Of the 97 national elections in free or partly free countries reviewed for this report during the period from 8 November 2016 to 30 April 2019, a fifth (20 countries) showed clear examples of foreign interference, and several countries had multiple examples (see the appendix to this report).17 It’s worth noting that confidence in attributions to foreign actors varied widely. In ideal circumstances, a government source made the attribution, but often the attribution was more informal. Our intention was not to provide an exhaustive list of every alleged case of foreign interference but instead to capture the spread of states experiencing the phenomenon and illustrative examples of different methods. Details on all examples identified through this research are set out in the appendix.

Country analysis

Of the 97 elections and 31 referendums reviewed, foreign interference was identified in 20 countries: Australia, Brazil, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Malta, Montenegro, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, Ukraine and the US.

Of those 20 states, 14 were deemed ‘free’ and 6 ‘partly free’. Just over half (12 of 20) of the states were in Europe, which is unsurprising given Russia’s leading role in this area (Table 1).

Table 1: Regional spread (alleged actor)

Table 1 shows the strong geographical link between the target and actor. With the exception of one anomalous case involving the UK (which was alleged to have supported a Yes campaign in a Montenegrin referendum), Russia was the only state interfering in European elections. Similarly, in the Indo-Pacific, China was the only actor (except for Indonesia, where Russia was also involved). Iran’s interference in Israel has a clear connection to its adversarial relationship. In the Americas, there’s more diversity among the actors, but Russia remains the dominant player.

China’s versus Russia’s motivations

Russia’s and China’s interference reflect different national approaches. For Russia, a key objective is to erode public trust in democracies and to undermine the idea that democracy is a superior system.18 This might be driven by President Putin’s personal drive to make the West ‘pay’ for its destruction of the Soviet bloc and by the desire to mount a case inside Russia that democracies are flawed and therefore not a model that Russians should aspire to. As a consequence, Russian interference is inherently destructive to democratic systems, even at the same time as Moscow may seek to promote a party or a candidate thought to be more sympathetic to its interests.19

Chinese interference seems more strategically focused on ensuring that its interests are promoted across all party lines. Unlike the Russian stance, one party’s interests don’t appear to be favoured at the expense of others (with the exception, perhaps, of Taiwan20). Instead, all consequential parties are in its crosshairs with a view to making them more sensitive to core CCP interests. China also seems to pursue a broader front of influencing activities (many of which aren’t captured by this report’s focus on cyber-enabled methods), which can include financial donations,21 aligning the policy interests and public comments of party figures to CCP political goals and suborning prominent individuals to advocate for Beijing’s interests. China doesn’t seem to be as openly intent on doing damage to the credibility of foreign political systems so much as aligning those systems to its strategic objectives.22

Methods

A review of the dataset reveals considerable repetition in methods. There are multiple examples of social media platforms being exploited to reach target populations, often used in concert with state-sponsored media outlets. There is, however, considerable variation in the way social media are exploited. This ranges from organising rallies and amplifying the voices of favoured groups to suppressing voter turnout and exacerbating existing divisions.23 There are also several examples of system breaches, again to pursue different ends, including stealing and leaking emails and accessing voter rolls.

Given the lack of detail in many media reports on foreign interference, it’s difficult to provide a list of the most common methods. Frequency of use also does not translate into impact. For example, the breach of one person’s email account (such as the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta) can have much greater impact than any single social media post or perhaps all of them.

Types of interference

This section examines our three defined buckets of interference.

Targeting of voting infrastructure and voter turnout

Direct tampering with election results is perhaps the most affronting form of foreign interference because it most directly overturns the will of the people.

Ukraine has long been one of the main targets of Russian election interference efforts and has also suffered the most egregious effort to alter the technical results of an election. As Mark Clayton reported back in 2014 (a date outside the scope of the mapping period covered by this report):

Only 40 minutes before election results were to go live on television at 8 p.m., Sunday, May 25, a team of government cyber experts removed a ‘virus’ covertly installed on Central Election Commission computers, Ukrainian security officials said later.

