Foreign electoral intervention
Based on Wikipedia: Foreign electoral intervention
Between 1946 and the year 2000, one out of every nine competitive national elections around the world saw a foreign power actively trying to tip the scales. That's not speculation or conspiracy theory—it's the finding of political scientist Dov Levin, who meticulously catalogued 117 interventions across 938 elections during those fifty-four years.
And here's the kicker: the average intervention shifted vote share by about three percent.
Three percent might not sound like much until you realize that seven of the fourteen American presidential elections since 1960 were decided by margins smaller than that. A well-placed thumb on the scale could have changed the course of history in half of modern American presidential contests.
What Exactly Is Foreign Electoral Intervention?
Let's be precise about what we're talking about. Foreign electoral intervention—sometimes abbreviated as FEI in academic literature—happens when one government deliberately tries to influence how citizens of another country vote. This is fundamentally different from staging a coup or imposing economic sanctions. Those are blunt instruments that bypass elections entirely. Electoral intervention is subtler: it works through the democratic process itself, trying to shape outcomes from within.
The methods vary enormously. Some are relatively genteel: a foreign leader making a public endorsement, or a government offering favorable trade terms right before an election. Others cross clear legal lines: funneling illegal campaign contributions, launching cyberattacks against political parties, or manipulating voter registration databases.
This distinction matters enough that the United States National Intelligence Council formally separates "interference" from "influence." Interference means breaking the target country's laws—hacking into vote-counting systems, for instance, or secretly funding candidates. Influence operates through legal channels, even if the intent is manipulative. A foreign president publicly praising one candidate over another isn't illegal, but it's certainly designed to move votes.
The Numbers Tell a Story
Of those 117 interventions that Levin documented, the United States was responsible for 81 of them. The Soviet Union and its successor state Russia accounted for 36. Put another way, the two Cold War superpowers were behind every single documented case of foreign electoral meddling during this period.
Most of this happened in the shadows. About 68 percent of these interventions were covert rather than overt—secret operations designed to influence elections without the public knowing that a foreign hand was involved. This makes intuitive sense. The whole point is usually to make an election outcome look legitimate and organic, not to be seen as imposing your will on another nation's voters.
These Cold War patterns have continued into the present, though the players and methods have evolved. A 2019 study from Sweden's Varieties of Democracy Institute examined electoral interference in 2018 and found the most intense interventions were happening in Taiwan (by China) and Latvia (by Russia). The primary weapon in both cases was the systematic spread of false information about key political issues.
The Domestic Accomplice
Here's something that often gets overlooked in discussions of foreign meddling: it almost never works without domestic help.
A foreign power can have all the resources and cunning in the world, but actually influencing an election typically requires someone on the inside—a political party willing to accept illicit funding, a candidate who welcomes foreign endorsements, a media figure who amplifies foreign-generated propaganda, or an influential public figure who lends credibility to foreign narratives.
This uncomfortable truth complicates the moral picture considerably. Electoral intervention isn't simply something that happens to a country; it's something that requires active collaboration from within. The targeted nation's own citizens, often motivated by partisan advantage, become willing participants in undermining their own democratic sovereignty.
The Polarization Machine
Researchers Daniel Corstange and Nikolay Marinov proposed in 2012 that foreign electoral intervention comes in two distinct flavors. The first is partisan intervention, where the foreign power openly backs one side. The second is process intervention, where the goal is to support democratic rules and institutions regardless of who wins.
Their research, based on responses from over 1,700 participants, revealed something fascinating about partisan interventions: they don't just help one side. They polarize the entire electorate.
When a foreign power endorses one candidate, that candidate's supporters become significantly more favorable toward the intervening country—they want better relations, more cooperation, closer ties. Meanwhile, supporters of the opposing candidate develop exactly the opposite views. The foreign intervention doesn't just influence the election; it creates lasting divisions in how the population views international relationships.
This polarizing effect suggests that electoral intervention might be as much about dividing societies as about picking winners. A fractured electorate is easier to manipulate in future elections, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of foreign influence.
Why Countries Meddle
Political scientist Jonathan Godinez, building on this earlier work, proposed in 2018 that we can categorize interventions by their underlying motivation. Some interventions are globally motivated—the intervening country genuinely believes it's acting for the benefit of the international community. Think of Western powers pushing for democratic candidates in countries with authoritarian tendencies, ostensibly to promote human rights and stability.
