The ballot-box ledger.
When a foreign power interferes in an American election, the United States calls it an attack on democracy — and it is right to. The uncomfortable part is the scoreboard: by the only systematic count we have, no country on earth has meddled in more foreign elections than the United States.
This is the part of the ledger that doesn't require a coup or an invasion — just money, propaganda, and a thumb on someone else's scale. It is also where we have to be most precise, because the honest version is damning and the sloppy version collapses into excuses for everyone.
What this page is about
Since 2016, interfering in another country's election has been treated in American politics as a singular violation — a hostile act, correctly condemned when Russia did it. What the condemnation tends to omit is that the United States is, by the numbers, the world's most prolific practitioner of the same thing. The political scientist Dov Levin assembled the first systematic database of great-power electoral interference and counted 117 interventions by the US and the USSR/Russia between 1946 and 2000 — 81 of them by the United States, more than any other country. This is not an activist talking point; it is peer-reviewed data, and Levin himself has made the hypocrisy point out loud.
The cases are concrete and, in the main, declassified. The CIA's very first major covert operation was buying Italy's 1948 election for the Christian Democrats — millions of dollars, some of it captured wartime funds, with covert aid continuing at roughly $5 million a year into the early 1960s. The agency spent years secretly funding Chile's anti-Allende candidates, and — as a US Senate committee later confirmed — the governing party of democratic Japan. It helped bankroll Boris Yeltsin's 1996 re-election in Russia. These are not rumors; they are the record.
And here is the line we hold hardest, because getting it wrong wrecks the argument: foreign-government election interference is a different thing from domestic lobbying by a country's own citizens — including foreign-aligned lobbies like AIPAC, which belong to a separate conversation about money and influence in politics (our Israeli Influence lane), not this one. The clean, apples-to-apples comparison to what the US does abroad is what other states do: Russia, Iran. Kept that precise, the conclusion is unavoidable — the country that treats election meddling as a unique assault on democracy pioneered it and leads the world in it.
The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Step through it here, or present it fullscreen.
The Ballot-Box Ledger.
When a foreign power meddles in a US election, America calls it an attack on democracy — rightly. The uncomfortable scoreboard: no country on earth has meddled in more foreign elections than the United States.
The scoreboard, and the cases behind it
By the only systematic count, the US has meddled in more foreign elections than any country on earth.
FACTThe number is the headline. Dov Levin's database — the first and still the leading systematic study of great-power electoral interference — counts 117 partisan election interventions by the United States and the USSR/Russia between 1946 and 2000, of which 81 were carried out by the United States. That makes the US the single most prolific election-meddler of the era, by a wide margin over its Cold War rival. Levin, no polemicist, has repeatedly made the obvious point himself: the country now most alarmed about foreign interference has the longest record of doing it. Condemning Russia's 2016 operation is correct; pretending the US is a stranger to the practice is not.
Italy 1948: the CIA's first major covert operation was buying an election.
FACTThe template for everything that followed. Facing a strong Communist-Socialist bloc in Italy's first postwar election, the newly created CIA ran its inaugural large-scale covert operation: funneling money — millions of dollars, some drawn from captured wartime funds laundered through private accounts — to the Christian Democrats, alongside a propaganda blitz, to ensure the left lost. It worked, and it did not stop: a Defense Department historical study released by the National Security Archive in 2017 documented covert US aid to Italian parties continuing at around $5 million a year into the early 1960s. The agency's founding act in the democratic world was to put its thumb on a democracy's scale and keep it there for over a decade.
Chile and Japan: the US secretly funded parties in two democracies for years — and the Senate confirmed it.
FACTTwo documented cases that show the practice was routine, not exceptional. Chile: through the 1960s the CIA poured money and propaganda into keeping the socialist Salvador Allende out of the presidency — backing Eduardo Frei in 1964 and running a 'spoiling' campaign in 1970 — all laid out in the US Senate's Church Committee investigation, before the covert effort escalated into the 1973 coup we grade in The Coup Ledger. Japan: the CIA secretly financed the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, the US's key Cold War ally in Asia, through the 1950s and 1960s to keep the Japanese left from power — a program confirmed by declassified documents and reported by The New York Times in 1994. Two functioning democracies, two ruling parties quietly underwritten from Washington.