If it had not been discovered and removed, the malicious software would have portrayed ultra-nationalist Right Sector party leader Dmytro Yarosh as the winner with 37 percent of the vote (instead of the 1 percent he actually received) and Petro Poroshenko (the actually [sic] winner with a majority of the vote) with just 29 percent, Ukraine officials told reporters the next morning.24

There are multiple means by which adversary states could interfere with the technical results of elections. Various methods could be used to prevent citizens from being able to vote (for example, by rendering electronic voting booths unusable or corrupting the voter roll so eligible voters are removed and turned away from voting booths25) or reducing the turnout of certain voter groups with known dominant voting behaviours (for example, via online campaigns that encourage a boycott26 or targeted misinformation that has the effect of deterring certain voter groups27).

The result itself could be altered via various means. Electronic voting booths could be maliciously programmed to record a vote for Candidate A as a vote for Candidate B instead, the transmission of votes tallied at individual voting booths could be intercepted and altered, affecting the final tally, votes in the central tally room or system could be altered remotely or, as was attempted in Ukraine, the release of the vote outcome could be tampered with (a tactic unlikely to go unnoticed, but likely to cast doubt among some about the integrity of the poll and of the national electoral system).

Research for this report identified six countries that had experienced interference targeted at voting infrastructure and voter turnout: Colombia, Finland, Indonesia, North Macedonia, Ukraine and the US (Table 2).

Table 2: Targeting of voting infrastructure and voter turnout

Examples included the targeting of voter registration rolls in Colombia,28 Indonesia29 and 21 US states,30 a denial of service (DoS) attack on a Finnish web service used to publish vote tallies,31 a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Ukraine’s Central Election Commission,32 and the use of social media to suppress voter turnout in North Macedonia33 and in the US.34 In the US, an Oxford University report noted that Russian operatives tried to suppress the vote of African-Americans by pushing the narrative that ‘the best way to advance the cause of the African American community was to boycott the election and focus on other issues instead’.35 While it’s difficult to determine the effect of the disinformation campaign by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the Pew Research Centre reported that the voter turnout of African-Americans fell in 2016 (see appendix, page 19).36

The attackers identified in public reports (sometimes speculatively) were Russia (in one instance, combined with Venezuela) and China. Russia was by far the dominant actor.

Interference in the information environment around elections

It’s difficult to detect foreign interference during elections with high confidence in a timely manner.

Consider this example from Bret Schafer, which fooled multiple media outlets: Have you met Luisa Haynes? She was a prolific force in the #BlackLivesMatter community on Twitter. In just over a year, she amassed more than 50,000 followers; and her outspoken, viral takes on everything from Beyoncé to police brutality earned her hundreds of thousands of retweets and media coverage in more than two dozen prominent news outlets.

She was, on the surface, a symbol of a new generation of Black activists: young, female, and digitally savvy—except—she was fake.37

At the International Cyber Policy Centre, journalists periodically approach us about websites and social media accounts they suspect are run by foreign agents or trolls. Mostly, investigations lead to dead ends, or to apparently real people who are hard to definitively classify as foreign trolls rather than colourful citizens.

Now that the traditional media have lost their old gatekeeper role and control over the information environment, it’s far easier for foreign adversaries to inject themselves into national debates and much harder to trust what you’re reading and seeing. When Australians were asked in 2018 ‘Do you feel like the news you read or watch gives you balanced and neutral information?’, 54% said ‘never’ or ‘rarely’. There were similar results in democracies around the world38 (in historical terms, in the US the proportion of people reporting ‘a great deal’ and ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in newspapers has dropped from a high of 39% in 1990 to 23% in 201839).

