Foreign powers are trying to interfere with U.S. elections, but voting machines haven’t failed us yet
While we can’t know if the efforts by foreign powers have changed people’s minds, the evidence so far indicates they haven’t compromised the tools we use to count the votes.
President Trump’s Thursday night address will reveal purportedly declassified intelligence about voting machine vulnerabilities, Reuters reported. That prompted us to take a look at what’s known about foreign interference in past U.S. elections and the safety of U.S. voting equipment, what President Trump is doing at two federal agencies that support elections, and what would happen if large scale foreign interference is discovered after the fact.
Foreign influence and interference
The threat of foreign interference is real, with cyberattacks, foreign propaganda, and straw donors all strategies being used by U.S. adversaries. This has been widely reported over recent years, so you’re probably familiar with it — in which case, jump to the voting machines section below. Otherwise, here’s a recap:
During the 2016 presidential campaign between then-candidate Donald Trump and candidate Hilary Clinton, Russia hacked and released damaging Democratic emails through WikiLeaks. That year a “Russian government attorney” met with Donald Trump’s son Don Jr. to provide “information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia,” according to emails sent before the meeting (which was the widely reported 2016 Trump Tower meeting). Later during the campaign, WikiLeaks communicated with Trump advisor Roger Stone about the hacked emails before they were publicly leaked, and with Don Jr. about publicizing the hacked emails. 12 Russian intelligence officials were indicted for the hack that exfiltrated the emails. Separately, an individual connected to Russian intelligence messaged with Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort about polling data.
(The Steele Dossier, opposition research commissioned by Clinton’s campaign to discredit Trump, especially around Trump’s relationship with Russia, and which was largely discredited, was leaked by U.S. journalists in 2017. But after unsubstantiated claims that it was a part of a Russian intelligence operation, the Trump Administration’s prosecution of one of the sources failed when a jury acquitted the source on all charges. It wasn’t foreign interference.)
In 2020, the Biden Administration concluded that foreign powers were seeking to influence the 2020 presidential election on both sides: “China prefers that President Trump … does not win reelection”, “Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden,” and “Iran seeks to undermine U.S. democratic institutions.” Iranians were later charged in 2021 for threatening Democrats to vote for Trump, hacking a state voter registration website, and attempting to pin the hack on the Democratic Party. In 2024, Iran attempted to discredit the Trump campaign by stealing and leaking campaign documents.
Russian agents were sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2020-2021 for influence operations. In 2024, the Department of Justice indicted Russians for propping up an American media company as a front for Russian propaganda: It was a right-wing media company featuring well-known commentator Benny Johnson and others.
These operations mostly targeted public opinion. Media manipulation, including through social media and AI-generated answers, is likely to be a significant issue in the years ahead.
In 2019, individuals were also charged in a straw donor and laundering scheme to route money from a Russian national to U.S. state and federal political campaigns. (Lev Parnas, who separately worked with Trump to research allegations against President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, was one of the individuals convicted of the scheme.) In 2025, a Russian and an Uzbekistan man living in Florida submitted 132 fraudulent voter registrations — they both pleaded guilty.
In a highly unusual move, former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard attended an FBI raid of election ballots in Fulton County, Georgia early this year, suggesting a foreign connection to a crime. That might be the subject of Trump’s address. Little more is known about the raid, and Gabbard resigned in June.
Voting machines have been secure, so far
Hacking electronic voting machines became a national issue 20 years ago when a college classmate of mine demonstrated manipulating vote totals in voting machines made by Diebold in 2006 (the machines were not part of an actual election).
But voting machines have come a long way since then, with paper records of votes and audits, and hacking voting machines usually requires physical access to each machine, precinct by precinct. It’s impractical to manipulate enough votes that way to change the outcome of an election. That’s the hope.
And the evidence supports that, so far. A 2019-2020 report by Senate Republicans found that while the Russian government targeted U.S. elections infrastructure from 2014-2017, “The Committee has seen no evidence that any votes were changed or that any voting machines were manipulated” by Russia.
