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Back in October, an Associated Press-NORC survey found [ [link removed] ] that sizable majorities of Americans were at least somewhat worried about the possibilities of foreign interference in U.S. elections—whether that be via vote tampering, influencing candidates or voters or stealing information from candidates or parties. But for all the hot air expended on concerns regarding foreign interference in U.S. elections, these discussions still manage to lack important details that would construct a more complete picture of the true nature of the threat. If our discussions were deeper, they would reveal that any threat to democracy from possible election interference is small.
That being said, we’re not totally immune from real problems on this front—but if we do face problems, we’ll have ourselves to blame in part. Examples from abroad show that the danger from election interference could increase if officials routinely come to annul the results of election campaigns in which foreigners have meddled.
What’s Missing From Election Interference Discussions
Despite all the discussions that have taken place among political leaders, in the media and online about foreign interference in our elections, these conversations rarely include three relevant considerations. The first concern involves issues about [ [link removed] ] hypocrisy [ [link removed] ]. Over the decades, the United States has assiduously intervened in foreign elections. For example, in the late 1950s, fearing the growing popularity of the Japanese Socialist Party, the United States provided millions of dollars [ [link removed] ] in secret campaign funds to opposition politicians.
As a public service, the University of Pittsburgh’s Michael Brenner has, with a little help from his friends, provided me with a list of countries where the United States has intervened in elections. Going back a few decades, his list includes Greece, Turkey, Italy, France and Portugal. More recently there have been Macedonia, Serbia, Albania, Bosnia, Ukraine, Russia (especially in Boris Yeltsin’s 1995-96 campaign), Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine, Cyprus, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Yemen, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Congo and several other countries in Africa, and, in Latin America, every country multiple times—including (within the last 15 years) Haiti, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina.
Indeed, a more extensive study [ [link removed] ] demonstrates that, over the centuries, intervention by major countries in foreign elections has been common, even routine, though the evidence strongly suggests that overt interventions are much more likely to be effective than covert efforts.
The second piece missing from election interference discussions is the unspoken assumption that it’s only the views of domestic Americans that matter in determining how people vote. But since foreign governments and foreign citizens frequently have a decided opinion about American elections, why should American voters be denied that information in formulating their vote? For example, if the Canadian government thinks a given U.S. presidential candidate is an especially good or bad choice, U.S. voters should be able to take that view into consideration or reject it in formulating their vote as they do for other campaign information. This isn’t “foreign interference,” but it is an item voters might want to consider.
And the third involves an unwillingness to assess the impact of foreign meddling on the actual vote. The conventional wisdom is that foreign interference is unjustified and indeed diabolical, in part because American voters, in their blissful and heartwarming innocence, can readily be manipulated by the occasional spurious social media post. However, colorful anecdotes aside, election interference is largely an exercise in futility.
A Surprisingly Small Impact
From birth, Americans face a deluge of advertising and marketing campaigns, overt and covert, about how to spend their money. We’re free to ignore the ads if we wish, and most of us become quite good at it. If extensive promotion could guarantee success, Americans would have all been driving Ford Edsels and drinking New Coke—legendary marketing failures in 1958 and 1985 by two of the (otherwise) most successful businesses in history. In fact, more broadly [ [link removed] ], studies find that upwards of 90% of new products fail to sell despite massive promotion campaigns.
This holds as well for campaign information. As anyone who has suffered through one knows, political campaigns tend to consist of candidates constantly distorting their opponents’ records. With more participants, foreign or otherwise, the fake news heap simply becomes higher and deeper. As political scientist Diana Mutz points out [ [link removed] ], however, “the scholarly consensus” on the degree to which campaign advertising shifts votes is that the impact “is marginal at most.” And a more recent study [ [link removed] ] assessing dozens of field experiments concludes that “the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidate choices in general elections is zero.”
Social media may provide a quicker and more effective method for getting information out, but it certainly doesn’t make people uncritical. For the most part, people tend to believe what they want to [ [link removed] ] believe, and their preferences tend to manipulate the views of candidates more than candidates manipulate the views of voters. In fact, a principal goal of campaigning is to determine which issues voters are concerned about, not to create those very issues. Thus in 2016, Donald Trump discovered that Japan-bashing (which had previously worked well [ [link removed] ] for him) no longer generated a big response, but China-bashing did [ [link removed] ].
During that presidential campaign, there were attempts by Russian hackers to undermine Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Although Clinton still handily won the popular vote, many analysts argued that digital interlopers had sought to undermine the integrity of U.S. elections and perhaps democracy [ [link removed] ] itself.
However, the Russian contribution to a flood of misinformation in the 2016 presidential election was tiny [ [link removed] ]. On Facebook, where most of the manipulation supposedly took place, Moscow’s intervention totaled perhaps a fraction of 1% of the content on the platform’s news feed. And this content had little influence on the vote because the people who embraced the information were already committed to a particular party or lived in states that went solidly for one or the other candidate.
Moreover, Facebook users are scarcely the most politically attuned: Over any period of three months, only [ [link removed] ] 4% of them click on more than one opinion piece. Indeed, Russia’s efforts proved to be wildly counterproductive. Instead of weakening U.S. policy, Moscow generated bipartisan support for anti-Russian sanctions at a time when the two U.S. political parties could agree on little else.
Scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson has studied [ [link removed] ] Russian efforts in the 2016 election campaign. Subtitled “How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President,” her study finds that the Russians probably did “help”—albeit, it seems, only by increasing the size of the fake news pile. Their efforts scarcely seem to have been decisive. The problem is that, as Jamieson acknowledges, “we have no good way to isolate the effects of troll-generated and hacked content from multiple other sources and forms of electoral communication” including, for example, the barrage of campaign advertising and news coverage, the effect of the various missteps of the Clinton campaign, peculiarities in turnout rates (and the weather) and the attractions of third-party candidates (who garnered 5% of the total vote in that election).
The Russians seem [ [link removed] ] to have had fewer than 100 people working as trolls—most of them college students or recent graduates. They were required to watch “House of Cards” on Netflix to enhance (or establish) a basic understanding of American politics, and they sought to shake things up by posting on controversial subjects rather than trying directly to swing support to one candidate or another. According to one report [ [link removed] ], only “two dozen of the trolls’ posts scored audiences of a million or more worldwide; the vast majority had fewer than a thousand page views.” Said one troll: “We were just having fun.”
Hackers, apparently from Russia, also had fun getting into electronic mail connected with the Democratic National Committee. One dump of this information embarrassingly (but scarcely surprisingly) showed [ [link removed] ] that [ [link removed] ] committee leaders, who were supposed to be neutral on who the party candidate for president would be, were decidedly in favor of Clinton. Another dump showed [ [link removed] ] that [ [link removed] ] Clinton, like every other politician in the history of the planet, was capable of saying one thing to one group and another to another.
In all, Russia’s cyber invasion scarcely seems to have presented a cosmic threat. And American democracy is entirely likely to survive it.
Future Fears
However, the issue of election interference can potentially be weaponized, and this may be seen by the recent experience [ [link removed] ] in Romania, where election results were officially annulled because foreign interference (mainly on TikTok) favored one of the candidates. However, there seems to be little or no evidence that foreign meddling made much difference in the vote. Like Trump, the leading candidate (who got only 23% of the vote in the multicandidate race) seems to have been adept at tapping into preexisting phenomena: a sharp rural/urban divide and deep resentments over corruption and economic ills.
Whether the Romania experience will have wider relevance has yet to be determined. But if it becomes routine for officials to annul elections because of foreign interference, however inconsequential, that would be a threat to democracy far greater and more significant than the interference itself.

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