While avenues for altering the technical results of elections are limited, opportunities to manipulate the information environment are limited only by creativity. Methods might include amplifying a party’s existing narrative using social media accounts that have assiduously built up followers over lengthy periods,40 or creating and spreading disinformation to undermine a candidate (for example, the state-owned Russian news agency Sputnik calling French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron an agent of ‘the big American banking system’).41 It might involve infiltrating genuine activist groups and attempting to increase polarisation,42 or it could involve the creation of fake personas who provide inflammatory commentary on divisive issues, as with Luisa Haynes. Often such campaigns seek to prey on and exacerbate existing social cleavages with a view to exploiting them to manipulate the information environment in the desired direction.

While the impact of this manipulation isn’t as direct as interfering with key election infrastructure, its ease and cheapness, combined with the difficulty of timely detection, make it a preferred method. Foreign interference in the information environment was identified in 10 states: France, Israel, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Spain, Taiwan, Ukraine and the US (Table 3).

Table 3: Interference in the information environment

Examples included information disruption campaigns targeting French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron (such as the theft and release of 21,000 emails just before the final vote in the election—a technique likely to be of enduring utility for adversaries)43 and the spreading of disinformation by Russian media outlets Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik in Catalonia44 and Italy with headlines like ‘Migrant chaos, the beginning of a social war’45 or claiming in the Macedonian referendum that, depending on who won, Google would remove Macedonian from its list of recognised languages.46 Chinese-backed disinformation campaigns targeting Taiwan were reported as using zombie accounts and China’s so-called ‘50 Cent Army’ of online trolls and commentators to amplify the dissemination of disinformation.47 In Ukraine, Russia sought to buy or rent Ukrainian Facebook accounts to disseminate disinformation.48 There was also an unusual case of the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office being accused of funding British PR agency Stratagem International to help the Macedonian Government with its ‘Yes’ campaign on the changing of the country’s name, thereby opening up the opportunity for Macedonia to join the EU and NATO.49

Research identified four alleged actors: Russia (the most dominant by far), China, Iran and the UK.

Long-term erosion of public trust in public institutions

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of foreign interference is the longer term corrosion of public trust in the institutions that underpin democracy.

For example, the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Defending Democratic Institutions Project has looked at Russian efforts to weaken trust in the rule of law as administered by the justice systems in both the US and Europe.50 In Australia, China is alleged to have attacked the Australian Parliament in 2011 and 2019, as well as three political parties in 2019.51 And in several countries attacks on electoral commissions responsible for impartially conducting elections have been reported.52

If foreign adversaries can destroy trust in these pillar institutions and related organs of democracy, democracy quickly unwinds.

Making this phenomenon even harder to confront, it’s often not immediately clear whether a campaign is being run by a nation-state or by conspiracy-oriented individuals. During the Brexit vote in the UK, what appeared to be a conspiracy theory (that had first surfaced during the 2014 Scottish referendum) spread online, urging voters to use pens, not pencils, to complete their ballot papers.53

The not-so-subtle inference was that government officials were rubbing out ballots completed in pencil and changing people’s votes (figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1: ‘I voted in pencil’

Source: Professor Brian Cox, Twitter, 23 June 2016.

Figure 2: ‘Use pens plea’

Source: BBC News, 22 June 2016.

It’s difficult to know how damaging these sorts of campaigns are for public trust in critical democratic institutions or whether they’re state-backed. What’s apparent is that polling has picked up distrust in key electoral institutions. The Australian voter experience report revealed that just 42% of Australians have a great deal of confidence in the Australian Electoral Commission’s ability to conduct an election, while a further 43% have ‘some’ confidence.54 In the UK, just 21% reported that they were ‘very confident’ and 48% said they were ‘fairly confident’ that the 2015 election was well run.55 While electoral commissions are generally off voters’ radars, trust in democracy collapses if people lose trust in those organisations’ ability to conduct elections impartially.

