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Broward as a target

In 2016, computer hackers tasked by Russia attempted to break their way into America’s election system, according to US intelligence officials. There is no evidence that they compromised vote tallying software to electronically award more votes to one candidate or shave votes from another.

But there is evidence of repeated attempts to break into another critical part of the election system: voter registration rolls.

The implications are potentially severe. Whoever controls the list of registered voters controls who gets to vote.

Which brings us back to Broward County and the quality of its registration rolls.

Is it possible that 131-year-old Henny Nelson could become an unwitting pawn in Vladimir Putin’s alleged attempt to undermine the essence of American democracy?

There are easier ways to fix an election, but experts acknowledge that a large number of deceased or otherwise dormant voters on a registration list could help give cover to a malicious attack that might be exceedingly difficult to detect.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be linked to Russia. North Korea, for instance, has demonstrated an ability to strike at its adversaries – like Sony Corp. – with cyber intrusions. Iran and China are known to possess similar expertise. Anarchists, hackers-for-hire, or a hacker with a strong party preference might also possess the ability to swing votes or sow chaos during an election, experts say.

How might the Russians or others try to do this? Broward County offers an example. It was ground zero in the disputed 2000 presidential election that ended in Florida with a margin of 537 votes.

With 1.2 million registered voters, Broward has more card-carrying Democrats than any other county in Florida, a key swing state that is a must-win for any candidate seeking the White House. To carry Florida, a Democratic candidate would logically have to carry Broward by a very wide margin, while a Republican would benefit from making inroads among, or minimizing the turnout of, Broward Democrats.

The county is also the location of the congressional district of former Democratic Party Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who lost her party leadership on the eve of the 2016 Democratic Convention following a series of embarrassing emails that were leaked to the media after being stolen by computer hackers allegedly working at the behest of Russia.

Cybersecurity experts warn that hackers – Russian or otherwise – could change or erase voter registration records, including those of the most active and loyal voters for one party or the other.

Such an all-out attack could plunge an election into chaos. But it would also blatantly tip off officials that the election was under assault.

A more subtle attack might seek to identify pools of dormant voters – registrants such as Nelson who haven’t voted in years but who remain on the rolls fully eligible to vote. Under this scenario, the hackers could harvest individual names, submit online change of address forms, and request that absentee ballots be sent to a new address.

The scenario depends on an essential circumstance: that there is a large enough pool of other “Henny Nelsons” on the voter rolls.

In recent years there have been a number of investigations into the state of Broward’s list of registered voters. Some have been undertaken by conservative special interest groups like the ACRU and the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Other inquiries were initiated by ordinary citizens wondering why their deceased neighbors or those who moved away were still eligible to vote years later.

Among their findings:

• During much of the past decade, Broward has had more voters listed on its registration rolls than there are citizens eligible to vote in the county. In 2016, there were an estimated 61,000 more registrants on the rolls than eligible voters living in Broward.
• In 2016, there were 107,278 individuals in Broward who remained on the voting rolls and fully eligible to vote even though they hadn’t voted or responded to any election office mailings in four years or more.
• Although there are an estimated 560 centenarians currently living in Broward County, the county’s voter registration list contains the names of 3,044 voters who are recorded as 100 years old or older. Of those, 1,450 are identified as “active voters,” meaning they voted in at least one of the last two federal elections.
• Researchers found 48 registered voters who are older than the oldest living person in the US.
• A May 2016 examination of the voter rolls found 2,082 likely duplicate registrations.
• The same 2016 review found 2,208 individuals who appear to have voted more than once in the same election in Broward.
• Researchers discovered an active voter whose recorded date of birth suggests he is 12 years old. According to voter registration records, he registered to vote at age 8.
• A computer analysis found 1,226 registered voters in Broward who listed a UPS Store as their legal address. Florida law requires that a legal residence be an actual residential structure – a home.

(When the existence of the UPS store voters was reported to the supervisor of elections, the voters were instructed to update their registration with a valid address. If they failed to do so within 30 days, they were advised that their legal address would automatically be changed to “102 Government Way.” That is the supervisor of elections office in Fort Lauderdale. After that change, requested absentee ballots continued to be sent to the UPS store postal boxes.)

A cautious approach

Broward’s supervisor of elections, Brenda Snipes, and her lawyers insist that she complies with all state and federal requirements for voter roll maintenance. In addition, she says she feels a strong responsibility to never remove someone from the registration list who may still be eligible to vote.

Photo illustration. Original photo: Gary Rothstein/Reuters/File

Broward County's supervisor of elections, Brenda C. Snipes (r.), talks with then-mayor, Irene Lieberman (l.), at the Broward County equipment center in Fort Lauderdale Fla., Nov. 2, 2004. A court case in Miami charges Dr. Snipes with violating a federal law that requires the county to maintain “accurate and current” voter rolls. She she says complies with all state and federal requirements, and feels a strong responsibility to never remove someone from the registration list who may still be eligible to vote.

“We exercise a lot of caution when we are moving a person to another status,” she testified in federal court in July. “We reach out to them. We never just take a person off the rolls.”

In an interview, Dr. Snipes says the bulk of registration list maintenance is handled by state officials, including information about a voter’s death, citizenship, felon status, and whether they are registered to vote in other states.

“We have a regular list maintenance program, but much is subject to interpretation,” she says. “We try to stay within the statute so we are being fair, first of all, to the voter.”

