Fresh Fears of Election Interference

Former President Donald Trump is famous for making dubious claims about election interference. Last week, however, his presidential campaign really was hacked by Iran, suggesting 2024 could see the kind of foreign interference that was the subject of intense scrutiny in the 2016 race.

Bad actors in Iran, in addition to adversaries in Russia and China, remain a top concern heading into November. In addition to breaching the Trump campaign through a phishing scheme, Iran reportedly attempted to hack into Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign.

The hackers’ aim may be to help one candidate or the other – or U.S. intelligence officials – or perhaps simply means to exploit preexisting divisions within American society and spread concern about election integrity ahead of November.

“We have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting Presidential campaigns,” said a statement released by the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Iranian officials have denied the allegations as “unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing,” saying Iran had no motive to interfere with the election. The hack comes at a time of heightened tension between America and Iran: U.S. ally Israel is on the brink of war with Iran and Iran-backed militias.

The attempted interference echoes 2016, when Russian military intelligence operatives hacked the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and released politically damaging emails to Wikileaks, which in turned released a tranche of 20,000 emails days before the start of the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Trump and his campaign were investigated for nearly two years over possible connections to the incident, but no evidence of collusion between the Trump team and the Russian state was discovered.

There is significant concern that even just the threat of foreign interference might sew distrust in elections, in a society where broad swaths of the country are already skeptical of election integrity. Fully 69% of Republican and Republican-leaning Americans think Biden’s 2020 win was illegitimate, largely thanks to a narrative Donald Trump emphasized about election fraud.

Trump and his team insisted fraud was afoot in the lead-up to the 2020 election, and when Biden won many of the swing states Trump had taken in 2016, Trump claimed that the Democrats stole the election. Vote recounts were demanded, and no evidence of fraud was found.

Trump refused to drop the issue and urged his supporters to protest outside the U.S. Capitol on the day Vice President Mike Pence was supposed to lead the Senate in a verification of the election results. The large crowd of Trump supporters stormed the capitol in an effort to “stop the steal.”

Now, Trump is once again on social media and at rallies insisting the 2020 election was not secure and that the 2024 election is also unlikely to be fair. At a rally in North Carolina last week, the former president suggested that the Democrats are planning another great theft.

“When, if, but when – I have to always say ‘if,’ you know, because they cheat,” Trump said of his opposition. “I would say ‘when’ if they didn’t cheat, but they cheat. That’s the one thing – they’re great at cheating in elections.”

Trump repeatedly called the many indictments against him “election interference,” as they kept him off the campaign trail earlier this year. He has said that Democrats and the mainstream media are “fraudulently manipulating” polling data in order to win the election.

In the run-up to the 2024 voting, Republicans and Democrats are maneuvering in ways that do not necessarily bode well for a smooth transition to a new administration. Asked if he would accept the election results this time, Trump answered with a big caveat – as he did in 2016: “If everything’s honest I’d gladly except the results,” he said.

For their part, Democrats have already filed a lawsuit in Georgia against a state election board that adopted new rules Democrats say will “invite chaos.” Which is precisely what may ensue.