Election Interference Is The New Normal

The U.S. has a long history of interfering in elections abroad

Throughout history, the United States has interfered in the elections of many other countries around the world. At least since the CIA was created in 1947. Whenever exposed for this, our political officials have often argued that we were simply promoting stability or spreading democracy. These types of covert actions by any given country are always in their own self-interest, at least from their point of view. The ends justify the means, depending on your perspective and whether you’re on the “right” side of a movement. The point is, while our historical narrative has painted a picture of America’s hegemony spreading goodness throughout the world, our new narrative involves the U.S. appearing weak enough to be misled and fooled into extremes on one political side or the other through propaganda and misinformation campaigns.

Today we find ourselves in an Orwellian news cycle of constitutional crises that would have been the absurd fodder in dystopian fiction of days past. Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress and witness tampering in the Russia investigation and then had his 40-year prison sentence commuted by Trump, said in an interview with Alex Jones that if Donald Trump loses the election in November he should declare martial law. Since August, Trump has been saying that “The only way we’re going to lose is if the election is rigged.” And this is our new normal. While the pandemic and quarantines have led us to accept many new norms in some areas of our lives, the weeks and months following Election Day are bound to force us to confront new norms of election interference in our democratic process.

2016 set all new precedents

After the 2016 election, many Americans learned they were the victims of Russian propaganda and media manipulation. Robert Mueller’s top prosecutor Andrew Weissmann stated that he believes Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was more damaging to our democracy than the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was during World War II. Today we continue seeing ongoing misinformation campaigns wreak havoc on the ecosystem of truth. In August of this year, Facebook reported having removed a troll farm posing as African-Americans for Donald Trump and QAnon supporters, as well as hundreds of fake accounts linked to The Epoch Times. On October 1, Reuters revealed that a pro-Trump news site called the Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens (NAEBC) was actually being run by people associated with the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed troll farm.

On October 8, it was reported that Facebook had deleted hundreds of fake accounts tied to Turning Point USA and banned U.S. marketing firm Rally Forge, a clear example of how American political strategists and marketers have been emulating the same foreign propaganda techniques we know occurred in 2016. Without a doubt, Russia is helping to amplify false narratives in the U.S. election once again, with arguments in line with Trump’s claims over the legitimacy of mail-in voting. There was an Intelligence Bulletin on September 3 from the Department of Homeland Security that states that, "We assess that Russia is likely to continue amplifying criticisms of vote-by-mail and shifting voting processes amidst the COVID-19 pandemic to undermine public trust in the electoral process." Other reports claim that we can also expect China and Iran to contribute to the growing mess of sowing doubt and anger.

Despite all that other countries may be doing to impact our 2020 election, the most successful spreaders of misinformation seem to now be within our own borders. A recent paper by Harvard University found that “Fox News and Donald Trump’s own campaign were far more influential in spreading false beliefs than Russian trolls or Facebook clickbait artists.” While Trump has benefited from other countries’ actions to enrage and polarize our society, he himself has been much more prolific and successful at spreading propaganda, along with Fox News. The Harvard paper goes on to say that, “Our findings here suggest that Donald Trump has perfected the art of harnessing mass media to disseminate and at times reinforce his disinformation campaign...”

84% of American voters are eligible to vote by mail in the 2020 election, according to a Washington Post analysis. Trump has repeatedly dismissed the validity of mail-in voting despite the U.S. intelligence community insisting that there is no evidence of fraud in mail-in voting. The actions of his new postmaster general have themselves served as deliberate sabotage by maiming that department and slowing it down at every turn. Trump may be right in calling this a rigged election, but not for the reasons he claims. It’s being rigged, in part, by changes to the post office to disrupt mail-in ballots while simultaneously claiming that mail-in ballots will be rife with fraud or shouldn’t be counted after Election Day, all in order to set the stage for not accepting the results. 

Trump will only accept the results if he wins

In March, Trump told Fox & Friends that Democrats want “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” By dismissing the validity of votes counted after Election Day, Trump is setting the stage for not conceding, and admitting that more people having their vote counted would be bad for him. Regarding the likelihood of voter fraud, The Atlantic put it this way, “An authoritative report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, calculated the rate of voter fraud in three elections at between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Another investigation, from Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School, turned up 31 credible allegations of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion votes cast in the United States from 2000 to 2014. Judges in voting-rights cases have made comparable findings of fact.”

In June, former Defense Secretary Mattis wrote that, "Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try." Scientific American endorsed Joe Biden in September, making him their first endorsement in the publication’s 175 year history. The New England Journal of Medicine, also with a history of being nonpartisan, published an editorial on October 8, saying, “Reasonable people will certainly disagree about the many political positions taken by candidates. But truth is neither liberal nor conservative. When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent.”

There is a constant drumbeat of warning signs that Trump may try to not leave office if he loses. With the high likelihood that he will be charged with crimes by the state of New York once he does leave office, Trump has even more reason to use every tool at his disposal to try to retain power.

Normal is whatever happens

The phrase “new normal” has been thrown around a lot this year, in some ways helping us cope or accept the reality of our daily lives now. New normals of working from home or schooling from home, of mask wearing and distancing and obsessive hand washing. Described by the World Economic Forum, “The 'new normal' discourse sanitizes the idea that our present is okay because normal is regular.” Normal becomes what we see and hear everyday. According to a Rice University study, the mental health of black men in the U.S. improved during Barack Obama’s presidency, showing that our leaders do help uphold standards, or create new ones. 

Simply calling attention to such matters doesn’t correct them. Edward Snowden’s revelations about government surveillance didn’t lead to correcting all the problems he exposed, it just gave us some insight into the “new normal” of our lack of privacy as Americans and made us all more aware of it. We the people can help decide what we accept as our new normals, and those norms can change as often as our priorities do. In an interview with Anand Giridharadas, Noam Chomsky put it this way, “I think if you take a look at the United States in the 1920s, and you asked, ‘Could there ever be a labor movement?,’ you would've sounded crazy. How could there be? It had been crushed. But it changed. Human life is not predictable. Depends on choices and will, which are unpredictable.”

Our new normal, at least for now, includes existential threats to our democracy such as increased election interference. And not just from other countries, but from within our own borders and from our own leaders.