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- [00:00]
Dov Levin
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- [00:20]
Marshall Po
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Dov Levin
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- [00:23]
Marshall Po
45% off sitewide plus a free professional measure. Rules and restrictions may apply. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical, there are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:39]
Eli Karetney
In October of this year, Javier Milei won a decisive electoral victory in Argentina's legislative elections and secured a mandate to move forward with his proposed austerity measures. As indicated in a much discussed New York Times article, the election was not just a referendum on Milei's policies. Hanging over the election was essentially a threat made by US President Donald Trump, who said he would deny the 20 billion billion economic aid package promised to Argentina if Malay's party did not win the elections. While this was not the first time an American president tried to influence another country's election, it was the first time that such a large financial incentive was used to sway the outcome of a foreign vote. Just how unique and worrisome is this example of election interference? How does such overt interference differ from the COVID influence operations that Russia, for example, is infamous for? Are we now in an era where foreign power seek to influence election outcomes in entirely new ways? Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is Eli Karetney. I teach political theory and international relations at Baruch College and and have for years been a Deputy Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate center of the City University of New York. With our Director, John Torpy on leave this year, I have the privilege of serving as the Institute's Interim Director, which means I have the honor of hosting this podcast. Here with me today to discuss foreign election interference is Dov Levin, Associate professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on partisan electoral interventions and on strategic public diplomacy. His book Meddling in the Ballot the Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions, published by Oxford University Press, won the American Political Science Association's Robert Jervis and Paul Schroeder Best Book Award for 2021. Welcome Dove. Thanks for joining us on International Horizons.
- [03:59]
Dov Levin
Thank you very much for this invitation and for this warm endorsement of my book.
- [04:05]
Eli Karetney
Let's start with the election in Argentina. Your research was referenced in the New York Times article about Trump's efforts to openly sway Argentina's election. How did Trump's actions differ from previous efforts by American presidents who also employed what you call the vote with us or else tactic?
- [04:25]
Dov Levin
Well, I mean, there were two key things that made this intervention unusual. The first was the identity of who exactly was aided by Trump, and the second one was its overall size in material terms. So just to make first something very clear in this regard, unlike some claims in the media, the intervention methods used by Trump in this election were not unusual. The use of explicit threats or promises before an election in order to swing an election, as he did in this Argentinian case, is one of actually the more common methods of election interference that is used in more than 30% of all cases of such meddling since the end of the Cold War, for example. Actually, it's even more commonly used for this purpose in the post Cold War era than the tools infamously used by Russia in the 2016 US elections. And likewise, some pre election supply of foreign aid of some kind is not unusual. So one thing that was unusual was the overall size and potential material cost to the United States. The explicit pre election promise of Scott Besson to defend the currency peg of the Argentinian currency, no, the peso by the US treasury to the tune of nearly US$20 billion and the immediate direct purchase of Argentine pesos worth around $1.5 billion by the United States are unusually large in the cost the United States could potentially pay if something went wrong and say, for example, the currency peg broke and the Argentine currency collapsed. And there's only a handful of special cases since World War II in which the United States was willing to bear such large potential or actual material costs in order to intervene in foreign elections. The two closest in size to this one in material terms were the American intervention in Italy in 1948, which cost the US government in today's money something like $2.9 billion. And the American intervention in the 1996 Russian elections through the IMF of around US$15 billion in loans by the IMF in today's money, when which the United States was on the hook for about 5 to 6 billion dollars of them as well as other far name to it. And my best guess why was it so large is that basically Argentina's problem with its puzzle peg was so bad and so urgent that the top administration was simply forced to provide material aid in advance before the midterms because mere pre election promises or threats would not be enough to significantly aid Malay in these midterm elections. And the other thing that was unusual was who exactly was aided, in other words, Malay and his party. Now the United States, when it intervenes in foreign elections, usually does not support candidates or parties who are so ideologically extreme as Malay is. In other words, a guy who openly describes himself as a libertarian or an anarcho capitalist, how to dramatically shrink the state and so forth. And my best guess is that basically Tom Somalay as a theological bedfellow, you know, I remember Doge and you know, Elon Musk was his chainsaw, so he was nevertheless open to backing him.
