Author: Laura Rosenberger
Affiliation: Director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy
Organization/Publisher: Foreign Affairs
Date/Place: October 26, 2020/USA
Type of Literature: Article
Word Count: 2056
Keywords: Foreign Interference, America, Russia.
Brief:
As the date of the US presidential election looms, American society may be more vulnerable to outside attempts to sow doubts about the integrity of the democratic process. Reports raise questions about whether the administration of US President Donald Trump is politicizing these concerns – as the president himself incessantly questions the integrity of the election. Many Americans no longer know what to believe. FBI Director Christopher Wray has testified that Russia is “very active” in efforts to discredit Joe Biden and to sow discord. Such a scenario has a precedent, as Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential election via the Russian Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked company that carries out influence operations, and which actually increased its activity after Election Day in 2016 according to a bipartisan report. According to the author, the United States is more prepared to face many of these threats than it was four years ago to secure the infrastructure for the American elections. Russia is not the only foreign player on the cyber front—there is also Iran and China. The FBI, CIA, and independent experts have assessed that Iran’s goals are to sow discord among voters and undermine public confidence in the American electoral process. While China does not aim to influence the elections or undermine confidence in them as much as it aims to shape the public policy environment in the United States, it pressures the political figures that it deems to be contrary to China’s interests, and to move away from anti-China. The United States today is more divided than it was four years ago as a result of all this manipulation and lack of transparency.
By: Taqwa Abu Kmeil, CIGA Research Assistant