The issue of how best to maintain voter registration rolls is politically divisive.

Republicans charge that sloppy registration lists lay the groundwork for election fraud. They favor robust efforts to police voter rolls and remove those who are ineligible to vote.

In contrast, Democrats maintain that voter fraud in the US is exceedingly rare and that efforts to purge voters from the rolls are often part of a Republican scheme to suppress the votes of likely Democratic voters rather than protect them.

Now in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, many Americans are expressing acute concern about a specific kind of election fraud – the kind that might be perpetrated by Russian-backed hackers.

There is no evidence that hackers broke into Broward’s voting rolls. But there is evidence that they may have tried.

Attempted hacks, allegedly at the direction of Russian military intelligence, targeted registration systems in as many as 21 states during the 2016 campaign season, including a successful penetration in Illinois, according to US intelligence officials. Hackers also posed as employees with a Florida-based voter registration software company, VR Systems, and launched a spear-phishing campaign against 122 officials in jurisdictions served by that company. (Spear-phishing involves sending decoy emails to entice a target to click on a file and unleash a malicious program that can corrupt and manipulate data systems.)

VR Systems provides voter registration and voter verification services in 64 of Florida’s 67 counties, including Broward. At least one of those phishing emails was addressed to an official in Broward.

“To our knowledge, according to our IT person, that did not get through to anyone,” Snipes says.

VR Systems’ poll books – computerized lists used to check voters in at the polls before they vote their ballots – contain substantially more than the public information listed on the voter rolls, experts say. The electronic poll books hold sensitive information about each voter as well as a photograph and digital signature.

Much remains unclear about the nature and scope of the attempted 2016 cyber intrusions.

The Illinois hack

In Illinois, the attack began on June 23. But information technology staff did not recognize it as an attack until July 12 – about 19 days later.

The attackers, working through foreign-based IP addresses, were bombarding the state’s paperless online voter application website at a rate of five times per second, 24 hours a day.

They were able to view multiple database tables and gain access to 90,000 voter registration records. The records were not altered, but the state notified 76,000 registered voters that their personal data might have been compromised.

Officials are not certain what the hackers were trying to achieve. The Russians have long sought to attack and undermine trust in American democracy. Given the current level of partisan enmity and distrust of election systems among Americans, that effort appears to be succeeding.

But there could be a second goal.

The 2016 election hacking may have been a scouting mission to lay the groundwork for future covert efforts to actually rig a US election, security experts say.

In June, former FBI Director James Comey delivered a stark warning about Russian intentions to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“They will be back,” he said.

No one is sure why the hackers were attempting to gain access to voter rolls. In most states, some portion of the voter rolls is public information. They can include name, date of birth, home address, telephone numbers, party affiliation, and voting history. Some include Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers, but those details are kept in more secure files.

Information warfare

It is possible the hackers wanted to tap into a large database to see if they could capture information useful for identity theft. It is also possible that they were seeking to gather a large mass of data to analyze the proclivities of specific voters to allow them to better wage campaign-related information warfare: personalized fake news.

“More sophisticated attacks weaponize the [registration] logs against the population and against democracy itself,” James Scott, senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, wrote in an email response to questions from the Monitor.

“Voter registration logs can be used to precision target voters based on their demographic (age, sex, area, income, etc.) and psychographic (party, voting record, etc.) characteristics,” he wrote. “Attackers leverage the information in Big Data algorithms, which are powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, to tailor malicious fake news lures to specific voters.”

That approach would dovetail with the theft, leaking, and online discussion of embarrassing emails that were used to attack Representative Wasserman Schultz and undercut Hillary Clinton’s election prospects in the final weeks of the campaign.

There are also many less sophisticated ways to use unauthorized access to voter rolls to undermine an election, Mr. Scott says.

“A mid-range attack might alter or delete registration logs in an attempt to disrupt voter turnout by adding time constraints and administrative overhead to election processes,” Scott wrote. “If the registration of each voter has to be manually looked up [on Election Day], and if some of those registrations are incorrect, less people will be able to vote that day.”

He added: “If nothing else, voters will question the integrity of the process and may question the results of the election regardless. Perceived election fraud can be just as harmful as actual fraud if it is adeptly weaponized.”

This type of attack might be as basic as covertly changing a voter’s party affiliation on the registration rolls.

In July 2016, officials in Riverside County, Calif., received a number of complaints from voters who said someone had changed their party affiliation in the online voter registration list. The change meant they were not eligible to vote in their party’s primary election. Those who complained were provided a provisional ballot, but it is unclear how many others simply went home frustrated.

Computer forensic specialists were unable to trace who might have made the changes within the state’s voter registration rolls. At the time, the state did not record the IP address of someone seeking to amend a voter registration file.

According to a report in Time Magazine, officials in the Obama administration believed the Riverside County incident may have been a Russian-linked operation. But more than a year later, there is no hard evidence attributing responsibility. The incident remains a mystery.

A Harvard study

Alarmed by the prospect of such attacks, a group of researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., examined how difficult it might be for someone to exploit internet-based registration systems to essentially steal the identity of voters and potentially steal their votes.

The researchers specifically examined registration databases that allowed voters to make changes online to a statewide registration list. They found that online registration systems of 35 states and the District of Columbia were vulnerable to an imposter posing as a voter to submit changes to that voter’s registration information. (On Oct. 1, Florida became the 36th state with a statewide online registration system.)