- [08:18]
Eli Karetney
Thank you Duff. As you say, this is nothing new. You mentioned the example of Clinton enabling the large US backed IMF loan package in support of Boris Yeltsin. Other examples that you give in your book. Or Obama using foreign aid to pressure Lebanese voters not to support Hezbollah in 2009 and Trump supporting Boris Johnson in 2019 as well as Trump supporting the right wing candidate in the Polish presidential election. In fact, and I found this especially interesting, you say that this problem has been around for as long as we've had elections in the modern world. That Alexander Hamilton even discussed this as one of the reasons for the electoral college. Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [09:06]
Dov Levin
Yeah, I mean basically foreign interference in elections is as old as the existence of elections. In other words, even in the pre modern era, before they were national level elections, just elections of a particular, say the Pope or of the King by a group of nobles, men There were foreign powers who saw it as important thing to basically intervene in. So we know, for example, that multiple papal elections were intervened by various major European powers because of the importance of the papacy. So one reason why we have these days such an elaborate scheme for electing the popes, all of these cardinals being each one in their separate rooms, the white smoke coming out of the chimney, and that they cannot meet and consult each other and so forth, was actually part of a scheme by one of the popes to basically prevent meddling by foreign powers. But it could literally lock the electorate in a building that could prevent foreign powers for meddling in the elections and determining who would be the next pope. So basically that was one common thing that happened in many throughout the European history and likewise in countries that had election for monarch in their country, like Poland, and at some points in time, also in what became later Romania, so to speak, and some other parts of Eastern Europe. So there was basically the king was selected by a group of senior noblemen, just like the end of the Game of Thrones where they choose the next king. That was actually historical. That's how some monarchs were chosen in medieval and early modern Europe. So there were multiple interventions of these kinds by foreign powers and such elections for monarchs. So, for example, multiple Polish elections were the targets of Russian intervention, so to speak, as well as by other countries, to the point that the term Polish elections became a term for massive foreign interference and dysfunctional political society, so to speak. So when the founding fathers of the United States were thinking about creating the new United States, they were leaders of history and they were aware of all of these issues. And we know from multiple letters they had between them that they were deeply worried of foreign powers meddling in the future US Elections. We have Jefferson predicting that the elections of the US President would be the focus of meddling from around the world as well as, you know, where Alex Hamilton and others being worried. So he was thinking about various ways to prevent it. And Alex HAMILTON From Federalist 69, I believe, basically claims that the reason why the United States has the Electoral College is a way to prevent foreign meddling. In other words, the sinking was because the original Electoral College was basically, you know, people would elect electors who would then decide on their own independently who would be the president afterwards. In other words, they were, in today's term, unpledged electors, all of them that, you know, if you could, all of them, you know, each one would be in their own, you know, state legislature on their own, deciding who would they choose. And then they'd all send their, you know, decisions, you know, to Philadelphia, the then capital of the United States and headed to Washington D.C. that would be a way to prevent foreign powers from meddling in the elections and trying to have what Alexander Hamilton called a creature of their own as president. As was discovered even in the lifetime of the founding Fathers, the Electoral College was not good even at that, so to speak. And they were already intervening in the mid-1790s to elect George Washington's successor.
- [13:44]
Eli Karetney
So two kinds of two forms of electoral or election interference you discuss are covert and overt. I'd like to talk a little bit about that. And two cases you explore are one, the American intervention in the 2013 Kenyan elections and the Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections. What makes these representative of overt versus covert interference?
