With US elections less than a month away, and global security at stake, it has never been more vital to secure elections than in the present moment.

The United States is currently facing a barrage of attempts by foreign powers to shape the American political landscape and public opinion in the run-up to the presidential election in November. The range of potential threats to the integrity of the vote is broad: from hack-and-leak operations to social media campaigns to deepfakes.

US officials are meanwhile fully engaged in detecting and countering such attempts, warning the public and forearming election administrators – all to protect both the technical integrity of the vote, and public confidence in the democratic process itself. But in the eight years since Russia’s unprecedented interference in the 2016 US election, how should ‘foreign interference’ be best conceptualised? How should this broad range of threats be prioritised and countered? What does research suggest about the likely impacts on the voting process, and on voters’ political beliefs and behaviours? Are there blind spots in American threat perceptions, or risks to overreacting? This panel discussion will address these weighty questions, as well as prospects for making democracies more resilient against foreign electoral interference – in 2024 and beyond.

The discussion is moderated by Dr Brianna Rosen in conversation with Ciaran Martin, Professor of Practice in the Management of Public Organisations at the Blavatnik School of Government and Gavin Wilde, Senior Fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former White House National Security Council Director focused on Russia, cyber operations, and election security.