Whatever Happened to the Threat of Election Hacking?

Strategic conversations often run in cycles. In the West, the great power competition narrative of the Cold War gave way to the peacekeeping and “responsibility to protect” debates of the 1990s, which were superseded by the counterterrorism/counterinsurgency discussions of the 2000s. Those, in turn, gave way to an intense focus on the threats posed to liberal democracies by the combination of technology and authoritarian regimes, which grew out of the wave of populist and nationalist electoral victories culminating in 2016.

But that narrative, too, has proven relatively short-lived. The threat of authoritarian regimes using a combination of misinformation and direct attacks on election systems has been subsumed into a broader conversation about great power competition. In a world once again full of visible hard security threats, from North Korean ICBMs to Russian battalions encroaching on Ukrainian territory, the diffuse threat of electoral or societal interference may well simply seem less urgent. Nevertheless, it is worth taking stock of the counter-electoral-interference world – since, after all, the state of strategic conversation does not dictate what threats are most real.

Part of that change of emphasis no doubt has to do with the fact that the dire predictions of electoral interference after 2016 largely did not come to pass. Those who worked on the issue might well draw analogies to the successful project to contain the Y2K bug – the dog didn’t bark precisely because a huge amount of time, effort, and expenditure went into muzzling it.

Another part of the problem is the fundamental difficulty in determining what shapes voter behavior. After all, voters often don’t remember how they voted; asking them to reconstruct what factors went into their choice produces unreliable data. This creates problems both for those who seek to influence voting behavior (legitimately or otherwise) and for those who wish to understand it and counter malign influences.

It is possible to establish that, for example, the Russian government actively sought to boost Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 – but not possible, especially in retrospect, to establish whether the Kremlin was successful in doing so. Trump might well have won without any Russian intervention, or he might not; the answer is not only unknown, but unknowable. The absence of definitive proof that such campaigns have been successful makes it far more difficult to maintain policymaker interest in countermeasures, especially when those policymakers are already oversaturated with potential and actual threats and concerns.

(A distinction has to be drawn here between attempts to influence voter behavior by playing on and inflaming existing sentiments, and attempts to literally change votes, by hacking into voting systems. The latter is not an influence operation but rather an act of cyberwarfare, which has its own admittedly complex and not fully resolved set of rules.)

But the decreased emphasis also points to a deeper and more fundamental mismatch about how the foreign policy world understands, conceptualizes, and responds to perceived threats. For the sake of argument, let us take it as a given that using social media and modern mass communications technologies to undermine elections is now a part of the foreign influence toolkit, and that both regulation and tech company policies remain behind the curve of stopping them. But at the same time, the volume of such efforts is paltry compared to the quantity of dis- and misinformation produced by domestic and non-state actors. In other words, the GRU may well try to reach into American politics through Facebook, but they will struggle to reach as many people as Infowars.

That is an uncomfortable truth for a foreign and security policy community that largely prefers to stay out of the messy and divisive world of domestic politics. Framing electoral interference as a tool of non-traditional warfare, exclusively wielded by thuggish authoritarian regimes against innocent democracies, is a narrative that obscures far more than it illuminates.

None of this is to suggest that the technological threat to democracy has faded, or that more effective tools for shaping public opinion overseas aren’t possible to develop or field. But foreign and defense policy communities are no more immune to the power of a simpler, more straightforward narrative than any other kind of community. And a narrative of great power competition – even one enhanced through advanced and emerging technology – is much easier to come to grips with and provide policy recommendations for than a messy, incomplete narrative that intersects uncomfortably with the complexities of domestic politics.