- [14:15]
Dov Levin
I mean, what's the name you call it? Well, I mean each one is describes, you know, one of the most common methods used for this purpose, either covert or overt. In other words, the Kenyan the American intervention in the Kenyan election in 2013 was a pre election threat by a then Senior Secretary of State, Assistant Secretary of State Johnny Carson before the election, threatening serious consequences if Kenyatta would win because he was at the time under the ICC warrant for the violence that happened a few years earlier in Kenya, so to speak. So that was one classic way in which the United States intervenes overtly. And as you know, the one in 2016 famously involved the spreading of fake news and the propaganda as well as hacks and leaks of two information. So that was a common example example of the COVID methods. So each one is a good example of such meddling because it describes a major common way in which stuff is done either covertly or overtly. So when you talk about differences besides the message, so in terms of effectiveness, I find for example that interventions done overtly are usually more effective than covert interventions when it comes to helping decide you want to win in an election election. So you know, for example I find in a statistical analysis that I could constructed that I conducted, you know, on a data set of such meddling that overt interventions increase interveners vote share by 3% more than covert interventions do and what's name you call it. So one difference is that basically overt is more effective than covert interference, so to speak. And that is for various reasons, such as for example the fact that there's a limit to how much resources can be provided in secret to the assisted side without the high risk of exposure which could of course cause an election destroying backlash. So when you do an Intervention overtly, you can provide more resources on average, with small resources usually increasing the chances of success. Another reason why it's more effective is that overt interventions are, you know, many methods that are feasible to be done overtly can try to affect, you know, voter behavior directly or also directly. So, you know, in overt interventions, the great power is usually speaking to the voters above the politician's head. You know, you can think about an election like, you know, a competitive bidding game where the candidates try to win by trying to outbid each other with various promises. You know, one side says if you vote for me, you are going to have a chicken in every pot. The other side says, if you vote for me, there'll be two chickens in every pot. And then the fine power comes in and says, if you vote for me, there will be two chickens in every pot and a brand new car. So basically, because great powers like the United States have a lot of resources at their disposal, usually much more than those of the local politicians, it can outbid them, shifting more votes to the preferred side. And in covert interventions, in contrast, they can only try to affect voter behavior indirectly, give resources of some kind to enable the assisted side to say, I don't know, place more better TV ads and so forth. So that is one difference between them, that one is more effective than the other. And in terms of tactics, another difference is in terms of tactics that you know, while some methods of electoral intervention can be done both covertly and overtly, with the differences that I noted in regard to the amount of resources and their usual effectiveness, nevertheless, many techniques of electoral intervention can only be done, or only can be done in a way that has any chances of helping the preferred side in an election, either covertly or overtly. Like the thing we talked about a minute ago about pre election threats or promises, for example, have no chances of working and shaping public opinion in the desired way if most of the public of the intervened country does not know about the threat or the promise. And likewise, if you try to spread, say, fake news openly, local authorities will block your media organs from your country and quickly debunk your false claims or the local public will just ignore them. So that would be the main differences between these two methods. And one reason why these things are good exemplars of such method, because each one illustrates a method that can only be used really and either covertly or overtly.
- [19:42]
Eli Karetney
You mentioned there several different forms of electoral interference besides promises of financial support or threats to withhold such support. You've also spoken about and written about the provision of campaign funds to a preferred candidate or preferred party, as well as other tactics, including quote unquote dirty tricks. What are the most common tactics foreign powers use and what are some examples of these dirty tricks?
- [20:14]
Dov Levin
Well, I mean there's, you noted correctly, some of them and there's a large variety of such methods and I categorize them into five major categories except that message of threats or promises. So basically, as you noted, one method is campaign funding, which can be given in three different ways. One is directly, for example the provision of cash or for quote unquote, a padded contract with a firm affiliated with that party. Another is in kind material aid, in other words, office equipment, newsprint for the party, newspaper or for leaflets, vehicles for the party's campaign, subsidization of campaign activities or so forth. In other words, material aid in a kind of A third way that such campaign funding can be given is indirectly with the fund power working like a de facto superpower, for example, who funding independent organizations that are bringing likely voters of the preferred side to depose an election day and so forth. So that's one message. Another message is campaigning assistance. In other words, increasing the capabilities or effectiveness of the assisted side's election campaign. And that can be done for the provision of non monetary or non material assistance, like for example training locals of the preferred side in advanced campaigning, party organization and get out the vote techniques, designing for the preferred side campaigning materials, sending campaign experts, sometimes some of the best and brightest used in American election campaigns to provide on the spot assistance to the preferred sites, campaign and messaging strategy, polling analysis and so forth. Another method is giving and taking aid. It can include, e.g. sudden new provision of foreign aid or significant increase in existing aid or other forms of material economic assistance like loans, improved loan conditions, loan guarantees or preferred trading conditions right before the elections. And in the terms of taking aid, it can be including the withdrawal of