Voting machine irregularity conspiracy theories have been thoroughly debunked: Fox News agreed to pay voting machine maker Dominion nearly $1 billion in 2023 to settle a defamation lawsuit over Fox personalities’ extensive fabrications that Dominion machines flipped votes from Trump to Biden in 2020. Newsmax settled with Smartmatic, another voting machine maker, and admitted it lied about the company’s machines and ties to Venezuela. Smartmatic also won a similar case against Mike Lindell and MyPillow for their lies and is in ongoing litigation with Fox.
Cases of tampering with voting equipment, at least the ones that are found out, are rare. In 2024, a Colorado county clerk was convicted of tampering with the county’s voting machines, and Trump advisor Sidney Powell pleaded guilty to a similar charge in Georgia. They were, after the election, fishing for evidence in support of Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was rigged.
In the two decades since the Diebold demonstration, most states have moved to paper-based systems with machinery used for tabulation and accessibility support, along with auditing election results. As of 2025, only Louisiana uses direct recording electronic systems exclusively according to Ballotopedia. More on that below.
Although Trump has been crying “rigged” since losing a state primary election in 2016, neither the Department of Justice nor any state has yet brought charges against anyone — foreign or domestic — for large scale election crimes of any sort. That’s really all you need to know to see what’s real and what’s not. See if he announces an indictment Thursday night.
Trump hamstrings federal agencies that support elections
The threat on voting machines remains anyway. That’s why the U.S. Election Assistance Commission in 2025 recommended that states use “voting systems that are auditable and software-independent … that have a paper record of every vote, such as paper ballots. . . . While most jurisdictions already use voting systems that produce a paper record of every vote, the EAC has adopted this policy to encourage the few remaining election offices to follow their lead.” The EAC is a legally-bipartisan federal agency that supports states in enhancing their voting systems through research and grants. In 2025, Trump issued an executive order directing the EAC to “protect the integrity” of elections (ostensibly). Yet early this month Trump fired all of the agency’s remaining commissioners, leaving the agency unable to take any further action.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the Department of Homeland Security, which Trump created in 2017, provides cybersecurity support to state and local elections officials. Last year, Trump cut CISA’s funding for election security, and the agency’s director position is vacant with no one currently nominated for Senate confirmation. (In a case brought by Republican states against CISA and other agencies for collaborating with social media companies to ban election-related (and other) misinformation, the Supreme Court ruled in 2024 against the Republican states deciding that CISA had not coerced the social media companies.)
Early last year, the Trump Administration also closed the Foreign Influence Task Force at the Department of Justice.
What if something did happen
The best time to secure an election is before it starts. The next best time is to challenge a result in court before the counts are certified.
When that’s not possible, individuals can be prosecuted for election-related crimes. Legislators in Congress can be expelled by a 2/3rds vote. The president can be impeached and removed by Congress. Or, more commonly, they can resign.
Back in 2012, former Rep. Michael Grimm was investigated for improperly seeking assistance from a foreign national in soliciting campaign contributions, among other crimes. Grimm resigned and served time in prison for unrelated tax fraud (for which Trump issued a pardon much later). In 2023 Rep. George Santos was expelled from Congress and in 2024 he pleaded guilty to wire fraud and identity theft after it was discovered that he had egregiously lied during his campaign and fraudulently solicited political contributions. (His federal sentence was later commuted by Trump.) In 2024, Sen. Bob Menendez was convicted of bribery and other charges, and then he resigned from the Senate. These recent cases are rare, however.
There is no process of recall by voters for legislators in Congress or for the president.
If foreign interference or improper vote tabulation is discovered, in which an elected legislator had no role, unprecedented questions would arise about the right response. Did the interference definitively change the outcome of the election? How would we prove it? Are the legislator’s constituents best served by the legislator remaining in office or without any representation in Congress until the seat is next filled? Would vacating the seat be giving the foreign power the outcome they wanted? There won’t be any good answers. And the bottom line is that elections must be decided by the votes. Anything else wouldn’t be democracy.
What you can do
We recommend working in the next election. Poll workers are trained to administer elections. There’s nothing like seeing how the process really works to put any concerns you might have about voting integrity to rest. It’s certainly a better use of your time than listening to politicians and talking heads stoking fears.