New York (CNN) As the 2020 presidential campaign heats up, individual states are ramping up education efforts to counter the threat posed by foreign disinformation campaigns to US elections.

A lack of action at the federal level has prompted many states to craft their own programs designed to counter foreign efforts to undermine American democracy and educate the next generation of voters in schools.

"It harms our democratic process when disinformation is at any point fed to voters in our democratic process," Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told CNN. "So I do think as secretaries of state, we have a responsibility to it take to the people."

Declassified intelligence reports on Russian meddling, by design, refuse to analyze the effectiveness of American opinion. And though most of Russia's known propaganda efforts in the 2016 election were unsophisticated — armies of trolls with often strongly partisan opinions on polarizing subjects — they were effective enough to be widely quoted in the media and cited by a number of political figures, including Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, Donald Trump's then-campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, and Michael Flynn, who went on to briefly serve as Trump's national security adviser and was later charged and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations with Russia's ambassador.

The Department of Homeland Security found no major foreign hacking campaigns dedicated to derailing the 2018 midterm elections. But the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, the agency dedicated to fighting disinformation tactics, alerted Facebook on the eve of that election of dozens of accounts and pages operated by Russia's Internet Research Agency, the "troll farm" that was active on social media in 2016, which the company promptly deleted.

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