“These aren’t breaches. This is not somebody breaking into a computer,” says Latanya Sweeney, professor of government and technology in residence at Harvard and one of the report’s authors. “This is somebody going in through the front door impersonating someone else.”

The attackers are merely posing as a voter to quietly and deceptively change the real voter’s information.

Although they didn’t study it, the researchers say this same vulnerability extends to any county or local jurisdiction that permits a voter to make online changes to registration information.

The study was published in September. The report’s conclusions are shocking. It turns out it is neither difficult nor expensive to surreptitiously change someone’s voter registration information. With moderate computer programming skills, malicious changes could be made to voter registration files nationwide in an attack that could affect thousands or even millions of votes, the report says.

“A voter identity theft attack could disrupt an election by imposters submitting address changes, deleting voter registrations, or requesting absentee ballots,” the study says.

To do so, the imposter must possess a few sensitive personal details about the voter to be able to gain access to and change the registration information. That information includes name, date of birth, gender, address, Social Security number, and/or driver’s license number.

The Harvard researchers found that those critical pieces of information were not difficult to obtain. They could be acquired from government databases, private data brokers, or markets selling such information on the darknet.

“An attacker could have spent $1,002 from darknet sources to acquire 2 datasets that jointly contained the names, addresses, dates of birth, genders, and Social Security numbers of most adult Americans,” the report says.

An automated attack changing 1 percent of registrations in all 35 states and Washington, D.C., could be carried out for about $10,000, they estimate.

“Perpetrated at scale, changing voter addresses, deleting voter registrations, or requesting absentee ballots could disenfranchise a significant percentage of voters.” The report continues: “If carefully distributed, such an attack might go unnoticed even if the impact was significant.”

Such attacks would not require particularly sophisticated programming skills, the report says. The authors say one challenge would be to defeat CAPTCHAs, onscreen visual puzzles that seek to block robotic access to information in a database. But they say programs exist that can bypass such obstacles.

“Changing hundreds of voter records could be done manually, without any programming whatsoever. Automation becomes necessary at scale if the goal is to change thousands or millions of voter records,” the report says.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

One voter per minute

“We assume that a computer could impersonate a voter on a state website and make an address change within 1 minute,” the report adds.

The imposters would likely rely on a large bank of computers working simultaneously over a period of weeks or months to carry out a national-scale attack, the report says.

“We were asked by several parties to consider not publishing this study,” the Harvard authors acknowledge in their report. “We decided to do so because whether we publish or not, does not make the possibility of these attacks go away.”

One safeguard against this kind of voter impersonation attack on election systems is that a random selection of victim-voters would almost certainly trigger an immediate outcry by citizens who show up to vote and discover the unauthorized changes. That outcry would disrupt the voting process and undermine confidence in the fairness of the election, experts say. But it would also alert election officials to potential meddling and prompt an investigation into how so many registrations could be changed without the voters’ knowledge.

A more insidious attack might seek to identify people on voter registration lists who are unlikely to complain if their registrations were changed and their votes stolen. The challenge in launching this kind of attack would be in identifying large enough numbers of dormant registrations still listed as valid, analysts say.

Some experts are skeptical that the Russians would take such a risk.

“First, the Russians would have to have a capability that even we don’t have – that is, confidently matching dead people and people who have moved out of state with 100 percent accuracy,” says David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research in Washington.

“If you take someone and ask for their ballot and that person shows up to vote, you are busted. There is an investigation,” he says. “You have to be perfect.”

Others disagree about the difficulty of identifying reliably dormant registrations.

“They are very easy to find,” says Gregg Prentice, founder of the group Election Integrity Florida.

Voter registration data in Florida includes voter history dating back 10 years. A would-be attacker could run a program to identify anyone in the state, or in a particular county, who hadn’t voted and/or updated their information in the past five years, 10 years – or longer, Mr. Prentice says.

Another tactic, he says, would be to conduct a computer analysis counting the number of registrations per residence. In some rental apartments with frequent tenant turnover many tenants move away without canceling their voter registrations.

“Sorting for residential addresses with say more than eight registrations can provide a list to start narrowing for likely abandoned registrations,” Prentice says.

Relying on abandoned voter registrations that are still listed as valid on the voter rolls offers a key advantage to would-be attackers. “They are not going to show up to vote and be turned away and told you already voted, because they are not voting anyway,” Prentice says.

Other analysts suggest a potential lucrative cache of dormant registrants may be found by searching for the addresses of health-care facilities listed by senior citizens on their voter registrations.

“How many people are in a long-term care facility or even a terminal care facility,” asks Professor Sweeney. “In that situation the change of address might well go unnoticed because the purpose of the care facility is not monitoring your mail to say, ‘Oh, there is a change in your voting record.’ Depending on your mental, physical, and medical condition, even if you got the mail yourself it is not clear it would be a priority.”

In Broward, there are five continuing care communities for seniors, 33 hospice care facilities, 53 nursing homes, and 149 assisted living facilities.

Any new activity in dormant registrations (changes of address, absentee ballot requests, absentee ballot votes cast) would re-activate those registrations in the eyes of election officials and further insulate them from any potential list maintenance scrutiny, analysts say.

Perpetual voting

Broward County offers an additional convenient service. Voters can sign up to automatically receive absentee ballots for all future elections. There is no endpoint to this service. The ballots will arrive at the listed address until the elections office is told to stop sending them. More than 215,000 Broward voters are currently participating in this perpetual vote-by-mail program.

