What Is Election Interference?
Over the past few years, we have all been conditioned by the media, by deep state bureaucrats, by the intelligence community, and by politicians from both sides of the aisle to simply accept the notion of election interference both as a fact and as an existential threat to American elections.
We have also been led to believe that it is the government's responsibility to combat this phenomenon, which is primarily portrayed as a foreign threat. However, not many seem to have questioned the premise of this concept itself.
One of the most effective approaches to understanding an issue like this is to examine the use of a term over time. Here’s what Google Trends reveals when you search for the frequency of the term “election interference” over the past two decades:
Source: Google Trends
So, when we move beyond superficial talking points and engage in actual analysis, it quickly becomes evident that the term election interference was essentially nonexistent before Donald Trump entered the political arena. This raises two possibilities: either election interference is a genuine threat that inexplicably went unmentioned since the dawn of the internet, or the concept of election interference was fabricated by Trump's opponents as a means to undermine him.
The answer in this case is quite obvious: if election interference were a real threat, we can be pretty sure we would have heard about it in the years before Trump appeared on the scene. However, it is not real—at least not in the sense that has been described.
So, let’s break this down: what exactly is election interference? Was it election interference when former President Lyndon Johnson miraculously found a batch of ballots, all of which were in his name and the quantity of which was precisely what he needed to overturn the 1948 Senate primary election in his favor? Was it election interference when Cook County in Illinois, aka Chicago, deliberately miscounted votes in the aftermath of the 1960 presidential election in a way that just happened to put John F. Kennedy over the finish line? Was it election interference when political operatives in North Carolina's 9th Congressional District harvested ballots, forged signatures, and filled in votes?
Of course not. Directly interfering with ballots and ballot counting is more accurately termed election fraud. There are laws against election fraud. However, there are no specific laws addressing election interference. This is why those in power often misuse ambiguous legislation, such as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, to target perceived wrongdoing. To be fair, outright election fraud is not what the media and DC elites depict when they discuss election interference, although they do like to muddy the distinctions. What they describe is a far more nebulous concept: the idea that someone, somewhere, disseminates information with the intent of manipulating voters' opinions. This is what they did when they kept telling us about Russia Russia. You see, while Russia Russia did not actually alter any ballots, they allegedly purchased a few Facebook ads and thereby somehow managed to get American voters to elect Donald Trump. That was the excuse in 2016. The new election interference narrative is that Russia Russia allegedly paid a fringe Canadian YouTuber, Lauren Chen, whom most people had never heard of, to create videos criticizing things that Chen was criticizing anyway, like the Ukraine war. From that, we are then supposed to extrapolate that Russia Russia is again interfering in the 2024 election to help elect Trump.
For the sake of argument, let's accept that it is true that Russia purchased Facebook ads or paid Chen to air videos. What that boils down to is that speech is employed to influence people's thinking. That is the argument. This is what we have been conditioned to perceive as a heinous crime. But isn't that simply a description of democratic discourse? Don't all media outlets engage in this practice all the time? Doesn't everyone who talks about politics do this all the time? And it’s not just politics. Whenever information is disseminated, it is usually intended to influence the recipient. That’s why we have conversations.
Some might argue that it's different when Russia does it, labeling it as election interference. But how exactly is it different? Is it because the information is untrue? Well, for starters, that is not the argument that is being made. The argument being made is that because Russia pays for the information to be shared, this automatically renders it election interference. But Chen, who reportedly received payments to air videos critical of the Ukraine war and authoritarian Covid measures, was posting those kinds of videos regardless.
According to the notorious 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which President Obama created to undermine the incoming Trump administration, Russia allegedly swung the 2016 election in favor of Trump by broadcasting segments on its state news channel, RT, that were critical of Hillary Clinton. Not that it affects the conclusion, but, similar to Chen in 2024, the allegation is not that these segments contained false information; rather, it is that they were aired at all. This is fundamentally incompatible with the principles of free speech. Free speech encompasses not only the right to express oneself but also the right to choose what to hear. It protects both speakers and listeners.
That should be the end of the discussion, but it gets even worse. At its peak, RT was viewed by only a few tens of thousands of people in the United States. Lauren Chen’s channel had similar viewership figures. In stark contrast, the recent presidential debate on ABC attracted tens of millions of viewers. Yet, unlike RT and Chen’s channel, which merely emphasized common viewpoints among Republican voters, ABC’s so-called moderators fabricated a litany of fake narratives out of whole cloth. They relentlessly pounded Trump with fraudulent accusations and misleading fact-checks while allowing Kamala Harris to evade scrutiny for her statements, many of which were false. Furthermore, ABC selectively chose topics that were advantageous for Harris while ignoring ones that would have helped Trump, such as the economy and the circumstances of Biden’s ouster by backroom elites.
If election interference were a genuine threat to the survival of the Republic, ABC would be among the first to face severe repercussions. Yet, no one is calling for jail time for ABC’s election interferers. We have all come to accept that dishonesty, particularly from the media, is part of the discourse. As distasteful as it may be, it still falls under the umbrella of free speech. This is the crux of the issue: what has been presented to us over the past eight years as something profoundly sinister, a threat to the very fabric of our nation, is merely free speech.
The recharacterization of free speech as election interference is a tactic devised by the elites to target Trump. That is its sole purpose.