In October, 2020, Bob Ferguson, the attorney general of Washington State, launched an initiative to combat “election interference.” A press release noted Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the coming election would be “rigged” against him, leading many of Ferguson’s constituents to fear that the result was being delegitimized in advance. In response, Ferguson pledged to defend “the longstanding American tradition of a peaceful transition of power.”
This year, Ferguson ran for governor of Washington, as a Democrat. So, too, did Bob Ferguson, and Bob Ferguson. The latter Fergusons—a retired state employee and a military veteran, respectively—were recruited as candidates by Glen Morgan, a conservative activist. (“If I had started a little bit earlier, I would have been able to have six Bob Fergusons,” Morgan told the Seattle Times.) Allies of the original Ferguson accused Morgan of deliberately trying to confuse voters; in a tweet, Ferguson called the gambit “election interference” and pointed out that the other Fergusons could be prosecuted under state law if they didn’t withdraw. Morgan, for his part, threatened legal action against Ferguson and anyone in his orbit who tried to “intimidate me or the candidates I am helping run for political office,” an act that would be, he suggested, itself “election interference.” In the end, the other Fergusons did pull out, but not before Ferguson had tried—and failed—to have Washington’s secretary of state move his name above theirs on the ballot. In an op-ed, Brandi Kruse, a former TV journalist in Seattle, charged that this was “election interference,” and urged voters to remember it “the next time Ferguson talks about the threat of Trumpism to democracy.”
The dispute was little more than a blip on the 2024 electoral map. (This month, Ferguson advanced from the primary.) But claims and counterclaims of “election interference” are, it seems, ubiquitous these days. Recently, the right has accused the left of election interference for a wide array of behavior: directing federal agencies to promote access to voting, making the argument that Trump should not receive full intelligence briefings, orchestrating a supposed PsyOp involving Taylor Swift. Republicans have accused one another of doing it in primaries; Democrats have levelled the charge against Republicans, too. When the editorial board of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called on Joe Biden to drop out of the Presidential race, in June, Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Biden campaign adviser and former mayor of Atlanta, didn’t use the words “election interference” but did accuse the paper of exerting “undue influence” on the election. Three weeks later, when Biden did drop out, sixty-five senior Republicans called his withdrawal “a coup or said it amounted to election interference,” according to the New York Times. When Kamala Harris replaced Biden atop the Democratic ticket, Trump said that she was using artificial intelligence to counterfeit photos of big crowds at her events. (The photos were real.) Harris “should be disqualified,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.”
The term “election interference” is fuzzy and subjective and has, at different moments, evoked different phenomena. Broadly speaking, in the run-up to and during Trump’s time in office, election interference was something Russia did; by 2020, it was something Trump did. These significations have persisted. Warnings of foreign propaganda and hacking are back in the headlines. At least as news stories, the criminal cases alleging that Trump and his associates tried to subvert the 2020 result never went away.
But, as with other Trump-era catchphrases (see also: “fake news”), the meaning of “election interference” has in many respects grown more elusive as various political actors—not least Trump himself—have co-opted, warped, and weaponized it. In 2021, Joseph Bernstein wrote in Harper’s that the words “misinformation” and “disinformation” had, in their crudest usage, come to mean “things I disagree with.” If that’s the case, then “election interference” has perhaps come to mean “things I disagree with in the context of an election.”
Whether election interference is actually as ubiquitous as its deployment in political discourse would suggest depends, of course, on how one conceives of the term. Define it narrowly and it excludes much conduct that is palpably anti-democratic (if, often, normalized); define it broadly and it risks becoming meaningless. But, even under the narrowest of reasonable definitions, election interference is much more than a matter of semantics, especially now. As Jens David Ohlin, the current dean of Cornell Law School, put it in 2020, “the age of election interference is upon us.”
