When U.S. intelligence agencies look at attempts by foreign countries to meddle in elections, they draw a distinction between “election influence” and “election interference.”
Election influence covers attempts by foreign governments to affect who voters decide to vote for, including by promoting or denigrating certain candidates, spreading false claims or sowing distrust. Election interference includes attempts to alter technical parts of the election process, like the casting of ballots, the vote-counting process or voter registrations.
In early 2021, the National Intelligence Council found that several countries attempted to influence the 2020 race without interfering in election processes. Russia tried to undermine the Biden campaign, Iran tried to undermine the Trump campaign, and Venezuela, Hezbollah and Cuba may have tried some smaller-scale strategies to denigrate Mr. Trump.
But the National Intelligence Council found “no indications” that foreign countries “attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process” during the 2020 election, including ballot-casting, vote-counting or registrations.
Experts have long argued it would be extremely difficult for anybody to pull off election interference at a large scale since U.S. elections are heavily decentralized, with thousands of counties and cities responsible for registering voters, running polling places and counting votes.
“We assess that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around voting systems across the country, or in post-election audits,” the National Intelligence Council said in a 2021 report.
The Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security also found in 2021 that there was “no evidence that any foreign government-affiliated actor prevented voting, changed votes, or disrupted the ability to tally votes or to transmit election results in a timely manner.”