Russia 1996: the US helped bankroll Yeltsin's re-election — then later accused Russia of returning the favor.
FACTA case thick with irony, graded carefully. In 1996, with Boris Yeltsin deeply unpopular and the Communists poised to retake the Kremlin, the United States threw its weight behind his re-election: open political endorsement, the well-timed release of a $10.2 billion IMF loan, and American political consultants advising the campaign (a story Time magazine put on its cover as 'Yanks to the Rescue'). We grade FACT that the US actively backed Yeltsin's campaign with money, institutional support, and advisers. We grade the stronger claim — that the US decisively rigged or stole the election — as SOME SMOKE: this was mostly overt great-power thumb-on-the-scale, not a covert vote-fixing operation, and Russian elites did the heavy lifting. The irony stands regardless: two decades before accusing Moscow of interfering in a US election, Washington helped secure a Russian one.
The precision that makes it airtight: a foreign government is not a domestic lobby.
FACTThis is the distinction the whole argument rests on, and collapsing it is how people lose it. Everything above involves one government covertly intervening in another country's election — the exact category of act the US condemns when Russia or Iran does it here. That is categorically different from domestic lobbying: American citizens and organizations — including foreign-aligned lobbies like AIPAC — pressuring their own government and funding their own candidates. Lobbying raises real and serious questions about money and foreign influence in US politics, and we cover them in our Israeli Influence lane. But they are a separate problem with separate law and separate remedies, and the apples-to-apples comparison to US behavior abroad is what other states do, not what American pressure groups do at home. Keeping the two apart is not a dodge; it is what makes the hypocrisy charge precise enough to be unanswerable.
The honest fence: 'intervention' is a spectrum, and the US record doesn't make Russia's innocent.
FACTPrecision cuts in every direction. 'Election interference' covers a wide range — covert cash, propaganda, overt endorsement, aid conditionality, and, more recently, hacking and disinformation — and these are not all equally grave or equally covert. The US Cold War operations were mostly money and propaganda to a favored party; Russia's 2016 effort was a cyber-and-disinformation campaign. Noting the US record is not a claim that these are identical, and it is emphatically not a 'so Russia did nothing wrong' argument — two governments can both violate another country's sovereignty. The narrow, defensible point is about standing and hypocrisy: a country that has interfered in more elections than anyone cannot credibly present the practice as a unique foreign evil it has only ever been the victim of. The record forbids the clean hands, not the condemnation.
The overt successor: 'democracy promotion' did openly what the CIA once did in secret.
SOME SMOKEA thread worth posing rather than overstating. After the Cold War, much of the old covert election work migrated into the open, through bodies like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID-funded programs that train parties, fund civil-society groups, and support 'free elections' abroad. Supporters call this legitimate, transparent democracy assistance — a real distinction from a bag of CIA cash. Critics note that it has repeatedly favored US-aligned factions and helped tilt outcomes (Nicaragua 1990 is the clearest case, where overt US funding backed the opposition that unseated the Sandinistas). We grade this SOME SMOKE: that the US continues to influence foreign elections through overt, funded channels is documented; whether a given program is neutral assistance or soft regime-shaping is a case-by-case judgment, and we pose it rather than flatten it into 'the CIA with a nicer logo.'
The practice the US invented and then forgot it invented
Election interference was, in a sense, the CIA's native tongue. The agency was created in 1947; its first big job, the next spring, was Italy. The logic was simple and, to its authors, compelling: a coup was expensive, bloody, and hard to deny, but quietly funding the right party and the right newspapers could achieve the same end — a government friendly to Washington — at a fraction of the cost and risk. For four decades that logic ran worldwide, from Western Europe to Latin America to Asia, usually aimed at the same target the coups were: the left, elected or otherwise. The ballot box was not sacred; it was one more terrain of the Cold War, to be shaped like any other.