In the U.S., at least, the idea of election interference is as old as elections. In 1796, Pierre-Auguste Adet, a French diplomat, effectively threatened war should Thomas Jefferson not be elected President that year; he sent a letter suggesting as much to the Secretary of State and to a newspaper in Pennsylvania, so that the public might get the message, too. Toward the end of the Civil War, Congress enacted a law to stop military officers from “interfering in elections in the states.” Since then, press reports have discussed election interference in the context of a complex suspected assassination plot involving a New York elections official at the turn of the twentieth century; the activities of the Anti-Saloon League in 1914; and Bush v. Gore, in 2000.
Contemporary definitions of the term vary widely. The Wikipedia entry for “election interference” notes, unhelpfully, that it “generally refers to efforts to change the outcome of an election.” The U.S. intelligence community has defined it a lot more specifically—at least with regard to foreign actors—as efforts targeting “the technical aspects of the election, including voter registration, casting and counting ballots, or reporting results.” (Other meddlesome behavior, according to a recently declassified assessment, comes under the banner of election influence.) Russian intrusion in 2016 certainly caused a spike in public discussion of election interference, however it was defined. The term cropped up in bipartisan congressional reports, resolutions, and legislation; in 2018, Chuck Grassley, a Republican who then chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, convened a hearing with the title “Election Interference: Ensuring Law Enforcement Is Equipped to Target Those Seeking to Do Harm.” The term appeared at least seventy-one times in the Mueller report. (Next month, three members of Mueller’s team will publish a book reflecting on their work, titled “Interference.”)
As the report’s findings were hotly debated, then faded into the rearview mirror, talk of election interference proliferated beyond “Russiagate.” In 2019, Trump was impeached over a different instance of election interference: the scheme in which he urged Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, to dig up dirt on Biden and his son Hunter; in 2020, Michael Pack, Trump’s controversial appointee to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, launched an investigation into what the agency described as possible “election interference” (that is to say, pro-Biden content) at Voice of America’s Urdu service. In 2022, Grassley attacked X, then still known as Twitter, over its decision, during the 2020 campaign, to limit its distribution of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Then, starting last year, Trump leaned in to the term heavily, as the criminal cases against him began to stack up. After Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney, charged him with employing a hush-money scheme to silence a porn star in order to boost his prospects in the 2016 election, then covering up the fact that he’d done it, Trump decried “massive election interference at a scale never seen”; after he was charged with attempting to subvert the 2020 election results in Georgia, he posted his mug shot online with the caption “ELECTION INTERFERENCE . . . NEVER SURRENDER!” As Trump was tried, and then convicted, in the Manhattan case, he continued to use the term, and his political allies picked up the baton. The attorney general of Missouri (unsuccessfully) took New York to the Supreme Court, claiming that the Manhattan case was unconstitutional interference with Trump’s current Presidential campaign. Representative Matt Gaetz proposed the Prevention of Election Interference Act, a bill that would ban the sentencing of major Presidential candidates in the four months before or two months after an election.
Of course, several of the cases against Trump revolve around the idea that he himself committed election interference—and not only in 2020. Bragg used the term explicitly to refer to the Manhattan case, as did Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who put the words into the subtitle of a book, “Trying Trump: A Guide to His First Election Interference Criminal Trial.” Eisen told me that a colleague of his queried his inclusion of the term, on the ground that it might be seen as amplifying Trump’s own talking point. But Eisen said that he didn’t want to cede a long-standing legal concept to “Trump and the MAGA manipulators.” Eisen decided “to fight for the meaning of ‘election interference,’ ” he said.
At the time, Eisen argued in the press that those using “hush money” as shorthand for the case were minimizing it; at issue, he told me, was not some simple, torrid affair, but “the Off Broadway preview” for Trump’s push to overturn the result in 2020, since the prosecution hinged on proving that he had conspired to affect an election result. Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, made something like the opposite argument: that describing Trump’s payments as “election interference” was minimizing to the term. “Willfully not reporting expenses to cover up an affair isn’t ‘interfering’ with an election along the lines of trying to get a secretary of state to falsify vote totals, or trying to get a state legislature to falsely declare there was fraud in the state and submit alternative slates of electors,” Hasen wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “If every campaign finance disclosure violation is election interference, our system is rife with it.” But this invites an uncomfortable follow-up question: What if it is?
