Introduction

Election interference is one of the most widely discussed international phenomena of the last five years. Russian covert interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election elevated the topic into a national priority, but that experience was far from an isolated one. Evidence of election interference by foreign states or their proxies has become a regular feature of national elections, and election interference is likely to get worse in the near future. Information and communication technologies afford those who would interfere with new tools that can operate in ways previously unimaginable: Twitter bots, Facebook advertisements, closed social media platforms, algorithms that prioritize extreme views, disinformation, misinformation, and malware that steals secret campaign communications. Defending Democracies: Combating Foreign Election Interference in a Digital Age tackles the problem through an interdisciplinary lens and focuses on: (1) defining the problem of foreign election interference; (2) exploring the solutions that international law might bring to bear; and (3) considering alternative regulatory frameworks for understanding and addressing the problem. The result is a deeply urgent examination of an old problem on social media steroids, one that implicates the most central institution of liberal democracy—elections. This volume seeks to bring domestic and international perspectives on elections and election law into conversation with other disciplinary frameworks, escaping the typical biases of lawyers—preferring international legal solutions for issues of international relations. Taken together, the chapters in this volume represent a more faithful representation of the broad array of solutions that might be deployed, including international and domestic, legal and extralegal, ambitious and cautious.

Foreign Election Interference and Open-Source Anarchy

Russian meddling in the 2016 elections in the United States sparked debates in liberal democracies about how to counter foreign election interference. These debates reveal the seriousness of the threat and the complexity of responses to it, including how to protect voting systems and what actions social media companies should take against disinformation. This chapter argues that international anarchy changes in ways that leading theories of international relations do not capture. The chapter develops the concept of “open-source anarchy” to understand how anarchy changed after the Cold War and to analyze why foreign election interference has gained prominence during the second decade of the twenty-first century. In open-source anarchy, changes in the structure of material power, technologies, and ideas permit less powerful states and nonstate actors to affect more directly and significantly how anarchy functions. The concept helps explain how Russia exploited the internet and social media to interfere in elections in the United States—the world’s leading democracy, foremost source of technological innovation, and most powerful country. Open-source anarchy also illuminates the struggles that the United States and other democracies have experienced in preventing, protecting against, and responding to foreign election interference.

Understanding Disinformation Operations in the Twenty-First Century

Remarkable developments in digital technologies have provided the conditions for a dramatic rise in state-sponsored disinformation operations crossing international borders. Spreading dezinformatsiya has a long history, but today it is done with a volume and accuracy that has left the targeted societies deeply destabilized as facts and events become sharply contested among citizens. This chapter is a descriptive work illustrating the essential components of this activity and draws three important conclusions. First, because disinformation aims to twist the truth in subtle ways when key facts remain secret and unavailable, exposing an operation becomes a tedious and difficult task. Second, the new digital world has opened the door to omnipresent operations that occur below the threshold of armed conflict and are accelerated exponentially by big data warehousing and algorithms that allow individualized targeting during an election cycle. Third, when disinformation operations disrupt the flow of information during a political campaign, the candidates involved and the process itself emerge with a dangerously eroded legitimacy. With a view to fill in critical missing data, the chapter ends with a clarion call to allow access for social scientists to study in detail of what is happening in the opaque public square of online social media wherever more political understanding is being fashioned.

Should We Worry about Partisan Electoral Interventions? The Nature, History, and Known Effects of Foreign Interference in Elections

Ever since the exposure of the Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections for the Donald Trump campaign, there has been much discussion of its causes mixed with deep concerns about the possibility of future meddling of this kind by Russia. There has been far less discussion, however, about the wider phenomena this particular intervention is just one recent example of. This chapter provides an overview of what scholars have found so far about partisan electoral interventions. It first describes the main methods through which foreign powers are known to have tried to intervene in elections in other countries in order to determine their results, as well as the long history of such efforts, going back to the very start of competitive national-level executive elections. The chapter then briefly summarizes the current academic research on the effects of such interference on the target, from its immediate effects on the intervened election results to their medium- and long-term post-election effects on the targets welfare (such as the quality of its democracy). Both parts illustrate that concerns about such foreign interference are indeed quite justified—it is a common, multifaceted phenomenon that can, in many cases, cause serious harm to its unfortunate targets.​

Weaponizing Information Systems for Political Disruption

Today, information systems are regularly weaponized for political disruption. This threat now encompasses electoral processes, given their increasing dependence on information systems both directly and indirectly. The chapter elaborates on a framing devise—ALERT (the Actors, Levers, Effects, and Response Taxonomy)—to study how information systems can be manipulated and the associated set of responses to such manipulation, which in turn can generate theories about election interference. Illustrative examples of such interference guide the reader through the ALERT framework in the foreign election interference context. Through the description of the ALERT framework and the copious examples reported, the chapter concludes by underlining the importance of a clear understanding of the dynamics related to the Actors involved in information warfare, the Levers used, the Effects in the political and, specifically, electoral fields, which all serve as a tool for obtaining appropriate Responses in the fight against weaponization for political disruption.

