March 31, 2021
What happens overseas matters here at home. Geo-political trends often start in other parts of the world and eventually make their way to the United States, and that is certainly true when it comes to threats to our elections and to our political system.
Just this week, we saw new reporting from the Associated Press indicating that Russian hackers gained access to the emails of then Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and other senior DHS officials, some of the top U.S. Government leaders responsible for tracking down and countering foreign threats like these. This high-level breach of our government systems is incredibly concerning and indicative of how aggressive and effective foreign hackers are today.
But election security isn’t just about safeguarding our physical infrastructure — although that’s very important — it’s also about protecting our country from foreign influence operations. Those kinds of attacks are often more insidious but just as damaging. I don’t want voters believing false information planted by a hostile foreign government any more than I want state voter rolls to be hacked.
In 2016, we saw primarily two types of attacks on our democracy directed from overseas. First, the hacking and release of confidential material to the public by a hostile foreign entity, in an attempt to influence the election in favor of a preferred candidate. Second, a covert public disinformation campaign, waged largely on social media, designed to create division in our country over hot-button issues like racial justice. Russian-backed entities created fake Facebook accounts posing as American voters, for example, and posted incendiary and often false comments with the goal of causing political and cultural turmoil.
Just recently, the Intelligence Community released more information about the threats we faced in our 2020 elections, among them Russian entities targeting “prominent U.S. persons and media conduits” by feeding them hacked materials and prompting them to cover issues with a negative (and largely false) narrative designed to hurt one candidate.
Despite these challenges, as my colleague Maurice Turner has written: By nearly all accounts, the 2020 election in the United States was the most secure ever. In order for that security to continue, we must remain vigilant about how the threats are evolving — we cannot always be fighting the last war — and take actions accordingly. Our adversaries adapt their tactics, so we have to as well.
There are proverbial canaries in coal mines happening across the globe when it comes to election interference, and they can be helpful for us to study. Indeed, we saw some of those warning signs in other countries prior to our 2016 election. For example, the more than 150,000 Russian-language Twitter accounts that posted tens of thousands of messages, in English, advocating for Britain to leave the European Union (one of Russia’s policy goals) in the run up to their 2016 Brexit referendum. Russia has a long history of meddling in other countries’ elections, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, and particularly in the former Soviet bloc states. Bad actors often test out tactics in their neighborhoods before taking them further afield.
Over the coming months, there are a number of elections scheduled in other countries that we will focus on to both spot new nefarious tactics and successful counter-measures, including in Kyrgyzstan in June and in Germany and Russia in September. We will be monitoring these and others and will post helpful information gleaned from them.
We will also highlight countries that have taken this threat seriously and appear to have had some success. For example, Sweden put in place a comprehensive approach prior to their 2018 elections, including improving public media literacy, upping their cyber detection and response capabilities, and developing a highly visible public fact-checking collaboration between media organizations.
The moment we face globally is in many ways a contest between democracy and authoritarianism, and these election interference tactics being used against democratic processes like ours are a weapon in that bigger struggle. It falls on all of us, the citizens of our democracy, to work to combat it as part of a larger cybersecurity strategy and to encourage cooperation between like-minded countries so we can strengthen all of our efforts together.
Marie Harf
International Elections Analyst, USC Election Cybersecurity Initiative
Marie Harf is a strategist who has focused her career on promoting American foreign policy to domestic audiences. She has held senior positions at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, worked on political campaigns for President Barack Obama and Congressman Seth Moulton, and served as a cable news commentator. Marie has also been an Instructor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service.