Election Meddling Is Surprisingly Common
By Joshua Keating Jan. 4, 2017
The 1948 Italian election was supposed to be a nail-biter, and one with potentially major consequences in the early days of the Cold War. Back then, Italy had one of the strongest communist parties in Western Europe, which relied on Soviet financial assistance, and the Americans’ recently established Central Intelligence Agency worried that the reds were about to establish a beachhead in what a memo to the White House described as “the most ancient seat of Western culture.”
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A little more than two weeks until Inauguration Day, and the incoming administration continues to dismiss, even just this morning, allegations that Russia deliberately interfered in the 2016 U.S. election by hacking and leaking information from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But interference by either Moscow or Washington in other countries’ elections isn’t unusual at all. A recent paper by Dov Levin, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Politics and Strategy, shows just how common it’s been.
Using declassified documents, statements by officials, and journalistic accounts, Levin has found evidence of interference by either the United States or the Soviet Union/Russia in 117 elections around the world between 1946 and 2000, or 11.3 percent of the 937 competitive national-level elections held during this period. Eighty-one of those interventions were by the U.S. while 36 were by the USSR/Russia. They happened in every region of the world, though most commonly in Europe and Latin America. The two powers tended to focus on different countries, though Italy was a favorite of both, receiving eight interventions by the U.S. and four by the Soviets.
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/01/04/u_s_and_russian_election_meddling_is_surprisingly_common.html
