Trump's former intelligence chief warns 'our democracy's enemies' want Americans to believe the 2020 election is rigged

• Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats is calling on Congress to create an election oversight commission.
• Coats in a New York Times op-ed warned that undermining the legitimacy of the election is precisely what "our democracy's enemies, foreign and domestic, want."
• He served as President Donald Trump's intelligence chief from 2017 to 2019.
• Coats' warning comes as Trump continues to push the unfounded notion that mail-in voting leads to widespread voter fraud.

Dan Coats, who served as the director of national intelligence from 2017 to 2019, on Thursday issued a stark warning about the dangers of American leaders undermining the legitimacy of US elections.

"The most urgent task American leaders face is to ensure that the election's results are accepted as legitimate," Coats said in a New York Times op-ed. "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 that "our democracy's enemies, foreign and domestic, want us to concede in advance that our voting systems are faulty or fraudulent."

"If we fail to take every conceivable effort to ensure the integrity of our election, the winners will not be Donald Trump or Joe Biden, Republicans or Democrats," Coats wrote. "The only winners will be Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Ali Khamenei. No one who supports a healthy democracy could want that."

Coats reportedly resigned last year after the White House repeatedly suppressed his warnings about Russian election interference.

The former intelligence chief, who resigned from the Trump administration in July 2019, called on Congress to create a commission with the purpose of overseeing the election.

"Our key goal should be reassurance," Coats wrote. "I propose that Congress creates a new mechanism to help accomplish this purpose. It should create a supremely high-level bipartisan and nonpartisan commission to oversee the election."

The commission would not bypass existing electoral reporting systems or those that "tabulate, evaluate or certify the results," Coats said, adding that it would "monitor those mechanisms and confirm for the public that the laws and regulations governing them have been scrupulously and expeditiously followed — or that violations have been exposed and dealt with — without political prejudice and without regard to political interests of either party."

"Also, this commission would be responsible for monitoring those forces that seek to harm our electoral system through interference, fraud, disinformation or other distortions," Coats added. He said the commission should be comprised of national leaders committed to putting partisanship aside in order to place "the integrity and fairness of the election process above everything else." Coats said the overall goal of such a commission would be public reassurance.

For months, President Donald Trump has sought to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 election with bogus claims about mail-in voting leading to widespread fraud. Voter fraud is extraordinarily rare in the US, and there's no evidence to support Trump's assertion that if he loses in November it means the election was "rigged." Trump is trailing former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, in the national polls.

There's been a push among Democrats in Congress to expand mail-in voting over concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump, who voted by mail in a GOP primary earlier this year and will vote absentee (which is virtually the same thing as mail-in voting) in November, has responded with a barrage of disinformation on voting.

In this context, Coats' suggestion that Congress create an election oversight commission is quite remarkable, and could be viewed as an indirect rebuke of the president's conspiratorial rhetoric on the election.