Foreign Interference Recap

November 9, 20247:58 AM ET

We look at the various threats sent to polling places on election day this week, as well as the extent to which foreign actors tried to interfere with the presidential election.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

The final stretch of the election was marked by a series of increasingly brazen attempts to influence voters and disrupt polling places. As NPR’s Huo Jingnan reports, the government and researchers believe that Russia and other foreign powers were behind the efforts.

HUO JINGNAN, BYLINE: On Election Day, multiple hoax bomb threats were sent to polling places around the country. Here’s Fulton County, Georgia, Police Chief Wade Yates late in the day.

WADE YATES: Five of them – the polls were temporarily closed down at the poll manager’s request while we conducted the sweep, and they were reopened.

HUO: No bombs were found at any of those locations, and so far, there is no indication that the delays affected the results in any way. The FBI says that the bomb threats were sent from Russian internet domains, and NPR has seen one of the emails. It looks like the escalation of a campaign that has also included a series of videos tied to non-Russian influence operations. In one instance, CNN reported that a registered Russian agent paid an American influencer to post this video, making unfounded allegations of voter fraud.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: We’re voting Kamala Harris. Yesterday, we voted in Gwinnett County, and today, we’re voting in Fulton County.

HUO: Some of the videos received over a million views on social media. American intelligence officials had been warning about foreign interference for months. In the final days of voting, they took the unusual step of calling out specific posts and videos. Graham Brookie oversees research on foreign influence campaigns at the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab. He says the volume of activity this year is notable.

GRAHAM BROOKIE: One of the major trends that we saw is the highest volume of in particular online foreign influence efforts directed at the U.S. elections by those three state threat actors that I mentioned – Russia, Iran and China in particular.

HUO: Studies of past foreign influence campaigns have not found that they sway elections. Caroline Orr Bueno, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland, says focusing on just the election cycle might be too narrow.

CAROLINE ORR BUENO: Influence operations really aren’t targeting a distinct event. So the elections may be targeted as part of a broader influence operation, but, you know, these are long-term strategic operations with very long-term goals.

HUO: Brookie agrees, saying that Russia wants to win its war in Ukraine, China wants to improve its global image, Iran is angry about the Trump administration’s assassination of one of its top generals. Current research shows all three nations are keen to exploit wedge issues already dividing American society. Orr Bueno says the fact that the efforts go beyond a single campaign or discrete events makes it difficult to measure the impact. But she says we still need to ask ourselves some questions.

ORR BUENO: Why am I following the people I’m following? Am I following them because they’re telling me the truth about the world around me, or am I following them because they’re telling me things that make me feel good?

HUO: All of us, Orr Bueno says, have these tendencies that are ripe for exploitation.

Huo Jingnan, NPR News.

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