U.S. Officials: Foreign Election Interference Could Get Worse After Nov. 5

In the closing days of the U.S. presidential campaign, intelligence and national security officials are trying desperately—and mostly unsuccessfully—to thwart a deluge of interference operations from foreign governments, especially China, Iran, and Russia.

And they’re warning that the problem could get even worse after Election Day on Tuesday.

“The election is not over the night of Nov. 5,” said Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is charged with overseeing U.S. election security. “It is very likely there will be close races that require the paper record to be counted and recounted and audited to ensure accuracy. It is between that period when polls close and when the vote is certified that our foreign adversaries will likely be most active in terms of trying to sow partisan discord and undermine American confidence” in the election.

They will do this by “creating a wedge” between the campaigns of Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris by mounting possibly even more active influence and disinformation operations that raise doubts about the accuracy of the vote, in what is expected to be a very close election, Easterly and her chief deputy, Cait Conley, said in an interview with Foreign Policy.

Easterly and Conley described an already unprecedented slew of sophisticated influence operations underway from Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran. “The objectives are really the same across the board,” Conley said. Citing recently filed Justice Department affidavits that accused two employees of RT, the Kremlin’s media arm, of funneling money to a U.S. company hosting pro-Trump commentators on social media platforms, Conley said the main current danger involved “fake websites that purport to be actual news media” as well as separate tactics of creating proxy media websites that purport to be local or regional outlets.

The foreign tactics are only a supplement, of course, to the vast disinformation campaign already begun by Trump, which also involves a “barrage of hate and threats and harassment” against election workers and administrators, said Jennifer Morrell, the CEO of the Elections Group, a consulting firm that focuses on election administration, security, and auditing. “Unfortunately, the challenges [election officials] are dealing with are unprecedented,” Morrell said at a National Press Club forum in Washington this week. “It’s unlike anything I’ve seen in my experience. The amount of misinformation out there, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like a tsunami.”

But an even bigger worry may come in the actual counting of votes after Nov. 5. In recent weeks, Easterly and her colleagues have been combing election districts across the nation, especially in swing states, to try to restore confidence. She pointed out, for example, that 97 percent of election balloting is not connected to the internet and that “voters will cast their ballots where there are paper records they themselves can verify.” Election infrastructure in the United States, she said, “has never been more secure.” Added Conley: “The election community is more prepared than in any prior cycle.”

They warned of ransomware or “distributed denial of service” attacks from abroad but said that is not likely to be nearly as damaging as the perceptions created by these operations, which could lead to protests and even violence.

Indeed, the biggest problem is that, even more than in previous elections in 2020 and 2016, the foreign operators are merely pushing on an open door—one that has been flung open by Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters. Though now—as before—there appears to be no evidence of active collusion between foreign operatives and Trump or his campaign, many of these overseas adversaries and Trump’s MAGA movement are often working toward the same goal: creating doubt about the legitimacy of the election even as the votes are counted.

Trump, who continues to insist that he won the 2020 election despite all evidence to the contrary, has said repeatedly on the stump that the only way he can lose this one to Harris is through fraud. Accordingly, people in Trump’s orbit have developed extensive plans to challenge any results that are negative to Trump in court by blocking election certification. They are also planning a mass protest on Jan. 6, 2025, the day Congress certifies the results, to emulate the violent uprising of four years earlier, CNN reports.