Conclusion: An Outsider Looks In

For problems of foreign election interference, international law is an important vehicle for promoting cooperation and combating the worst forms of human (and other) behavior. Nevertheless, scholars of international law engage these problems from limited perspectives. For example, law (including international law) does not deal well with large-scale bad effects that may result from the commission of many unfriendly acts that are individually legally permissible. Nor does international law seem able to handle nonstate actors whose electoral impact crosses national borders. Put differently, what is the meaning of “foreign” election interference when domestic actors are often willing and able to do what a foreign adversary might wish them to do? One important class of domestic actor is the useful idiot—the citizen who is easily tricked into spreading a message that advantages the adversary. A second class of actor, especially relevant for U.S. elections, is the U.S.-based social media company whose free services foreign adversaries use to influence politically relevant messaging. Lastly, international law scholars would do well to question the fundamental psychological limitations on human “rationality” on which many of their putative solutions are based; collaboration with social and cognitive psychologists would help in this regard.

When Does Election Interference via Cyberspace Violate Sovereignty?

When does foreign election interference via cyberspace violate U.S. sovereignty, and when do such violations warrant a response? When do violations of sovereignty constitute “armed attacks” or “acts of war”? This chapter posits triggers for discerning such violations of sovereignty. The rough determining factor ought to be whether activities in cyberspace were those of an authorized user. Malicious cyberspace operations that do not involve unauthorized activity should not be considered a violation of sovereignty (though they may be politically concerning). But any unauthorized state activity in another state’s networks (e.g., change of code or unauthorized access) ought to be considered a violation of sovereignty. While the U.S. Congress has the authority to “declare” war, what constitutes an “act of war” remains the discretion of the U.S. commander in chief and is almost entirely a political assessment. There is no defined legal or technical trigger to discern a cyberspace operation as an “act of war,” though something as simple as an information operation that caused mass rioting and death could conceivably be called an act of war (such as claiming the U.S. government created and disseminated the coronavirus). Notably, no cyberspace operation has to date been declared an act of war by any U.S. president.

Protecting Democracy by Commingling Polities: The Case for Accepting Foreign Influence and Interference in Democratic Processes

This chapter criticizes several methods of responding to the techniques foreign powers are known to be using to subvert U.S. elections. It suggests that countries do this when they have a legitimate stake in each other’s political deliberations, but no formal voice in them. It also suggests that if they accord each other such a voice, they will engage as co-deliberators with arguments, rather than trying to undermine each other’s deliberative processes; and that this will be salutary for all parties. It moots several methods for giving nations such a voice, ranging from inviting representatives of foreign powers to participate in debates in each other’s high-level elections, to having representatives of all nations vote in each other’s key elections or legislative bodies, or in international bodies constituted in recognition of the need for binding global deliberation about shared issues.

The Dangers of Forceful Countermeasures as a Response to Cyber Election Interference

Cyberattacks are increasing in frequency, publicity, and impact, making significant cyber episodes a hallmark of modern foreign policy. One subset of these cyberattacks is state-supported interference in elections. For this form of election interference, existing international law offers states limited response options. This predicament has led some state officials and international legal experts to champion creative interpretations of international law that would allow forceful retributions—or “forceful countermeasures”—on cyber election interferers to dissuade states from conducting online election interference. This chapter explores both the existing international legal framework that apples to cyber interference in elections and the proposals to accept the possibility of forceful countermeasures. It concludes that although countermeasures are available above the use-of-force threshold, states should resist engaging in forceful countermeasures when addressing cyber election interference. States can employ other mechanisms, including drafting a new treaty regulating interference in the digital age, rather than stretching countermeasures doctrine beyond a prudent scope.

The Free Speech Blind Spot

The current system for monitoring and removal of foreign election interference on social media is a free speech blind spot. Social media platforms’ standards for what constitutes impermissible interference are vague, enforcement is seemingly ad hoc and inconsistent, and the role governments play in deciding what speech should be taken down is unclear. This extraordinary opacity—at odds with the ordinary requirements of respect for free speech—has been justified by a militarized discourse that paints such interference as highly effective, and “foreign” speech as uniquely pernicious. But, in fact, evidence of such campaigns’ effectiveness is limited, and the singling out and denigration of “foreign” speech is at odds with the traditional justifications for free expression. Hiding in the blind spot created by this foreign-threat, securitized framing are more pervasive and fundamental questions about online public discourse, such as how to define appropriate norms of online behavior more generally, who should decide them, and how they should be enforced. Without examining and answering these underlying questions, the goal that removing foreign election interference on social media is meant to achieve—re-establishing trust in the online public sphere—will remain unrealized.