In the November 2016 election, the Broward elections office distributed 283,000 absentee ballots. More than 77,000 were never returned. An additional 4,442 were returned as undeliverable.

“If a voter roll is dirty and poorly kept, would that county clerk know they were even being hacked? Probably not,” says Logan Churchwell, a researcher with the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

“If their voter roll is already in a state of shambles, a foreign threat coming in may not trip any alarms,” says Mr. Churchwell, whose group is working with the ACRU in the Miami lawsuit against Broward Supervisor Snipes.

A vigilant election supervisor might notice a pattern of changes to her voter roll. For example, a large number of absentee ballots being sent to certain locations overseas or a large number of address changes followed by absentee ballot requests could raise a red flag. But experts say such an attack spread over many months might blend in with legitimate voter registration activity.

Another potential bottleneck for an attack is how to redirect procured absentee ballots. “You need to have a place where these ballots are going to be sent. If there is one place where a ton of ballots are to be sent that is going to be easily flag-able,” Mr. Becker says.

“If it is a lot of different places, it is going to be harder to flag but you are going to need human beings in each of those places,” he says. “You can’t ask for all of them to be sent care of The Kremlin, Moscow, Russia.”

For these and other reasons Becker says he is skeptical such a plot would be pursued. It would require hundreds or thousands of people on the ground in the US, he says. “That is pretty darn close to an act of war, if not over the line,” he adds.

Nonetheless, logistics and manpower may not be an insuperable issue. In recent decades, a significant number of Russians have purchased condos in seaside communities in southeast Broward and northeast Miami-Dade Counties. One oceanfront city, Sunny Isles Beach, is known among locals as “Little Moscow.” Such communities could offer cover for an election fraud operation directed from Moscow.

Snipes says any effort to hijack absentee ballots would be discovered because county officials compare the signature on each absentee ballot with an electronic signature on file.

“If the signature does not match then we send correspondence out to the owner of that ballot and they have an opportunity to send us the corrected signature,” Snipes says. “We’ve not had any of that occur.”

The importance of signatures might partly explain the attempted hack of VR Systems in 2016. The company provides voter verification services to Broward and other counties – including maintaining a database of voters’ signatures. 

“I don’t think a person hacking into the system could go in and pull up signatures and recreate a signature in our system,” Snipes says. “I don’t believe they could do that.”

Others disagree. “If you have access to that system you have access to people’s signatures because that is how they verify you at the polls,” says Mary Garber of the Florida Fair Elections Coalition, an election watchdog group.

“It is everything that would be needed to phony-up a request.”

Where is Henny Nelson?

There is no evidence that Henny Nelson or Sophie Golub, both registered Democrats, or Lillian Nicoletti, a registered Republican, voted in the 2016 election – or even the 2006 election. But that doesn’t mean their continued presence on the voter rolls might not be useful in a hacker attack.

The Monitor sought to identify the whereabouts of Nelson, Nicoletti, and Golub.

Nelson’s last known residential address was the Margate Health Care Center, a skilled nursing facility. A receptionist checked the register of current patients and verified that Nelson was no longer a resident.

Nelson’s date of birth is recorded as Jan. 14, 1886. That year Apache leader Geronimo surrendered to US troops in a dusty canyon in Arizona and President Grover Cleveland dedicated the newly erected Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Nelson was 101 years old in 1987 when she listed the skilled nursing facility as her residential address.

Attempts to locate Nicoletti were also unsuccessful. County real estate documents show that she moved from her listed address in Davie to nearby Weston, but apparently failed to update her 1988 voter registration. That was in June 1994.

Both cases underscore the challenges facing election supervisors in tracking down and verifying that a voter is no longer eligible to vote. But critics say a simple computer search could easily identify registrants with birth dates in the 1800s. Such a check would at least raise a red flag and justify additional investigation, these analysts say.

In contrast to Nelson and Nicolletti, Golub’s whereabouts were relatively easy to discover and verify. 

Golub also apparently failed to notify election officials when she moved from her two-bedroom, one-bath home in Sunrise, Fla., to Brooklyn, N.Y. According to real estate documents, the white ranch-style home in Florida was sold in May 1996. 

In an interview, the current owners of the house say Golub was in her 90s when they moved in and she moved out. According to records maintained by the Social Security Administration, Golub passed away in Brooklyn later that year in November 1996. She was 97 years old.

Nonetheless, in August 2017, nearly 21 years later, Golub’s voter registration file proclaimed optimistically: “You are currently eligible to vote in Broward County.”

In recent weeks, with a pending lawsuit and facing public criticism, election officials apparently noticed something was amiss. But rather than investigate registrations based on implausible ages, the officials simply added a new notice to the online registrations of Golub, Nicoletti, Nelson, and others.

The notice is highlighted in bright red lettering: “We have been unable to verify that this is your correct address. Please confirm or update your address with our office or use this website’s ‘change of address’ feature before voting in the next election.”

Part 2: How efforts to prevent fraud, and voting rights, collide

Part 3: How 'paper' can protect US elections from foreign invaders

Fifteen minutes before Boston Public Schools’ pop-up welcome center at Sociedad Latina in Mission Hill is set to open for the first time, Maria Berrios is already sitting in line in a black fold-out chair. She is gripping a piece of scrap paper with a “2” written in fat Sharpie, denoting her second place in line.