What changed was not the behavior but the memory of it. The covert cash gave way, after the Cold War, to overt “democracy promotion,” and the old operations faded into declassified footnotes most people never read. So when Russia interfered in 2016, it landed on an American public that experienced election meddling as something that happened to democracies, not something its own government had spent half a century doing to others. That amnesia is not accidental; it is the same severing of cause from memory we trace in the blowback ledger. A country that cannot remember its own record cannot see its own hypocrisy — and cannot be held to it.
This is why the ballot-box ledger belongs beside the coups and the blowback. Together they describe one behavior at different volumes: the overthrow is the loudest way to pick another country's government, the funded election the quietest, and the aftermath the part nobody plans for. All three answer the same instinct — that the United States is entitled to decide who governs elsewhere — and all three are being exercised again now, from the pressure on Venezuela to the designs on Greenland in Sovereignty for Sale. The names change; the entitlement doesn't.
Standing is the whole currency of a norm
“Don't interfere in other countries' elections” is a good rule — one worth defending. But a rule has force only to the degree the people invoking it are willing to live by it, and the US invokes it from atop the largest pile of violations on record. That does not make the rule wrong; it makes the United States a compromised enforcer of it, which is a real strategic problem, not just a rhetorical embarrassment. When Washington condemns foreign meddling, adversaries reach for the ledger, and much of the world — having been on the receiving end — finds the complaint hard to take at face value. The cost of a century of quiet interference is not only the democracies it distorted; it is the credibility the US no longer has when it needs the norm to hold at home. Hypocrisy, here, is not a sin to confess but a weapon handed to the other side.
- If interfering in a democratic election is an attack on democracy — and it is — what is the name for doing it 81 times, and why does that name never get used at home?
- The US experienced 2016 as a violation precisely because it had forgotten Italy 1948, Chile, Japan, and Yeltsin. How much of a nation's sense of its own innocence depends on not reading its own declassified files?
- If covert cash became overt “democracy promotion,” the practice didn't end — it got a letterhead. So who decides where legitimate election assistance stops and soft regime-shaping begins, and would the US accept another power funding its parties and NGOs on the same terms?
Questions worth taking seriously
Isn't this just 'whataboutism' that excuses Russia's 2016 interference?
No, and the distinction matters. Whataboutism says “you did it too, so it's fine” — a way to make a wrong disappear. We're saying the opposite: it's wrong when anyone does it, Russia included, and the US has done it more than anyone, so it can't claim to be a pure victim of a foreign evil. Condemning 2016 and documenting the US record are fully compatible; in fact, the only consistent position is to hold both. The point isn't to exonerate Russia — it's to deny the US the clean hands it keeps claiming.
What about AIPAC? Isn't that foreign meddling in US elections?
It's a real issue, but a different category, and we keep it separate on purpose. The cases on this page are foreign governments covertly intervening in other countries' votes — the mirror of what Russia did here. AIPAC is a domestic lobby: American citizens and PACs spending in US elections and pressuring their own Congress, which is legal in ways a foreign government's covert op is not. That doesn't make it beyond criticism — the money, the pressure, and the foreign-alignment questions are exactly what our Israeli Influence coverage examines — but folding it into “foreign election interference” would be legally wrong and would hand critics an easy way to dismiss the whole argument. Precise beats sweeping.
If you are named on this page
If you are named on this page, or are a party materially affected by the claims made here, and you wish to respond, correct the record, or add context, use the Contact page. Responses are published verbatim alongside the original claim, with the sender identified and the date of receipt. The channel stays open for the life of the page.
This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- Foreign Affairs — review of Dov Levin, 'Meddling in the Ballot Box' (117 interventions, 81 by the US)
- Foreign electoral intervention — Levin's finding that the US intervened in the most foreign elections, 1946–2000; the 1996 Russia case
- National Security Archive (2017) — CIA covert aid to Italian parties, ~$5 million/year into the early 1960s
- U.S. Senate Church Committee — Covert Action in Chile 1963–1973
- The New York Times (1994) — CIA secretly funded Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party
- Dov H. Levin — research on partisan electoral interventions
- National Endowment for Democracy — the overt successor to covert election funding
- Black Book Audit — The Coup Ledger
- Black Book Audit — The Blowback Ledger
- Black Book Audit — The Interventionist's Ledger