part or whole of that aid and so forth. Another way is other concessions. In other words, you can give up costly benefits to the targets which have non economic or non material benefit in their value or main value like the old MasterCard commercial. Some stuff are priceless, some things you can give the other side are priceless. They cannot be measured in monetary terms, but the electorate really cares about like evacuating a military base, supporting a highly contentious claim by the target for particular piece of disputed series, releasing of POWs or war criminals, or signing or advising an alliance treaty was the target. You know, all kinds of these non material concessions. And as for the dirty tricks which which as you know, which you know is in is which you noted, which has become really, you know, the most famous over the last decade thanks to Russian meddling. So by those tricks I mean, you know, acts that were designed to directly harm one or more such candidates or parties which are competing against the side which the, which the intervener really prefers. One type of such dirty tricks, by the way, don't try them at home, includes the dissemination of fake news on the rival candidates or parties or the spreading of real information that puts them in bad light, which as we saw in the case of the 2016 US elections is one of the stuff that Russia did. Another type of dirty text that is sometimes used involves political map reshaping, like for example, encouraging the breakup of the rival sides, political coalition or party and a run up to the election by saying no, by being a faction in that coalition to split off the side that the United States wants to harm. And by the fact that they are leaving, they reduce their vote share. And it can also involve, for example, in single round presidential elections or first past the post parliamentary systems, or people or parliamentary systems that have elections to their parliament who's first passed the post, bribing some rival candidates to stay in the race and act as spoilers who siphon away resources or more accurately vote from the undesired candidate or the undesired party. And the third type of dirty tricks involves outright physical sabotage, like damaging or destroying arrivals, offices or campaign materials, sometimes literally. We know cases that the US government actually hired someone to come into the warehouse full of campaigning materials, making sure that they all burned down conveniently before the election so they could not make more of them. Or spying and the rival campaign activities and plans, or disrupting that rivals fundraising efforts by threatening would be donors that they would suffer if they donate to that party, and so forth. And a final and fourth type of dirty tricks includes assistance to the preferred side, usually an incumbent one, and conducting voter fraud. You know, like literally like in the. For example in the case of the 1968 Guyanese election where the CIA secretly helped the incumbent Bernhard Forbes, among other things, to register tens of thousands of fake overseas voters. As was discovered in a later documentary, some of those fake voters included horses.
- [26:28]
Eli Karetney
Thanks for that dove. You write in your book that partisan electoral interventions are usually quote unquote, inside jobs. What do you mean by this?
- [26:39]
Dov Levin
Well, I mean by that close cooperation, or as it became famous the term in the last few years, quote unquote collusion between the intervener and and decide that it is trying to assist in that election on the conduct of the partisan electoral intervention, what methods are exactly used, how are they deployed before the election, what to avoid doing, and so forth. This can come either from the assisted side agreeing to get such an intervention on its behalf. When it's asked, the fine power comes to that a particular candidate and says, would you like help for me? I know that you are in a bit of trouble, would you like some bags of money or any other help? And the site says, okay, help me. Or you know, in some cases it sends a message to the fan power and says, you know, I'm in trouble, save me, I need help. If not, I lose the election. And this is basically the reason why it's a key factor in most electoral interventions is because that an electoral intervention basically means running or helping someone's election campaign. In order to succeed in such meddling, the foreign intervener needs the same kinds of high quality information that domestic candidates have and use for this purpose, like for example, healthy specific electoral data, the preferences of important voter groups, what are effective messages, and so forth. And if the intervener doesn't have this information, it's likely to fail or even hurt the preferred party or candidate. And the foreign power needs this outright assistance of the local actor in order to gain that information. Because the foreign powers usually have very limited knowledge of the domestic politics of other countries, let alone of how exactly to manipulate an election in another country in order to benefit one of the sides, you know, contesting it. And usually the only way that they can acquire this really hard to find information, because politicians usually don't like tell all idiots guides how to win an election in my country, for obvious reason, they keep that stuff hidden. And the only way they can usually acquire this really hard to find information is for gaining the cooperation of people who have it from years of firsthand experience in that country's domestic politics and in winning various elections, which, namely you know, the politician or the party that they are aiding in that election. So accordingly, if a would be intervener fails to gain the cooperation of the would be assisted side, you know, the assisted side says to it, which we know happened in a few cases, you know, no, please don't help me if this ever comes out, that's my political end, forget about it. I can work, I can survive on my own, thank you, but no need. And the pound power's chances of success in an electoral intervention are so low did they usually decide to avoid intervening in this manner in an election? And so, you know, so basically this inside job cooperation doesn't necessarily have to be with the candidate itself. You know, in a few cases, the electoral of electoral interventions, the cooperation may have been instead between the foreign power and senior members of the election campaign of the assisted side, with the aided candidate itself, you know, being left in the dark about the foreign involvement, you know, but nevertheless, in most cases, for pretty obvious reasons, the assisted candidate knows about this foreign interference in the election on its behalf and plays a key part in the. In the cooperation with, you know, the foreign power.
