US officials expect foreign meddling to last past Election Day

Foreign influence campaigns aimed at meddling in the 2024 general election are not expected to stop when the polls close on Nov. 5, experts and U.S. officials say, warning that adversaries could seek to undercut trust in the integrity of the contest.

The intelligence community said in a briefing that foreign actors are pushing to exacerbate divisions in the U.S. and influence elections at multiple levels this year, with Russia in particular seeking to boost former President Donald Trump’s candidacy while Iran prefers Vice President Kamala Harris.

U.S. officials, appearing before Congress earlier this year, expressed confidence in the government’s ability to safeguard U.S. elections, but experts say that won’t stop foreign actors from trying to sow doubt about election security after the polls close.

A close election between Harris and Trump could provide adversaries with fertile ground to manipulate Americans’ views by trying to convince the losing side the election was stolen, said Darrell West, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.

“Everyone expects this to be a close race, and so it will be an easy target for the foreign entities to try and divide Americans and cast doubt on the integrity of the election,” West said.

Lawrence Norden, vice president of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said foreign powers could lean on the same influence efforts they have used before, such as creating fake news sites to amplify false information or using bot farms to spread certain views on social media.

Oftentimes, misinformation and disinformation are worse after a major event, when passions are high and people are waiting for information, Norden said.

“There’s a vacuum that opens up the possibility for bad actors to spread false, divisive information,” Norden said. “The most dangerous time is when there’s uncertainty. When the polls have closed and there’s uncertainty about the results.”

After the 2020 election, Russian online influence actors “continued to promote narratives questioning the election results and disparaging President Biden and the Democratic Party,” according to an intelligence community assessment.

The U.S. intelligence community is forecasting that foreign actors, after the polls close, will call into question the validity of the election results, according to an election security update posted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Foreign players are almost certainly taking into consideration the chance of another contested presidential election, and a close fight for control of both chambers of Congress, according to the one-page update, which was released earlier this month.

“They will likely take advantage of such an opportunity to use similar tactics in a post-election period to undermine trust in the integrity of the election, election processes, and further exacerbate divisions among Americans,” the update read.

Even if foreign adversaries might try to influence voters’ perception, the director of the nation’s cyber defense agency has appeared confident about the election’s security.

Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has said that the machines Americans will use to cast their ballots are not connected to the Internet, a dynamic that keeps voting equipment safe from cyber threats.

“Malicious actors, even if they tried, could not have an impact at scale such that there would be a material effect on the outcome of [the] election,” Easterly told The Associated Press.

The potential for post-election misinformation has caught the attention of some lawmakers.

During a committee hearing last month, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said one of his concerns is that “the level of misinformation, disinformation that may come from our adversaries after the polls close could actually be as significant as anything that happens up to closing of the polls on election night.”