[2] Unlike other forms of foreign intervention, such as through military force or economic coercion, FEI aims to achieve a political outcome in the targeted country by affecting how its citizens vote, rather than by directly imposing regime change (such as backing or initiating a coup).
[4] Consequently, some scholars and organizations, such as the United States National Intelligence Council,[5] distinguish between methods of FEI that constitute interference—in that they clearly violate the domestic laws of the target state, such as disrupting vote counting, providing illicit funds to a party or candidate, or launching cyberattacks on a political campaign—and influence, which alter incentives or beliefs of voters through evidently legal means, such as public threats or endorsements by foreign officials, offering preferential trade terms, or revealing legally held but damaging information about a party or candidate.
[9] According to Dov H. Levin's 2020 book Meddling in the Ballot Box: The Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions, the United States intervened in the largest number of foreign elections between 1946 and 2000.
Combining these figures, the U.S. and Russia (including the Soviet Union) thus intervened in 117 of 938 competitive elections during this period—about one in nine—with the majority of those interventions (some 68%) being through covert, rather than overt, actions.
[11][b][c] In contrast, a 2019 study by Lührmann et al. at the Varieties of Democracy Institute in Sweden summarized reports from each country to say that in 2018 the most intense interventions, by means of false information on key political issues, were by China in Taiwan and by Russia in Latvia; the next highest levels were in Bahrain, Qatar and Hungary; the lowest levels were in Trinidad and Tobago, Switzerland and Uruguay.