- [30:26]
Eli Karetney
So thinking about the calculations going on on the part of the foreign power intervening, you write that great powers will typically not intervene unless they fear that their interests are somehow endangered by an opposing party or candidate with very different policy preferences. Can you say more about these calculations? In what situations are they more likely to intervene and less likely to intervene? And what's the danger of blowback? What do you mean by this idea of blowback?
- [30:59]
Dov Levin
Well, I mean, basically the idea here is, is that great powers, when they think about intervening, are aware of the fact that if they intervene in elections and decide they're intervening against them, know it, they can make them really angry at them. You know, they can turn a not friendly side into their outright enemy. You know, one of many of the biggest feuds in politics come from one guy trying to get the other guy defeated in one way or the other 20, 30 years back in, in history. So they are aware that they could potentially alienate us and turn them into an enemy, make their life worse, so to speak. And likewise, what sneymy call it, in many cases, great powers can simply negotiate away the differences. The United States, for example, has a lot of resources. If an unfriendly candidate or party wins an election, it could something just negotiate away the disagreement. That new party or candidate wins an election on the promise to kick out an American base. For example, the US Constitute and says, look, if you just keep that base, I can double your foreign aid. Wouldn't you like your local population to have more school lunches or more new roads? So many times the local leader says, well, yeah, I'm willing. I prefer to have, you know, more roads or more school lunches over this military base. If you're willing to double my aid, I will swallow it, although I really don't like it. So the only cases where they are willing to do it is when they feel like basically they are dealing with a very inflexible side. You know, the other side really has very inflexible preferences which are very different than those of the foreign power. And they can be inflexible because they're simply ideologically committed to them. Very hostile anti American candidate in the American case, a very anti Soviet or anti Russian case in the Russian case or so forth, or their own electorate is very opposed to the stuff that the United States or Russia and other intervener wants. And they know that if they make those concessions, they can pay a big price from their own party base. So usually only in those cases where they feel like there's something very significant that that particular candidate is threatening in their interest regarding that country and that that candidate is, you know, basically is inflexible and cannot negotiate away the differences, would they be willing to, you know, intervene in this way. And when it comes to blowback, it can come, you know, as I said, part of it by alienating the candidate that you don't, that you are intervening against, and part is if it's done in the wrong way, you know, if you are intervening in a very nationalist public publicly, there can be a nationalist backlash against you that will alienate the public and harm the side you're trying to help. There's multiple ways in which this blowback can be.
- [34:12]
Eli Karetney
Considering that the significance of the outcome is part of the calculation going on on the part of the foreign power, it surprised me to learn from your research that there's a distinction between ordinary elections and founding elections, in which case, in the case of founding elections, foreign powers are maybe less likely to interfere with because the results can be ineffective or even counterproductive. Can you elaborate on this distinction between ordinary elections and founding elections?
- [34:49]
Dov Levin
Sure. Basically, what makes basically founding elections, to make it clear what they are basically the first competitive elections ever in that country, or after a period of a significant period of full authoritarian, authoritarian rule, a period of 10 years or more of authoritarianism, or the first time there was ever really a competitive election in that country. And what makes founding elections different in that case? In other words, much more likely for such interventions to backfire and hurt rather than harm. The preferred side, by what I estimate is about 6.7% on average, is that none of the sides competing in them knows much about winning elections. So in those cases, all of the main candidates or parties running in them know very little about winning elections locally because they never ran in them before. In other words, for the local politicians, the equivalent of riding the bicycle for the first time, so to speak. So many of us first experience of riding the bicycle you ride, then you fall and are not quite a nice way. So if a foreign power tries to intervene in that type of election. The side they are colluding with does not know what that will be, what will be helpful for it, because they have very little experience in running in elections. So what happens in many of those cases that they ask for the wrong things from the great power and the great power obliges and unintentionally makes that the Saudi are trying to help political situation worse rather than better.
