The Real Threat Of Election Interference

In a speech to the nation in July, Donald Trump said that reports from intelligence agencies showed that American elections were profoundly vulnerable to foreign interference. China had “bought, stolen, or hacked” voter data in 18 states, he said, and he implied that foreign operatives had somehow been able to manipulate actual votes. Reports by the CIA and other agencies that he made public that day did not back up his most extravagant claims. But Trump suggested that a foreign government may have stolen the 2020 election from him, and that it could strike again.

Democrats consider that speech a dress rehearsal for next week’s elections. For years, Trump has claimed that foreign governments possess the power to hack electronic voting machines to change the outcome of a race. Election-security experts and lawmakers told me that they expect him to trot out the same claims again if Republicans lose large numbers of seats in the House and Senate. And they’re concerned that he’ll use classified intelligence reports as a pretext for trying to seize ballots or stop vote-counting by the states.

“We start with the premise that the president is going to do that,” Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters last week. But according to the most recent intelligence that Himes said he had seen about foreign threats to the election, U.S. adversaries haven’t changed votes. “We have never seen an operation to actually interfere,” he said.

Years of reporting from intelligence agencies and election-monitoring groups backs Himes up. Foreign governments disseminate propaganda and try to undermine confidence in the political process, and they seek to influence policy, sometimes through espionage. But there is a big difference between influence and interference, which experts define as manipulation of an election with the aim of altering the outcome. Top Trump officials have sought to prove that foreign actors worked with Democrats and other “deep state” interests to deny Trump a second term in 2020, only for their theories to come up empty. Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard went so far as to obtain voting machines from Puerto Rico and test them for evidence of tampering. Her probe found none.

One reason voting machines are so secure is that they’re not connected to the internet. “It would be extremely hard for a foreign or outside actor to reach the actual vote,” Lawrence Norden, the vice president of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center, told me. “And we have a paper backup of almost every vote that is cast in the United States at this point,” he added. So even if a hacker managed to flip a vote from one candidate to another on a computer tally, election officials could spot the discrepancy. Norden said that, in his view, foreign governments aren’t the major concern this season. Instead, the dominant source of worry is closer to home. “The new threat in this election is the administration,” Norden said.

Real limits constrain Trump’s ability to interfere in the midterms, even if he tries to do so. The Constitution gives states the power to administer elections, and U.S. law prevents a president from carrying out what many experts consider a nightmare scenario of “nationalizing” the vote. “A mere declaration by the president is not going to be enough legally to justify going in and trying to seize voting machines or ballots,” Richard Pildes, a professor at NYU School of Law, told me. Federal agents would need a warrant to take control of election equipment or ballots, and first they’d need to persuade a judge there was probable cause that a crime had occurred. Any classified intelligence reports might have to be shown to a judge, Pildes said. Even if the government was successful, it cannot legally remove the ballots themselves from state custody, and must rely on copies or images of them, he added. “There’s certainly no power in the executive branch to take over or nationalize the election process,” Pildes said.

A White House spokeswoman told me that Trump was focused on prosecuting election crimes, including voter fraud, and on strengthening election infrastructure. The Department of Homeland Security has offered physical security and cybersecurity services to states and localities. “The only ‘concerns’ about election security are being caused by radical Democrats refusing to enact basic election security measures, supported by the majority of Americans, including voter ID and citizenship verification to ensure only Americans are electing America’s leaders,” the spokeswoman, Laruen Biss, said in a statement. “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections.”

[Read: Trump still hasn’t found what he’s looking for]

Should Trump claim that foreign operatives are changing votes, Himes and his counterpart on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, told reporters they would call the president’s intelligence advisers and ask for the underlying facts. Himes said that he told CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, “When the president makes that announcement, you will answer your cellphone to give us information about what’s happening.”

A spokesperson for Clayton’s office told me that since he was confirmed this summer, he “has made it clear” to the leadership of the House and Senate committees “that he is available to them 24/7 on any issue.” A CIA spokesperson told me, “Director Ratcliffe is responsive to CIA’s Oversight Committees and will continue to be available as appropriate.”

Recently, House committee members met with career staff in Clayton’s office who monitor threats to election security. It’s a smaller group these days, after cuts by the administration, Himes said. “But we got a lot of confidence that they are doing their job, that if the president were to demand that they make something up, one way or another, we would learn about that,” he said.

The threat profile from U.S. adversaries this fall is similar to what it’s been before other major U.S. elections in recent years. Russia continues to spread misinformation aimed at undermining public confidence in the political system, voting machines, and Democrats in particular, according to lawmakers and election-security experts. In some cases, Moscow-aligned actors are making deepfake videos with the help of AI to spread false allegations of misconduct. China has focused more on local races and influencing specific policies, often by recruiting agents in the United States. (In May, a former mayor of a Los Angeles suburb pleaded guilty to acting as an illegal foreign agent, primarily by promoting Chinese propaganda.) As for the Iranians, who historically have tried to influence U.S. elections, they appear more focused this year on keeping gas prices high by disrupting traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

Foreign influence has been a prominent feature of American politics for a decade now, since Russia used propaganda and selectively leaked emails to divide voters and denigrate Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton. But true interference would be novel, alarming, and contradicted by U.S. intelligence agencies’ best estimates about what foreign adversaries actually hope to achieve.

Norden said that both before the election and just after, Russian influence groups are likely to again sow divisions and political discord. One Russian propaganda group in particular, Storm-1516, was active in the 2024 election and could come on the scene again, he said. But peddling misinformation, however corrosive, is not the same thing as flipping votes. Meanwhile, Norden said, the Trump administration has laid the foundations to undermine the public’s confidence in the outcome of the election. That is its own kind of influence operation.

[From the October 2026 issue: The election deniers’ long game]

Intelligence officials seem aware of that particular risk. Back in July, when Trump tried to suggest that China might have had a hand in his loss, the declassified documents that the White House put on its website didn’t substantiate those claims. One CIA document that garnered significant attention from lawmakers and security experts contained a summary of China’s aggressive efforts to exert influence on American politics and economic policy. But it didn’t claim that China had ever interfered and changed votes.

If any renewed claims of foreign interference by Trump next Tuesday, or in the days that follow, are to be believed, they will require the sort of evidence that he has so far been unable to supply.