Meddling in the Ballot Box

As long as there have been American elections, foreign powers have sought to influence them. George Washington and John Adams were targeted by French revolutionaries during 1796, and Nazi Germany tried to undermine President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reelection campaigns.

Dov H. Levin, a professor of international relations at the University of Hong Kong and the author of Meddling in the Ballot Box: The Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions, accepts as fact that powerful governments will intervene in other nations’ elections for strategic purposes. America has certainly done plenty meddling of its own, mostly during the Cold War (significant interventions in Argentina and Guatema