More significantly, there’s also been a dramatic drop in levels of satisfaction with democracy in Australia. Although once again it’s hard to track a causal relationship, it seems likely that democracies experiencing rising dissatisfaction with democracy would be more vulnerable to interference. The Australian voter experience report noted that just 55% of Australians “are satisfied with the way democracy works in their country nowadays. This places Australia on the lower end of established democracies, which typically have rates of satisfaction that exceed two-thirds. Historical data indicates that there’s been a dramatic fall in satisfaction. Data from the Australian Election Study in 2007 indicated that 86% reported being satisfied with democracy, falling to 72% in 2013”.56 Surveys such as the Lowy Institute Poll have tracked this dissatisfaction with democracy and speculated about its causes, but with no definitive answers.57

The Democracy Perceptions Index 2018 provides hints to the growing levels of public distrust in democracies around the world. It found that 64% of the public in ‘free’ countries (as defined by Freedom House) said their government ‘never’ or ‘rarely’ acts in their interest, compared to 41% in ‘not free’ countries. In Australia, a third of Australian adults say the government ‘mostly’, ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ acts in their interest (67% say it does so ‘never’ or ‘rarely’).58 While this is a large proportion of the population, it hasn’t yet resulted in French-style yellow vest protestors.59

In Australia and elsewhere, it’s highly unlikely that this dissatisfaction is driven entirely by foreign interference. Anxiety about large economic and social changes brought about by globalisation and technological development could all be in play.60 Longitudinal Gallup surveys have also picked up a long downwards trend in average trust in public institutions (Figure 3).61

Figure 3: Americans’ average confidence in public institutions over time

Quantifying examples of the long-term erosion of public trust is perhaps the trickiest of tasks, as in many cases more immediate efforts to shape public opinion (such as spreading disinformation) also have the longer term impact of eroding public trust in the media and other institutions. Efforts to erode public trust also typically exploit existing societal cleavages,62 making detection difficult and any additional impact from interference on pre-existing divisions hard to measure. However, for the purposes of this research, 10 states were identified as having experienced efforts to create long-term erosion of public trust: Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Germany, Montenegro, Norway, the Netherlands, Singapore, Ukraine and the US (Table 4).

Table 4: Long-term erosion of public trust

Examples have included the use of social media bots in Brazil to question the democratic model,63 amplification by Russia using Twitter bots of far-right Alternative für Deutschland’s warnings about election fraud,64 and systematic efforts by Russia to weaken ‘faith in the rule of law as administrated by the justice system’ in the US through the use of disinformation and the exploitation of ‘legitimate criticisms of the justice system’.65

The two identified actors in this category were Russia and China.

Limitations

There are several notable limitations to this research.

First, we focused on states and therefore missed private actors that are distorting democratic debates in similar ways. For example, there have been several cases of the commercialisation of Russian-like disinformation campaigns. Consider the group in the Balkans that built up popular Facebook pages with titles such as ‘Australians against Sharia’ and ‘Aussie infidels’ that targeted Australians to generate ad revenue.66 Future research could usefully explore the impact that these groups are having and how to counter them.

Second, our focus was on public cases, which perhaps tends to favour the identification of Russian efforts, given Moscow’s more overt and detectable methods and the media’s growing familiarity with its approach. Parallel research on CCP methods that the International Cyber Policy Centre is preparing suggests that Beijing often uses techniques that are harder to detect and longer term and so may be underreported. A broader methodology is probably needed to capture difficult-to-spot influence activities such as subverting policy positions and decision-making as well as long-term campaigns to cultivate supportive political figures and voices and silence, pressure or sideline critics.67

Third, the focus on foreign state actors has, of course, excluded domestic efforts to harness these same techniques, for example by political parties and local activists that may also be contributing to voter dissatisfaction with democracy and trust in institutions.

Fourth, there has been a tendency to favour English-language sources.

Finally, the increasing ability to micro-target voters and the difficulty of detecting many of the types of interference reported here mean that many examples could be being missed in the online information arena. Consider the case of a Russian-operated fake Black Lives Matter Facebook page that was only reported as suspicious because it used the phrase ‘Don’t shoot’—an expression that genuine activists had stopped using.68 The shift by major platforms such as Facebook to move from public broadcasting to private messaging will only accentuate this challenge.69