Other interventions are nakedly self-interested. The intervening country simply wants a government in power that will give it favorable trade deals, military basing rights, or support in international forums.
Godinez suggested you can usually figure out which motivation is at play by examining three things: the specific tactics used, the stated justification for the intervention, and how much effort and resources are being devoted to it. Self-interested interventions tend to be more covert and less publicly justified, while globally-motivated ones are more likely to be conducted in the open with explicit appeals to universal values.
Who Can Get Away With It?
Not all interveners are created equal. Researchers Stephen Shulman and Pazit Bloom identified in 2012 that the source of the intervention dramatically affects how it's received. Nation-states provoke the most resentment when they meddle. International organizations like the United Nations or European Union generate somewhat less backlash. Non-governmental organizations and private individuals can often intervene with minimal public outcry.
This hierarchy makes intuitive sense. There's something particularly galling about one nation directly trying to control another's elections—it feels like a violation of sovereignty, a return to colonialism. When an international organization does the same thing, it can more easily frame its actions as upholding universal standards rather than pursuing national interests. And when private actors intervene, even if they're secretly backed by foreign governments, there's more plausible deniability.
Cultural and national similarity also plays a role. Countries that share language, history, or cultural values with the intervening power are more likely to welcome—or at least tolerate—electoral interference. In some cases, what might be resented as meddling from an alien power is accepted as helpful guidance from a kindred nation.
The New Landscape
The twenty-first century has introduced entirely new tools for electoral manipulation. Russia's Internet Research Agency, funded by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, was implicated in interference campaigns across Europe and North America. Fancy Bear, a hacking group linked to Russian military intelligence, broke into political party databases and selectively released damaging information.
But it's not just Russia. Cambridge Analytica, a British firm that collapsed in scandal in 2018, claimed to have worked on more than 200 elections worldwide, including in Nigeria, the Czech Republic, and Argentina. The company used data harvested from social media to build psychological profiles of voters and target them with customized political messaging.
Artificial intelligence promises to accelerate these trends dramatically. Deepfakes—synthetic video that can make anyone appear to say anything—could be deployed in the final days before an election, when there's no time to debunk them. Automated systems can generate and spread disinformation at scales that would have been impossible even a decade ago.
The Democratic Paradox
Here's the troubling irony at the heart of this issue: the more democratic a country is, the more vulnerable it may be to electoral interference.
Authoritarian regimes don't have this problem. When elections are rigged from the inside, foreign meddling is redundant. It's precisely because genuine democracies have elections that actually matter—where public opinion translates into political power—that they become attractive targets for manipulation.
Free speech protections that prevent governments from censoring foreign propaganda, open media environments that allow disinformation to spread, and competitive elections where small margins can be decisive all create opportunities for interference. The features that make democracy vibrant also make it vulnerable.
This doesn't mean democracy is fatally flawed. But it does mean that maintaining genuine self-governance in an interconnected world requires constant vigilance—not just against foreign adversaries, but against domestic actors willing to sacrifice democratic integrity for partisan advantage.
The Historical Long View
Electoral interference is nothing new. The Murchison letter of 1888 provides a telling early example. Lionel Sackville-West, the British ambassador to the United States, was tricked into writing a letter appearing to endorse Grover Cleveland's reelection. When the letter was published, it backfired spectacularly—American voters didn't appreciate British meddling, and Benjamin Harrison won the election.
What's changed isn't the existence of foreign interference but its scale, sophistication, and deniability. In the nineteenth century, a single letter could expose an intervention and turn public opinion against it. Today, thousands of fake social media accounts can spread customized disinformation to millions of people, and tracing it back to a foreign government may take years of investigation—long after the election is over and the damage is done.
Research in this field was characterized as weak as recently as 2011, but the past decade has seen an explosion of serious academic study. We now understand much more about how electoral interference works, what its effects are, and who's doing it. Whether that knowledge translates into effective defenses remains to be seen.
The fundamental challenge is that defending democracy from external manipulation ultimately depends on the democratic citizens themselves—their ability to recognize manipulation, their willingness to reject it even when it favors their preferred candidates, and their commitment to maintaining the integrity of the process even at the cost of losing particular elections. No amount of cybersecurity or counter-intelligence can substitute for a citizenry that genuinely values democratic legitimacy over partisan victory.