- [36:32]
Eli Karetney
Very interesting, very interesting. I want to step back for a moment and look at the kind of a big picture frame. Your research indicates that between the Americans and the Soviets or Russians, there were foreign interventions in one out of every eight national level elections. Originally, I believe your research indicated one out of nine. And you recently updated the data set, which now reflects the fact that one out of every eight national elections between 1946 and 2000 saw some form of election interference. So where I want to kind of get a big picture here, you know, as I, as I tell my undergraduates, you know, despite international norms of non interference in the internal affairs of other states, we expect to see this kind of interference. We expect to see that great powers in pursuit of their own advantage will in fact, when they calculate that it's in their interest to do so, they will in fact intervene. So the big picture question is why is this form of meddling so worrisome?
- [37:45]
Dov Levin
I mean, I think it is. I would just make a small collection, it's 1946 to 2014, that it's one out of eight. I would say that it's quite worrisome because that such interventions can have a lot of negative effects when a foreign power intervenes. I said it can frequently give a boost to the assisted side, depending on the exact method, between 3 to 6% on average. In many cases it determines who wins. So it means that in many cases the foreign power, rather than the electorate, decides who is their leader. So that reduces that country's sovereignty and harms one critical democratic principle, the fact that the electorate gets to choose its own leader, so to speak. So that's one important harm to the very basic principle of democracy. Another harm that I find in subsequent research. And it frequently increases the chance it causes democratic erosion or even increases the chances of a democratic breakdown. That is, when this type of stuff is done covertly, it frequently increases the chances of that country if that assisted side wins power to be elect to cause that democracy to collapse or severely erode, so to speak. So using that data set and doing statistical analyses on it, I found that basically there's a significant increase of such intervention in A democratic election, if it's successful, when it's done secretly to bring about a leader, that ends that country's democracy. One reason is that, for example, leaders that are good in keeping secrets are not model Democrats. And likewise, a lot of the message used in this stuff when it's done in secret, like giving bags of money, are frequently stuff that induce corruption and can make the leader corrupt. That then spreads corruption as well, so to speak. So one bad effect is it can cause that country's democracy to be eroded, to, in some worst cases, scenarios, even to collapse. And just to make it clear, I did that statistical analysis in 2015. And so there was no. So there was, you know, I was doing this analysis long before, you know, any of the events of the last decade or so, so to speak. And likewise. So that's one negative effect. Another negative effect that I find in my analysis is that it increases the frequency of domestic terrorism when it succeeds. And the reason is that basically when intervention like this succeeds, if it's public or it becomes exposed, it leads some of the more extreme partisans of the other side, the side that lost, to feel like, you know, like peaceful methods are not effective. It provides support, you know, to the. To a belief that, you know, their countries, actually their leaders are not really their leaders, but quote, unquote, puppets of, you know, a foreign power. And that makes them open, you know, to the propaganda of terrorist groups to, you know, they say one of the favorite stuff of propaganda of terrorist groups in democracies to get people to join them is, well, it's not actually a democracy, it's a fake democracy. Your leaders actually controlled by shady powers behind the scenes. Guess what? If a foreign power just intervened in the election and that guy won or that gal won, that looks a bit more plausible to people on the far. On the extremes of one of the political sides that makes them more conducive to joining a terrorist group or in some cases, creating their own terrorist group. So these are some very important effects. There's also evidence that this stuff causes shifts in their policies, causes more cooperation between the assisted side and the intervener when it's successful. So all of those stuff can have many major important effects on that country, which are many of them very negative. So there's a lot of reasons to be really concerned and worried about such meddling. Yes.
- [42:16]
Eli Karetney
So when I ask you about what we can expect in the coming years looking backwards, the Cold War era was, of course, a period of intense ideological rivalry. And in the immediate post Cold War era, we were told by Francis Fukuyama, for example, that the democracy was now going to become the way of the world. So in light of both the kind of Cold War ideological competition and the post Cold War democratic triumphalism, to hear that one out of eight elections were influenced by foreign actors. I don't want to sound too cynical, but that sounds like a relatively limited amount of interference. What can we expect expect going forward? Can we expect that number to increase? And what role might technology play enabling foreign powers to intervene more frequently, more effectively? What can we expect in the coming years?
