Election Interference: How States Meddle in Votes

That states try to influence other countries' elections is not a conspiracy theory: it is one of the best-documented phenomena in intelligence history. Political scientist Dov H. Levin, author of the benchmark quantitative study, identified 117 partisan electoral interventions by great powers between 1946 and 2000 — 81 by the United States and 36 by the USSR — counting only cases with solid evidence. The digital age did not invent election interference; it gave it scale, speed and a layer of deniability.

This article reviews the forms state interference takes, the best-documented cases, and the hardest question of all: does it work? The honest answer from academic research is «sometimes, and less than is believed».

What counts as election interference

The academic literature distinguishes interference — covert or coercive actions to favour one side — from mere influence or public diplomacy, which is legal and open. Documented methods form a spectrum:

• Covert funding of friendly parties or candidates, the classic Cold War method.
• Material support: campaign advisers, polling, training, logistics.
• Information operations: covert propaganda, dissemination of compromising material (genuine or fabricated), amplification of social divisions.
• Hack and leak: theft of emails or internal documents and their selective release to damage a candidate.
• Attacks on election infrastructure: intrusions into voter registries or tally systems, the gravest and least frequent rung.
• Coercion and threats: from economic pressure to hinting at consequences if the «wrong» candidate wins.

The Cold War: the golden age of interference

The foundational case is Italy, 1948. Facing a real possibility of victory for the Italian Communist Party, the newly created CIA channelled covert funds to the Christian Democrats and organised letter-writing and pressure campaigns, according to consolidated historiography (Tim Weiner among others). The USSR, for its part, openly funded Western communist parties. The Mitrokhin Archive — the notes KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin smuggled out of the USSR — documents decades of Soviet «active measures»: funding, disinformation and influence operations in dozens of countries.

The United States did likewise in Latin America, Iran (1953) and Chile (where the CIA funded opposition to Allende before the 1973 coup, according to the U.S. government's own declassified documents). The era's lesson is uncomfortable for everyone: election interference was a systemic practice of both superpowers, not one side's eccentricity.

2016 and after: interference goes digital

The 2016 U.S. election marked the modern inflection point. The U.S. intelligence community concluded with high confidence, in its January 2017 report, that Russia ran an influence campaign combining the hack-and-leak of Democratic National Committee emails (attributed to the GRU), the Internet Research Agency's troll farm and social-media amplification. The Senate investigation (five volumes, 2019-2020) and Special Counsel Mueller's inquiry documented the scope, without concluding that the election result had been altered.

Since then the phenomenon has become normalised: the European External Action Service documents disinformation campaigns attributed to Russia and China against European elections; Microsoft, Google and Meta publish periodic reports on dismantled influence operations; and countries such as France (the hack of Macron's campaign emails in 2017), Germany and Taiwan have denounced episodes of their own. Attribution remains the weak point: it is rarely instant and often contested.

Does it work? The debate over real effectiveness

Particular rigour is needed here, because the field is full of exaggerated claims in both directions. What the evidence says:

• Modest but real statistical effect: Levin's models estimate that a great-power electoral intervention raises support for the favoured candidate by about 3 percentage points on average — enough to decide close elections.
• Effect on trust, not just votes: even when no operation changes a result, it can degrade faith in the process, which is often the real objective.
• Backfire risk: exposed interventions can mobilise the opposing electorate and damage the favoured candidate; Levin documents cases in both directions.
• 2016 cannot be measured precisely: no reliable method exists to know whether Russian operations changed the outcome of an election decided by tens of thousands of votes in three states. Anyone claiming certainty either way exceeds the available evidence.

The most defensible conclusion is twofold: election interference is real, frequent and sometimes decisive at narrow margins; and its greatest strategic damage is not changing specific votes but eroding citizens' trust that elections are clean.

The defence: what democracies have learned

Documented responses include strengthening election cybersecurity (registries, tally systems, campaigns), transparency in political funding, cooperation with technology platforms to remove fake-account networks, and public attribution and sanctions as deterrence tools. Sweden created a Psychological Defence Agency in 2022, a singular institutional precedent. No measure suffices alone, and all coexist with an underlying tension: defending elections without the defence itself becoming a partisan instrument.