Russia Isn’t the Only One Meddling in Elections. We Do It, Too.<br />That said, the methods they used in this election were the digital version of methods used both by the United States<br />and Russia for decades: breaking into party headquarters, recruiting secretaries, placing informants in a party, giving information or disinformation to newspapers.”<br />His findings underscore how routine election meddling by the United States — sometimes covert and sometimes quite open — has been.<br />In recent decades, the most visible American presence in foreign politics has been taxpayer-funded groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which do not support candidates<br />but teach basic campaign skills, build democratic institutions and train election monitors.<br />Thomas Carothers, a scholar at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace, recalls arguing with a State Department official who<br />told him at the time, “Yeltsin is democracy in Russia,” to which Mr. Carothers said he replied, “That’s not what democracy means.”<br />But what does democracy mean?<br />The United States “absolutely” has carried out such election influence operations historically, he said, “and I hope we keep doing it.”<br />Loch K. Johnson, the dean of American intelligence scholars, who began his career in the 1970s investigating the C. I.A.<br />officials told Mr. Johnson in the late 1980s that “insertions” of information into foreign<br />news media, mostly accurate but sometimes false, were running at 70 to 80 a day.