- [43:23]
Dov Levin
I mean, I would separate your question to two parts. Would we have increases in general? I would say it would depend largely about the geopolitics in the next decade or two. So what I see is that in eras in which there is very high geopolitical tensions between countries, you see much more interference than in more quieter decades. Again, there's interference in every decade. But in eras of decades of higher political geopolitical tensions, there's more because there's more situation that the two sides see as, quote, unquote, threatening to them. One of the most interventionist eras of elections by the US government has been the 1950s, the early cold War United States really seeing a lot of geopolitical threats sometimes justified many times not around the world, so to speak. So basically, I would say that one thing that could determine whether you'd see more or less is whether there are more or less geopolitical tensions. If we see really heavy geopolitical tensions over the next decade or two, you would see a lot more, so to speak, in this regard. As for technology, the thing you noted, I don't think that it's likely that most technological development that are sometimes discussed in this regard in the media would affect the frequency of such meddling in the near future, with one special exception. I'll get to it in a moment. And that is because they don't make it more feasible for foreign powers to meddle in practice. So, for example, some people are afraid that AI will make it easier for, say, I don't know, Russia to create fake news and propaganda for meddling in elections. And that may be indeed the case technically. You know, I'm sure that in that there's now some, maybe now some layoffs in Russia's, you know, fake news manufacturers because of AI or something like that, that may indeed be the case. You know, one case of technological unemployment that no one will cry about. But the thing is that for such propaganda to work in an electoral context, in other words, you know, for it to change voting intentions on election day, you need to know what exact messages or what exact type of fake news will harm the side you want to hate and shift votes towards the side you like. So in other words, the real bottleneck for more meddling, in other words, is knowledge of what exact types of, say, I don't know, fake news to create, not the ability to create it. And in that key issue and what's name you call it and the new text they are talking about in the foreseeable future will not make it more easy, easier or common to, or more common or see more meddling in this regard. And the only special exception I could see as to the effects of technology is as to the growing use of voting machines or even online voting for voting in elections in some countries as well as, you know, in some US states. Why is that? Because that particular technological shift can open the door for a pre modern form of such interference. In other words, you know, interference in the voting tallies. And in that case, meddling would proliferate, given that message. And basically before the modern era, I know what I talked about a few minutes ago, that you know, when elections occurred for the Pope and medieval Europe or for the king in various European countries, foreign powers didn't just sometimes try to change how the voters voted indirectly, but in some cases they tried to change the vote tally directly. Like say for example, bribe many of the voters to change their vote or bribe the person in charge of counting the vote. Now, in the early modern era, when elections began to include big parts of the general public and not just some no noblemen or some cardinals, this form of intervention, however, stopped. And this was because that such direct manipulation became simply too hard. When you are dealing with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of polling stations and millions or even hundreds of millions of voters. And the big problem is that any voting system that uses in some ways computers potentially makes that form of meddling feasible again. And that is because such systems are open to hacking whose cyberspace biofiling power. You know, when online voting systems, like anything that you know is online, can be hacked. And as you know, even very secure networks were hacked that way by state, even minor state actors like North Korea, so to speak. And likewise, for example, though voting machines are supposed to be not connected to the Internet in theory, in practice they are usually connected to the Internet directly. You know, in most cases, you know, through the need to insert a program with the names of the parties and candidates which, you know, the polling personnel receive over the Internet. And the gunpowder can potentially Use that indirect Internet access to like, for example, infect the voting machine with malware attached to that program or bribe a few technicians who are in charge of installing the voting program to add a malware to the voting program. And, you know, that's in the same way that according to some media reports, the United States and Israel got the Stuxnet virus into those Iranian centrifuges in the early 2010s. And since then, you know, the technology became even, you know, more easy for this purpose. And if that happens, the foreign power can then use this access to change the voting results directly. In other words, the voting power, the foreign power can just, you know, break in, in this way into the system and change directly the results. You know, they can literally see what are the results being counted. And they, for example, have, you know, the malware take 200,000 votes from the party it hates and give it to another party that it likes. And in that case, it does not need any special knowledge about both the preferences, only about what wants to win in that election. And such an intervention would be very hard to detect given the recent decline in the accuracy of polling nowadays. You know, we stop being surprised these days when, I don't know, even, you know, that lady in Iowa, which is known as the wonder woman of, you know, voting in Iowa, when she got it wrong, we were not that surprised because, you know, the decline of the quality of polling means that we're not surprised when the polling are wrong anymore. Luckily, it seems that in many democracies, they're becoming increasingly aware of this issue and are beginning to move away from such digital voting and counting systems or at least acquiring some kind of paper to it to identify. So hopefully that nightmare scenario will not happen in practice. But if there's one way in which technology can cause voting meddling to become more common, it would be, I would say that one. In other words, if there's more voting machines around and more online voting and no one does anything to protect them more, or go back to, you know, paper ballots and going back to voting like it's 1979, this can be a way in which can become more common. Who meddling directly in the vote tallies.