Ms. Berrios fled to the Boston area with her husband, her 3-year-old daughter, and 15-year old son after hurricane Maria tore through her home in Puerto Rico. The young mother has lived in Boston before, but this is the first time her daughter has left the island. 

“It’s horrible [in Puerto Rico] and that’s why I came here,” says Berrios. “We lost everything.”

She is at Sociedad Latina to sign her children up for school, she says. She doesn’t care which school – and if BPS and the city can help her find housing, they will live anywhere. Because going back is not an option. 

“There is no school. There is no water. For an adult it’s OK because you know how to deal with it, but for a kid…” Berrios trails off, shaking her head. “For a kid, no.”

Boston joins other US cities – from Orlando, Fla. to Hartford, Conn. – in welcoming Puerto Rican students displaced by a hurricane that has resulted in the longest blackout in US history. Six weeks after the storm hit, 70 percent of the island was still without power, and health concerns surrounding the water system remain. Damage estimates range from $45 billion to $95 billion – an entire year's estimated economic output.

Boston's approach is one possible model for how cities can support families affected by disasters warmly and efficiently, by centralizing all of its relief assistance in one place. The city is using its public school system as its main source of outreach to Puerto Ricans, providing families with the government programs and basic resources they need to make children feel a part of the community and succeed in the classroom.

“We have a one-stop shop to make this transition as easy as possible for our families,” says BPS Superintendent Tommy Chang. “We know that we need to create stability for these young people as quickly as possible… Without housing, without some of the basic needs, our young people are not going to be able to focus on [their] transition to school.”

Research after hurricane Katrina has shown the importance of making that transition as smooth as possible: A study done five years after the storm devastated New Orleans showed that 34 percent of affected middle- and high-schoolers were a grade level behind. Students also were 4.5 times as likely to be diagnosed with symptoms consistent with emotional disturbance as their peers, according to the study by the Children’s Health Fund, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and the National Center for Disaster Preparedness.

Before Maria, Boston had a Puerto Rican population of roughly 126,000, one of the largest in the country. Soon after the hurricane hit, city leaders started preparing for the arrival of hundreds – or thousands – of Puerto Ricans. 

In addition to Boston Public Schools’ year-round welcome centers where parents can ask questions or enroll their children in school, “pop-up centers” at three Latino community centers – Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción in the South End, South Boston en Acción, and Sociedad Latina – opened last week.

Among the services provided to families from Puerto Rico and the Caribbean Islands are: enrolling students in school, registering for Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief, and applying for access to Mass Health, housing and food assistance, and to other resources, such as coats and school supplies. 

As of Oct. 31, 68 children from Puerto Rico had enrolled in BPS. The city plans to keep the current pop-up centers open for a month as more direct flights reach Boston from Puerto Rico. District officials say they have no way to know the final number of students who will enroll – it could be between 200 or 2,000.

"It has been amazing to see numerous City departments and organizations step up to help families from Puerto Rico and the Caribbean islands,” says Boston Mayor Marty Walsh in an email. “I applaud the Boston Public Schools (BPS) and Superintendent Tommy Chang for embracing our new families … Bostonians always help one another in a time of need, and this instance is no different.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

After arriving from Puerto Rico in late October, Ana Gueits (l.) and Petra Gueits, (c.), fill out forms to enroll Ana's nephew in school at Sociedad Latina on November 2, 2017 in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.

'We're here for everyone'

Relief efforts for BPS are being led by Sonia Gómez-Banrey, the director of BPS’s Countdown to Kindergarten program and a native Puerto Rican. In September, Ms. Gómez-Banrey volunteered for the job and started preparing to help families she had never met, while simultaneously trying to get her own mother and five nieces and nephews to Boston. Her family arrived at the end of October, and now she spends her time floating between the pop-up centers.

“It was a packed house in here yesterday,” says Gómez-Banrey, while overseeing the efforts at Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción on Oct. 24. The previous day, the staff had helped seven children enroll in BPS. 

An older woman sits in the back of the room with a BPS employee in front of a large desktop computer with a screen that reads “FEMA ASSISTANCE.” Speaking softly in Spanish, the older woman is shuffling around a deck of photos, featuring a flooded living room and a yard scattered with trees and debris. 

“BPS is part of the Boston community,” says Gómez-Banrey, looking back at the older woman. “Anyone can walk through these doors and we’ll help… we’re here for everyone.”

New partnerships 

Before the pop-up centers opened, BPS trained 31 volunteers from the three community centers on the basics of registering families for school and other services. Many of Sociedad Latina’s 14-person staff are Puerto Rican, says associate director Lydia Emmons. During training, several were still waiting to hear from their own families on the island.

“Knowing that we do have these resources available to us through Boston Public Schools, has been really helpful and has given us the capacity to say, ‘Yes, we will figure this out with you,’ ” says Ms. Emmons. “BPS is able to leverage a lot of support that three small community organizations might not be able to do independently.”

In return, BPS can make pop-up centers approachable: by locating them in neighborhoods with large Latino populations and in centers where there are already bilingual staff members who might have worked with the newcomers’ family or friends. As of Oct. 27, Sociedad Latina had helped 35 families and 90 individuals.

“We have the cultural competency to be working with families, and families may feel more comfortable accessing services in our building than navigating the district,” says Emmons.

Other outlets for help

Community centers haven’t been the only ones to lend a hand for Puerto Rican children. Lynn Margherio, founder and director of the Boston nonprofit Cradles to Crayons, also started brainstorming immediately after the hurricane.

