Class 25. Election Interference 201
Our foreign election interference report card as we head into 2024. It's a mixed bag.
It’s fitting that I am closing out the third module of the course, Disinformation and Election Interference, on the eve of another election year. Over the last few months, we have taken a deep dive into the theory of election interference, conducted a detailed post-mortem of Russia’s 2016 disinformation and influence operations, and seen how racism continues to be the most easily exploitable fissure in American society. So what have we learned, and where do things stand now?
In this lesson I’ll conduct a general assessment of how the U.S. has responded over the last seven years to foreign election interference, and whether we are prepared for 2024. Bottom line up front: While we have come a long way, particularly in some of our institutional efforts, to combat election disinformation, we still have a ways to go to fully address the problem. But, don’t get discouraged! After the New Year, I will be turning our attention to what, exactly, makes America so vulnerable to disinformation, and what we can do to generate more societal, psychological, and digital resilience as we head towards November 2024.
So let’s turn to the report card:
The Good News
Perhaps the best place to look to see how far we have come when it comes to foreign election interference in presidential elections is the Intelligence Community Assessment of Foreign Threats to the 2020 U.S. Federal Elections. One key takeaway in the assessment is the IC’s distinction between election influence — the attempt of foreign actors to affect candidates or voter preferences (changing hearts and minds) — and election interference, or the attempt to target the technical aspects of election infrastructure and vote tabulation (changing votes). On the latter front, the assessment unequivocally states that the IC did not see any efforts by foreign actors, including Russia, to tamper with election infrastructure in 2020, as it did in 2016.
On the influence front, the IC appeared to be monitoring the “misleading and unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden” involving alleged corruption between him, his family, and officials in Ukraine. (Sound familiar?) What I think is notable is not only that the IC was proactively tracking this narrative, but that it was doing so under a Trump administration! Indeed, the classified version of the IC’s assessment was provided to President Biden and congressional intelligence committees on January 7, 2021 — which means that despite the tumult of the Trump years and some of the crazy officials he put in charge at, e.g., DNI, DHS, and elsewhere, our intelligence agencies were keeping their heads down and doing their jobs through the 2020 election. I don’t know about you, but I find that incredibly heartening, and it gives me hope that as the government ship has been further righted over the past four years, we are in even better shape going into next year. A few specific aspects to note on our progress:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Freedom Academy with Asha Rangappa to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.