- [51:22]
Eli Karetney
Very interesting and unexpected, I have to say. You know, we think about, like you say, the AI and the kind of growing sophistication of deep fakes. You expect that that will not necessarily make foreign electoral intervention in that form more prevalent, but maybe in the crudest possible types of intervention we may see. Very interesting. I want to take us back to the present kind of where we are right now in the current moment. And as a final question, I want to ask you for some comments about what happened in the recent elections in Honduras. It looks like Trump's preferred candidate is not going to win. Are there any lessons to draw from from this case? Was the nature of Trump's interference different in any way? He has said he's now alleging voter fraud. He's threatening that there will be, quote, unquote, hell to pay. Are there other such cases of foreign interference that were not successful and which led to post election retribution from the unsuccessful intervening party?
- [52:33]
Dov Levin
Certainly there have been some cases in which there has been a retaliation by the great powers when their assisted side does not succeed. In some cases they fail and nevertheless try to negotiate and sometimes succeed in negotiating and then there's no quote, unquote, further consequences. But in some cases when they fail, they sometimes escalate. So like for example in Chile in 1970 after the United States failed to prevent Salvador Allende from being elected the President of Chile. And we know that Richard Nixon became really, really angry, brought the then head of the CIA hams to his office and told them, I want you to remove Allende by any means necessary and if necessary, quote, unquote, make the Chilean economy scream. And it created and it led to multiple attempts to overflow Allende, led to the assassination of General Snyder and then the funding of mass protests against Allende and destabilized Chile in a way that probably led eventually to Allende's overflow three years later. So sometimes this can lead to an escalation, to more extreme message of regime change. It can also be simply following through on the punishment. You know, I promised you that I would take away aid if you will not vote for that guy, I took away aid, so to speak, you are now going to suffer in that economic way. So in the case of Honduras, it's not yet clear to me what would happen exactly in that case. I mean, Honduras was a bit of a surprise that Trump even cared about this case. It seems that someone told him that the incumbent leader is a communist or is very left wing and that led him to decide that he had to intervene against them to prevent the left wing candidate from winning, so to speak. It's possible that the person that is elected can find a way to appease Trump and prevent him from, what's name you call it, punishing Honduras. Given that, I'm not sure that Trump has really deep feelings in this regard. So I'm not 100% sure what would happen in this case. It's possible that the new leader of Chile, sorry, of the Honduras, will be able to appease top in some way, just like we've seen with all of these tariffs, like the Swiss bringing a big block of gold and succeeding in convincing Trump to reduce their tariffs. If the Honduran leader maybe has some way to a key stomp in some, I don't know, some kind of economic concessions or something else maybe can persuade Trump to not enact the punishment or things like that. So it's not yet clear what would happen in this case, but it's certainly possible of some kind of severe punishment to Honduras, some kind of taking away of foreign aid and so forth. And we know of some cases in history where it became even much worse than that.
- [56:16]
Eli Karetney
Wow, a horrifying prospect. What's happening now in South America, the thought that we may be seeing Trump despite being the anti regime change president, that we may be seeing actions both in Venezuela leading in that direction and potentially in Honduras as well. Thank you, Dov Levin. This has been a fascinating talk considering how important this issue is and also how limited academic work has actually been done on this. I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more from you in the coming years. Thank you so much, Dov.
- [56:54]
Dov Levin
Thank you very much for inviting me.