“As we thought ‘How can we step in here? What can we meaningfully do?’ we started to put feelers out to anticipate what was going to happen here in Massachusetts,” says Ms. Margherio. “Our mission is to collect the very things that are being lost in the hurricanes.”

In the organization's warehouse in Brighton, Mass. – which is slightly smaller than a football field – hundreds of volunteers sort clothes, toys, and school supplies by age and gender. School districts across Massachusetts, including BPS, Holyoke, Mass., and Lawrence, Mass., reached out to Cradles to Crayons and asked for a donation of 750 backpacks, filled with school supplies, for new Puerto Rican students. Almost immediately, the company Cultural Care Au Pair in Boston called willing to help with that need – and then some – offering 2,500 filled backpacks.

Now Cradles to Crayons is fundraising with the hope of pairing each of those school packs with a “winter pack,” that has a coat, gloves, and hat, to support students not used to temperatures in January below 70 degrees F. 

Margherio says the community needs to think in terms of, “ ‘Well what is it that my son or daughter would need?’ That mental checklist that every parent goes through.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

Displaced Puerto Rican families look through donated clothes at Sociedad Latina on November 2, 2017 in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.

Among the remaining issues: housing

BPS had openings for about 200 students as of late October, but Superintendent Chang told reporters last week that, “if we need more seats, we will create more seats.” When it comes to housing, however, the city doesn't have as much availability.

“The one piece that none of us have been able to put our finger on, is where people are going to live,” says Emmons, from Sociedad Latina. “It’s the No. 1 question we've received and the question we have zero answers for.” She says there is already a five-year waiting list for Boston public housing, and shelters are full.

But city leaders continue to exude a calm confidence. Boston has already been creative in its initial response plan, Emmons adds, so the city just needs to think creatively about long-term housing as well.

“We’ve seen in Boston, time and again, that when there is an emergency, or when there is a real significant need, that this Boston community responds,” says Margherio. “We are ‘Boston Strong,’ after all.”  

Editor's note: Due to incorrect information provided to the Monitor, this article has been updated to reflect that the organization that provided 2,500 filled backpacks to Cradles to Crayons is Cultural Care Au Pair.

Susie Armitage

Mitsue Murakami (left) stands with Tomoko Shinkai, a city employee who helps single parents settle in Hamada, Japan as part of an initiative to counter depopulation. Ms. Murakami moved to Hamada last year with her twin boys.

Mitsue Murakami was newly divorced and living in Yokohama, Japan’s second-largest city, when she typed a few words into a search engine on her phone: “single mother,” “work,” “countryside,” and “cheap rent.”

Her ex-husband had gambled away their money. Ms. Murakami worked part-time in a hospital. The hours were convenient and the pay was pretty good, but it wasn’t enough to support their 10-year-old twin boys.

Her search brought up around 10 government programs to subsidize a move and help her find a permanent job. The most compelling benefits were in Hamada, a city of 55,000 on Japan’s southwest coast: training as an assistant at a local senior care facility; half her rent and a child support subsidy for her first year there; and a roughly $9,000 bonus after completing her course.

With Japan projected to lose 30 percent of its population by 2065, some fast-shrinking areas are pulling out all the stops to woo single-parent families like Murakami’s. Single mothers, in particular, face an uphill battle in Japan, where most fathers do not pay formal child support, and full-time, full-benefits employment for women lags behind men’s. For many mothers – and their new communities – the relocation programs are a lifeline, though critics say they’re more of a patch than a long-term solution.

Before long, Murakami crammed everything she could into a rental car and drove her sons more than 500 miles across Japan to start their new life. Now they wake up surrounded by mountains and brilliant green rice paddies. Murakami commutes to work in a used car provided by the city. At night they can see the stars.

“I like the model family with a father as well as a mother, but when things like this happen and you end up as a single parent, you just do what you have to do for your children,” Murakami said in a recent interview at Hamada’s city hall.

Women's work?

Murakami’s sons have settled in well at school, though they stay home alone sometimes while she works. Neighbors helped her plant vegetables, and seniors at a nearby shrine teach the twins kagura, a traditional dance. She says the boys are happy and she’s grateful for the city’s help. But Japan still has a lot to do to improve life for single-parent families, women’s and children’s advocates say, and address child poverty overall.

Eighty-five percent of Japanese single mothers work, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), yet 51 percent still live in poverty. In part, that highlights systemic issues that plague women in Japan’s labor market. While Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has put increased female participation in the labor force at the center of his “Womenomics” policy, Japanese work culture is still built around traditional expectations of a breadwinner father and a stay-at-home wife. Long hours are commonplace and it’s a big no-no to leave before the boss does.

“That basically ends up reinforcing a gender division where you can only make a career if you have somebody else who does all the care work and the housework for you,” said Aya Ezawa, a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands who has studied Japanese single mothers.

“People look at the single mothers as if they are the problem,” she adds. “The problem is with the work culture that doesn't make it possible to combine work with family.”

Married mothers often quit their jobs after giving birth and go back to work when their children are in school, leaving a resume gap that further limits their career prospects. A majority only find part-time or temporary jobs, and though dual-income families are on the rise, tax policy encourages married couples to limit one partner’s earnings. With out-of-wedlock births rare in Japan, most single moms are divorced, making it likely that they’ve gone years without full-time, regular employment.

