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What worked: strategies to mitigate foreign election interference

Election security
FBI and DHS warn of foreign misinformation on election results
Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images

Election Dissection spoke with David Levine, elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Levine has been tracking foreign attempts to interfere with U.S. voting this year, but he also knows a lot about the mechanics of running elections in the U.S. He's managed elections in Boise, Idaho, Richmond, Virginia and Washington, DC.

What can we say about foreign interference in the 2020 election, so far?

There aren't any indications foreign adversaries were able to interfere with the election infrastructure to affect vote tallies, change results or alter any voter data. In one instance, Iran was able to take non-public voter data, but there's no evidence the data was altered. The interference hasn't affected the outcome, and that's really important.


The FBI and others openly acknowledge it's a challenging time after the election. There's still an opportunity during the post-election process for our adversaries to exploit ambiguities, to push disinformation campaigns or to amplify false information coming from domestic sources.

We know that Russian sources were pushing a voter-fraud conspiracy in Pennsylvania recently. Earlier this week, RT [a state-controlled Russian news service] was trying to suggest there was a great deal of fraud. Their video was flagged and taken down. The bottom line is that there isn't any evidence that the voting infrastructure has been altered, or that vote tallies were affected in any way.

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What worked well this year?

We saw more paper backups in 2020. Every piece of election technology is capable of breaking down. When there's a backup, you can continue voting. You can assure the election process continues unabated.

Another good development was all the planning for potential attacks. Election officials are resourceful on their own, but they had more federal help in 2020. We saw the Department of Homeland Security do training on cybersecurity and things election officials can do. Local officials were given tools they needed. There was outreach, training and support.

Also, in 2020, the government wasn't just trying to be aware of problems like foreign interference. They were attacking it, trying to actively disrupt our adversaries. That yielded some intelligence that federal officials were able to feed back to localities.

What were your big takeaways about this year's election?

We had high interest among Americans wanting to vote. That's good. This demonstrates Americans have confidence in our voting process. Had they not had confidence, they would have stayed home.

One of the really good things this year is that people began to see an election as a season and not a single day. Number one, during a pandemic, voting is safer if you spread it out. Fewer people at the polls at any one time means you're less likely to contract the virus there.

Number two, it's good for election security. For example, spoofed emails were identified by the intelligence community. Over a 24-hour period, state and local officials were briefed and got the information out to voters. There was a way to mitigate the damage. Having a longer election period means if there's an incident, it's less likely to impact voters. When you have voters spread out, it means election officials have more opportunities to deal with any issues that do arise. It also means individual voters are less likely to wait in long lines.

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The election went remarkably well. Here's how to make the next one even better.
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The election went remarkably well. Here's how to make the next one even better.

We haven't yet seen evidence that would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election — even with the unprecedented challenges of a global pandemic, the threat of foreign interference, civil unrest and greater turnout than any time since 1900. That counts as a resounding success.

Once the final tallies are certified, we need to thank the election administrators and poll workers whose heroic efforts preserved American democracy. After that, we need to assess what worked best and what needs to improve, so we can identify achievable steps to make future elections even more secure.

Based on what we know so far, here are five things that should be on the U.S. elections to-do list:

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The three steps to ensure a well-run runoff in Georgia

Hold the champagne: The 2020 Election Season isn't over just yet. Neither of Georgia's Senate races resulted in a victor on Election Day, sending both contests to January runoffs that will likely determine control of the U.S. Senate. And while many folks are understandably focused on the political repercussions of these races, I'm pulling for a different candidate: democracy.

While Georgia will likely conduct a risk-limiting audit and recount of the presidential election later this month, the state appears to have done a good job administering the 2020 presidential election. As a former election administrator and expert on the integrity of elections, my assessment is there is no reason to question the integrity of the election outcome. If any concrete evidence suggesting that wrongful disenfranchisement has or will affect the accuracy of the outcome, that assessment could change. Right now, there isn't.

Regardless, these are three steps Georgia officials could take now to ensure the integrity of the state's runoff elections in January:

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The nation has a new president-elect, Joe Biden. At the same time, there is no official president-elect, because the electoral process itself hasn't yet reached that point.

How can both these assertions be true? And if they are, how are Americans supposed to understand that? Most importantly, how can Americans of opposite parties get on the same page, so that we can move forward together as one country, as our new president-elect in his impressive victory speech is urging us to do?

When it comes to ending elections, there are actually two different processes at work, and they operate on different timelines.

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What's next for U.S. democracy after the president's stress test?

In another assessment of the 2020 vote so far, Election Dissection sat down with Laura Williamson, who works on voting rights and democracy at Demos. We spoke about President Trump's election night remarks as a stress test for the United States. Williamson had plenty to say about the state of the elections and some things that need fixing after the votes are finally counted.

What was your reaction to the president?

The president's remarks and actions are a test of our ability to show up, as a people, to mass mobilize and resist his authoritarian calls to end the counting. The basis of our democracy is that we pick our leaders. It's not the president or the courts that choose. So it's a test of our ability as a people to resist what is so clearly an anti-democratic attack.

And Americans are rising to the test. We're seeing masses of people calling for every vote to be counted. They're showing up and exercising their political power. We flexed our political power one way, by voting before or on Election Day. Now we're exercising it again in a different way — showing up in the streets and demanding every eligible vote is counted.

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