In February, 2023, during a House committee hearing about Twitter’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story, Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, accused four former executives at the company of “shadow banning” her account over what she said was a joke about Hillary Clinton. “Election interference?” Boebert thundered. “I bet that Putin is sitting in the Kremlin wishing he had as much election interference as you four here today.” Leaders at Twitter—and, since Elon Musk acquired the company and renamed it, at X—have often found themselves on the election-interference-allegation merry-go-round. Recently, conservatives and liberals alike have made such claims about Musk or the platform. (Musk, meanwhile, has suggested that Google might have committed election interference because, when a user typed “president donald” into the search bar, the suggested results were “duck” and “regan.” Trump has since called Google “a Crooked, Election Interference Machine.”)
If this all sounds deeply silly, the question of tech titans’ role in policing election-related speech is actually serious, and complicated. Recently, Nora Benavidez, a senior counsel at Free Press Action Fund, told Agence France-Presse that Musk’s behavior appears to be edging “closer to election interference.” When I called her to ask what she meant by this, she defined the term as “the attempt by an individual or a group to prevent others from engaging in the democratic process.” Musk, Benavidez added, is “using his influence and platform to promote individuals who find it acceptable to consider the non-peaceful transition of power.” Although, she said, he does not yet appear to have interfered in the election process, she noted that, among other things, he has explicitly endorsed Trump, and that the public cannot see how X’s algorithms shape what information appears in users’ feeds.
But it’s hard to pinpoint when and how, exactly, Musk—or any other tech leader, for that matter—might cross the line. The mere possibility that he could be engaging in interference reflects the fact that his ownership of a mass-communications network gives him the power to do so. The same must surely hold true of other media and tech entrepreneurs; they may not use their platforms as chaotically as Musk uses his, but their decisions—on which speech to promote and on which to downplay or hide; on which candidates to promote and on which to attack—can and do influence voters. Calling this “election interference” does not seem inherently unreasonable. Similar points could be made about the role of political mega-donors. (Recently, some observers have applied the term to AIPAC’s hefty investments to unseat progressive members of Congress.) Go much deeper into this logical thicket, though, and you end up with a Wikipedia definition of election interference, encompassing pretty much everything that happens in an election.
When I asked Benavidez about this quandary, she told me that society has not yet agreed on language to describe “how influence and power held by a very small group of individuals—increasingly small—has started warping and twisting institutions for specific outcomes.” Again, a cynic might say that politics has always worked this way. But Benavidez offered a specific example: Republican state lawmakers using Trump’s lies about the 2020 election outcome as a pretext to introduce “hundreds of pieces of legislation to disrupt the administration of our local and higher elections.” By bickering over the meaning of election interference, Benavidez said, political actors may be trying to muddy voters’ perceptions of what they’re actually doing. Viewed a certain way, crying “ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” can itself be a form of election interference. Already, allies of Trump are arguing—everywhere from the op-ed pages to the halls of Congress—that the real interference is letting foreigners vote illegally. After 2020, it’s certainly justifiable to see this as part of a push to undermine the result ahead of time.
In writing this article, I tried mightily to come up with a definition of election interference that is both comprehensive and workable. I failed. Behaviors that are both legal and illegal, foreign and domestic, pre-Election Day and post-Election Day, direct and indirect—and, in each case, both broad and narrow—seem to qualify. The challenge, as I see it, is to look through the fog of claim and counterclaim to the types of election interference that are the most pressing in a given moment; the strains that, if unresolved, neuter our ability to debate the definition at all.
Hasen, the U.C.L.A. law professor, told me that he doesn’t mean to diminish the wide range of factors that might weigh on an election outcome, from the American campaign-finance system—which he once wrote a book about, and still describes as “fundamentally unfair”—to a foreign power stealing documents. But he nonetheless defines “election interference” relatively narrowly—as the use of illegal means to, say, manipulate vote totals or change results after the fact—and argues that including broader efforts to sway public opinion in the definition risks “cheapening” it. “This kind of language policing matters to me,” Hasen said. It’s about “reserving a very serious term for a very serious set of behaviors.” Bob Ferguson, perhaps, had it right the first time. ♦
