Preparing for the Real Risks of Election Interference

In February, allies of President Trump began circulating a 17-page draft executive order declaring a national emergency and granting the president unprecedented powers over voting — including the power to ban mail ballots, require IDs to vote and other changes.

The basis for the order was a claim that China interfered in the 2020 election — an assertion that U.S. intelligence has said is not credible. The president later told reporters he was not considering the executive order, which would have almost certainly become mired in court challenges.

President Trump has never conceded defeat in the 2020 election, but investigations have never turned up evidence of widespread fraud or of foreign interference in the technical aspects of the voting process. Still, foreign interference in U.S. elections is a real threat. U.S. intelligence has repeatedly reported that countries like Russia and Iran have attempted to influence U.S. election outcomes. A 2021 intelligence report found that China considered interfering in the 2020 election, but did not follow through.

These interference efforts were largely focused on sowing discord within the American populace and swaying public opinion via posts on social media. In 2016, Russian actors “altered the content of the electoral dialogue” in ways that contributed to Donald Trump’s victory, writes Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, in an authoritative study of 2016 Russian interference.

A new term for this kind of interference, “cognitive warfare,” was first used in military circles about a decade ago. It refers to weaponization of communication to foster social division and distrust. This kind of psychological warfare is nothing new, but technology can spread propaganda and misinformation in ways that outpace efforts to counter it.

Local officials, however, can take steps to counter this problem in their own communities.

Counts Are Not the Problem

Multiple reports from the intelligence community confirm there’s no evidence that foreign actors have changed vote counts, says Lawrence Norden, the Brennan Center for Justice’s vice president for elections and government.

The challenges of falsifying a national outcome are considerable. More than 10,000 local offices administer elections at more than 100,000 polling places. Voting machines are generally not connected to the Internet.

“The reason our system is so effective at preventing interference is because it’s so decentralized,” Jamieson says. “A single player can’t influence multiple places without having extraordinary access, and that access is unlikely because there are strong protections in place at the state and local level.” These protections increased after the 2016 election, she says.

There is also almost always a paper trail for verifying results. There was a paper backup for 98 percent of the more than 150 million votes cast in the 2024 presidential election.

Election skeptics’ calls for paper ballots were answered long ago by election officials. They already use them to conduct post-election “risk-limiting audits” to make sure that machine counts match paper records.

When the president challenged 2020 results in Arizona and Georgia, there was an unprecedented number of audits and recounts. “None of them showed a different result than what we got,” Norden says.

Foreign actors can cause serious damage in other ways, however.

Democracy and Trust

A briefing from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence just before the 2024 election observed that Russia, Iran and China are all “trying by some measure to exacerbate divisions in U.S. society for their own benefit.” Election periods are windows of vulnerability, the briefing warned.

The underlying goal is to undermine confidence in our electoral system, Norden says, and to take away soft power the U.S. has gained by exporting democracy. “That makes the country weaker,” he says. “It makes democracy weaker.”

At times, foreign actors may have preferences for one candidate over another, but they are just as likely to use disinformation to stir up controversy around candidates on both sides.

Russia has manipulated videos to provide “evidence” that election workers committed fraud, Norden says, or that non-citizens were voting. “It’s very often attacks on the process itself or attempting to inflame people on charged issues like race.”

A foreign actor might not be able to manipulate ballots, Jamieson says, but they could shut down part of an electric grid or public transportation and make it harder for people to get to the polls. In 2024, a “foreign state actor” called in bomb threats against polling locations in Georgia.

The “self-replication” capabilities of AI have increased significantly in recent years. It’s easier than ever for humans in foreign bot farms to have virtually unlimited digital assistants to help make disinformation go viral. Video and audio fakes are harder to distinguish from reality, even by tools created for this purpose.



A video from the California Secretary of State is an example of the increasing use of social media to help voters understand local election processes.

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Not Broken

Still, none of this means that elections are broken or can’t be trusted, Jamieson says. Election officials have repeatedly demonstrated a commitment to free and fair outcomes regardless of their personal opinions or political parties, she says.

Preserving election integrity has new dimensions, and election officials have worked hard to understand the new climate of threat and to be prepared for the unexpected. More than 200 bomb threats were made against election offices and polling centers in 2024. Ballot boxes were bombed and hoax calls were made regarding shooters at school-based polling places. As a report from the Brennan Center observes, these didn’t disrupt operations or ripple through the news cycle because election officials were prepared.

To foster trust and counter attempts to make elections seem weak or untrustworthy, it’s important for the public to know all the things elections offices do to ensure fair outcomes, Jamieson says.

Public education about election processes begins in schools. Civics courses need to do a better job making sure that students understand election infrastructure and how it protects the integrity of outcomes, Jaimieson says. Tours of election offices and processing centers are a long-established best practice for easing the concerns of skeptics.

Election offices have used YouTube to give voters a look inside election operations, to help them understand local processes. The National Association of Election Officials offers communications training. The Elections Group offers templates for all aspects of an election communications plan, from press releases to social media posts and press advisories. Online communications training is available from the Election Assistance Commission.

Local officials and experts have also coordinated to strengthen election cybersecurity practices, particularly in the wake of President Trump’s dismantling of some federal cybersecurity organizations.

In January, The Election Resource Center launched the Election Security Exchange, a project where security experts, chief technology officers, cybersecurity specialists and election professionals curate what they consider to be the best available webinars, guides, training materials, reports and templates produced by federal agencies, election associations, nonprofit organizations and state election offices.

New materials and training will be developed as needed; recent briefs on risks arising from the war in Iran, and lessons from the country’s attack on the medical technology company Stryker, are examples. The great majority of election offices serve populations of 25,000 or less, and most have 10 or fewer full-time employees. For them, these resources are an “equalizer” on the plus side of the ledger.

Risk is real, but Jamieson sees it in context. “I think sometimes we get into a frame in which we think everything is broken, and as a result, the world is going to go to hell,” she says. “Among the things that are not broken are state and local election structures, and the people who are responsible for protecting election integrity.”