Women who work full-time make only 74 percent of the men’s median wage. But it’s not just earnings that make single parenthood difficult. Single motherhood and divorce can still carry significant stigma. In part, Murakami moved to Hamada because she wanted a fresh start. She doesn’t mind that people there know she’s a single mom, but she didn’t tell people in Yokohama that her marriage ended, or even where she was going.

Survival strategy

When single parents call to learn more about Hamada, Tomoko Shinkai is at the other end of the line, at her desk in the city’s Residency and Marriage Promotion section. (“But I’m single,” she laughs.) Ms. Shinkai has a wide smile and brims with energy. She organizes welcome events for the new arrivals and helps them adjust.

Natives can feel their hometown shrinking. When Shinkai was in elementary school in the late 1970s, she remembers close to 40 children in each room. Today, Murakami’s sons’ class is around half of that. Shimane prefecture, where Hamada is located, is aging especially rapidly, with one of Japan’s highest concentrations of centenarians. One of Hamada’s closed schools was recently repurposed as a nursing home. Another facility has a waiting list of more than 200 seniors.

Nationwide, Japan is facing a demographic crisis: more than a quarter of the population is over age 65, fertility levels are below replacement rates, and the country tightly restricts immigration. For the national government, opening up women’s employment opportunities isn’t only an issue of equality: it’s a matter of economic survival.

For many smaller cities and rural areas, it’s an even more pressing existential challenge – but these communities hope that relocation can help make up for the lack of babies. Many court not only single parents, but any Japanese citizen willing to move.

Since Hamada’s program started in 2015, 12 single mothers have settled here. Eight have stayed. For some, it’s been a lifeline. One mother moved to escape a stalker. Another, reeling from her husband’s affair in a town of 4,000, had thought about suicide. Six months after arriving in Hamada, she said the program had transformed her life.

'I don't need pity'

However, advocates point out that such programs fail to address the underlying challenges that made moving across the country these women’s best option. Rather than enticing single parents to relocate, critics say, the government should focus on making it easier to support a family anywhere. The recruited moms aren’t the only single parents in Hamada, of course. One nursing home director says the city program caused friction between employees who received the settlement benefits and those who did not. The city has since reduced fees for babysitting and after-school care for all single parents based on their income, but acknowledges there is more work to do.

In a recent op-ed in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, Chieko Akaishi, the director of the nonprofit Single Mothers’ Forum, wrote that while the Hamada program has brought increased attention to single mothers, it wasn’t designed with their needs in mind. Many have survived domestic violence or experience social isolation and need more comprehensive services. Ms. Akaishi also criticized hopes that the women should marry local men and give birth to more children. (Shinkai said this was “desirable” but that the city did not prioritize women who wanted to remarry or pressure them to do so, and that single fathers were also welcome.)

Dr. Ezawa takes issue with the focus on channeling single mothers into elder-care work, which is physically demanding, may require overnight hours, and is often not well paid. “If there’s a labor shortage anyway, why not open it up to other occupations and then improve the work-life balance for everyone at these places?” she says. Hamada is considering recruiting nurses as well.

One mother, whose name is withheld because she moved to escape a stalker, sometimes has to work the nursing home’s night shift while her 9-year-old son stays home alone. “Your mom is a single mom so you don’t get any birthday presents,” girls in his class have taunted him. “Your mom is poor.” The home is adjusting her hours to try and give them more time together.

“I don’t need pity,” she says. “I’m determined to hang in there, and while I really appreciate everyone’s support and I do ask for help, I feel like I’m doing the same thing all other mothers or fathers do. So I don’t want people to make assumptions about a child because they have a single parent.”

Han Zhao/The Christian Science Monitor

Shoppers line up outside of the Fresh Truck, a retrofitted school bus mobile market that brings fresh produce to city neighborhoods, in Boston's South End on Sept. 29, 2017.

Kemarah Sika and her young daughter line up in front of a brightly painted food truck outside of YMCA in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. But it’s not a quick bite they are here to get. They are filling their shopping bags with ears of corns and bunches of kale to cook at home.  

“I shop here because it’s convenient,” says Ms. Sika as she waits for her turn at The Trustees Mobile Farmers Market. “I take my daughter to her karate lesson [at the YMCA] every Saturday. It’s easy to get locally grown fresh produce at an affordable price.”

Before the mobile market started rolling through her neighborhood in April, Sika says that she bought fresh produce maybe every other week because “it’s pricey and not as convenient.” Now she includes fresh vegetables weekly in her family's meals.

“I look forward to it every Saturday,” Sika says with a smile.

Han Zhao/The Christian Science Monitor

Customers select fruit inside the Fresh Truck mobile market on Sept. 29, 2017 in the South End neighborhood of Boston.

Providing more fresh produce to urban neighborhoods where grocery stores can be few and far between has long been a focus for those working to balance food offerings among fast food restaurants and corner convenience stores. The proliferation of farmers' markets has helped, with more than 8,000 operating nationwide in the United States. But farmers' markets tend to be located in wealthy neighborhoods and are often out of reach, both physically and economically, for many low-income residents.

A growing number of cities in the US, however, have been trying another tack: food trucks that bring fruits and vegetables directly to low-income communities and that double residents' Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) dollars.

“[I]f someone wants to go the grocery store, they have to change two different buses, go to the grocery store, get back on the buses with all of their groceries to a bus stop then walk home,” says Hannah Heacox, who has been driving a fresh food truck in Spartanburg, S.C., since July. Her truck is sponsored by Hub City Farmers’ Market, an organization working to increase access to local food. “I’m taking the mobile market to places where it would be very hard otherwise for people to get the food that they need.”

