The word “interference” gets used loosely in American politics, and federal agencies say it should not be. Since 2020 they have treated foreign influence and foreign interference as separate things, with different warning signs and different legal consequences.
Influence covers the broad range of efforts by foreign governments or their agents to sway voters and candidates. Interference means degrading or disrupting the ability of election administrators and workers to run a free and fair vote. The Fulcrum, an election-focused news site, argues that President Trump and his supporters blur the two when they raise the specter of foreign meddling.
What the record shows
Experts agree there is no evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 presidential race, though Russia and Iran carried out influence efforts and China did so to a lesser degree. A 2021 intelligence-community assessment found no indication that any foreign actor tried to interfere with registration, ballot casting, tabulation or results.
The only confirmed case of interference came in 2016. Russian intelligence agencies hacked into election board infrastructure, including registration databases, and the Department of Homeland Security assessed that they did not reach vote tabulation systems. Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, also stole large volumes of data from the Democratic National Committee. The Obama administration expelled Russian intelligence officials, and Trump’s Justice Department indicted 12 GRU members.
The intelligence community’s last report on the 2024 elections said foreign actors still meant to use influence to undermine American democracy but that it had found no acts of interference. Jen Easterly, then director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, found “no evidence of any malicious activity that had any material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”
Influence operations that did lead to charges
In 2024 the Justice Department indicted two Russian nationals, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, for laundering money through shell companies to fund a U.S. company that produced content aligned with Russian government interests. News reports named it as Tenet Media. It paid a number of American media influencers and did not disclose its link to RT, the sanctioned Russian state-controlled outlet. The Treasury Department sanctioned both.
That year Iranian cyber actors also sent stolen, nonpublic material from Trump’s reelection campaign to U.S. media organizations and to people tied to the Biden campaign. The Justice Department indicted those responsible and Treasury sanctioned them.
No Chinese actors have been formally charged for election influence. The intelligence community assessed in 2024 that China tried to sway congressional races with no party preference, possibly to protect its interests concerning Taiwan.
The political fight
The distinction is at the center of a dispute over the 2020 vote. In a televised address, Trump described elections as “so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it,” according to a Guardian column by Jamil Smith. Smith wrote that some documents released with the speech contradicted it. One newly released document judged tabulation systems difficult to manipulate at election-changing scale. The files also detailed a Russian influence campaign meant to defeat Joe Biden.
The Atlantic reported that after millions of documents were reviewed, a White House official said no evidence showed a foreign power changed votes. The conservative media figure John Solomon, who helped search government files, conceded the same for 2020, 2022 and 2024, the column said.
The Fulcrum says the Constitution gives only the states and Congress the power to set election rules, and that foreign influence does not justify federal takeover of election administration. It also criticizes the administration for dismantling offices that tracked foreign influence and for ending CISA funding for the Election Infrastructure Information Analysis Center, known as EI-ISAC.
Sources
- Trump is invoking foreign election interference to justify his own | Jamil Smith
- Foreign Influence vs. Interference: What Really Threatens U.S. Elections?