How it works

Mobile market vendors hope their efforts will help redirect eating habits away from fast food.

“The more we can reduce the barriers of [accessing] fruits and vegetable, we know there’s a demand that people want healthy food,” says Eliza Dexter Cohen, the food access coordinator for Food on the Move in Providence, R.I. “This type of program really enables people to eat fruits and vegetables when they wouldn’t otherwise be able to.”

Ms. Cohen and her team drive to 21 sites across Rhode Island weekly, including public and elderly housing sites.

“We know from the NIH [National Institute of Health] studies, this intervention has a particularly high impact on families with young children and older adults,” says Amy Nunn, executive director of Rhode Island Public Health Institute. “Because of that data, we are doubling down on our effort to make sure that those populations are served in our outreach. So we’ve added more senior sites and sites with more working families.”

Food on the Move serves about 6,000 people across Rhode Island. In 2016, the initiative made $120,000 in sales, with a majority of its customers shopping more than once. The numbers for 2017 are expected to increase, says Cohen.

All revenue goes back to fund the mobile market operations, but that’s not enough. Food on the Move also receives grants from United States Department of Agriculture to support their SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) doubling program.

A fertile model?

On average, SNAP participants receive $130 per month per person.

“[O]ne of the biggest public health problems facing the nation with hunger and food and security is that a lot of people’s SNAP benefit ran out at their first grocery run on the 3rd or the 5th of the month,” says Dr. Nunn. “If you are a SNAP recipient, your $1 is worth $2 at [Food on the Move].”

Every time SNAP shoppers purchase produce with their EBT card, they get a SNAP gift card for the same amount.

Nunn hopes one day the USDA could integrate this method into federal policy – and possibly into more traditional grocery stores.

“What if Wal-Mart started doing this? What if Kroger's and Whole Foods started doing this, you could really have an impact,” she says.  

Han Zhao/The Christian Science Monitor

A customer pays for a bag of corn at the Fresh Truck mobile market on Sept. 29, 2017 in the South End neighborhood of Boston.

In Massachusetts, the Department of Transitional Assistance launched a new program in April that creates a direct farmer-to-SNAP-customer transaction model. 

The Healthy Incentives Program, or HIP, matches an equal amount of SNAP dollars back to the participant's EBT cards, with receipts showing the additional SNAP dollars earned. Based on the household size, SNAP recipients can monthly earn up to $40 for one to two people, $60 for three to five people, and $80 for families of six or more.  

Since April, there has been more than $2 million in HIP sales at farmers markets, farm stands, mobile markets, and community supported agriculture (CSA) farm-share programs across Massachusetts, four times the amount of SNAP redemption sales in 2016. There are currently 295 locations for HIP participants to buy fresh produce across the state. However, with the multiple stops made by food trucks, those access points increase to 427 locations.

Hope on wheels

In Boston's South End, a bright green school bus painted with corn, carrots, and the words Fresh Truck is perfecting its parallel parking on a busy street. “Five more minutes!” the bus driver shouts out from the bus to the line of people waiting with baskets and carts.

When the door opens, Chrissy, a first-time customer walks in. (As a domestic violence survivor, she declines to give her last name.) She eyes the veggies on the right, fruits on the left, and picks up two ears of corn.

“This gives me hope,” she says as she heads for home.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this article misidentified the sales total for Food on the Move in 2016. The correct number is $120,000.

AP Photo

From left, Facebook's General Counsel Colin Stretch, Twitter's Acting General Counsel Sean Edgett, and Google's Senior Vice President and General Counsel Kent Walker, are sworn in Nov. 1 for a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian election activity.

After a grilling by Congress for allowing Russia to meddle in the 2016 elections, the nation’s biggest social media providers are starting to make changes to their platforms. Twitter, for example, will ban official Russian news outlets while Facebook plans to do better fact-checking on its news feed and will reveal the sources of political ads.

In essence, the social media giants are taking more responsibility to help others discern the truth and to uphold civility. Their past passivity toward the dissemination of “fake news” and attack ads had only undermined the very democracy that preserves the freedoms of an open society, including the internet.

During the presidential campaign, Google says it allowed 1,108 Russian-linked videos to run on its YouTube site. Facebook admitted that 126 million users may have seen Russian disinformation on its site. The magnitude of these numbers shows how much social media, like books, TV, and radio, can accelerate the flow of information, whether it be true or false.

These private companies should not be alone in taking corrective steps against those whose sole aim is to pit Americans against each other and to raise fears, as Russian internet trolls tried to do. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center finds Americans are more divided than at any time since 1994 in their political values and their views toward those of the opposing party. On a range of issues, the partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats has doubled, as has each side’s negative views of the other.

Bridging this divide will require citizens to do what Twitter, Google, and Facebook are now attempting to do: realize their ability to perceive the truth and practice the virtues of civil discourse. While debate is necessary in a democratic society, and different sides will cite different facts in an argument, there remains a shared desire for wisdom to rise to the surface. That should not be lost.

Just as the big information providers are being held accountable for what passes across their platforms, individuals can also take responsibility for what enters their thoughts or guides their actions. Simply blaming others for their being duped is to deny the role of individual conscience. Without discerning thinkers, a democracy cannot hold.