Americans fear election interference from US government, says survey

As the Biden administration focuses on countering “foreign disinformation” in elections, most Americans are concerned about election interference from the US government itself.

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) aims to “counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.” The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) seeks to counter “foreign influence operations”. The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also claims to counter “foreign influence operations”. The Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC), which oversees them all, focuses on “foreign malign influence, including election security”.

But according to a Harvard-Harris survey of 2,004 voters last week, 70% of Americans are either very concerned or somewhat concerned about election interference by the FBI and intelligence agencies in a future presidential election.

Seventy-one percent of voters, including 65% of Democrats and 76% of Republicans, also say they want wide-ranging reforms to protect elections against interference by law enforcement and the intelligence community.

US intelligence officials who in 2020 declared the New York Post’s story about corruption in the Biden family to be “Russian disinformation” did so with intent to sway the presidential election in Joe Biden’s favor. Almost 50 percent of Biden voters knew nothing of the Hunter Biden scandal at the time of the election and about 16 percent said they would not have voted for Biden had they known, according to a survey from The Media Research Center. 

Now, however, 53% of voters believe Joe Biden was involved in his son’s illegal influence peddling, though 55% also believe the FBI and Justice Department are not really investigating the matter.

The finding supports other responses concerning the FBI. According to the poll, 69% of Americans — including 55% of Republicans and 45% of Democrats — say they are “not surprised” that the FBI violated its own standards to investigate the Trump-Russia collusion hoax as concluded by the Durham report.

A Rasmussen report last year revealed that 53% of American voters agree with former Trump advisor Roger Stone that “a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI who are using the FBI . . . as Joe Biden‘s personal Gestapo.” 76% of Republicans agree the FBI is “Joe Biden’s personal Gestapo”, along with 43% of Democrats. Overall, 54% of whites, 55% of black voters and 50% of other minorities at least “somewhat agree” with the quote. 

These findings bare teeth after a University of Chicago poll found that over a quarter of Americans feel it soon may be time to exercise the Second Amendment as it was originally intended and take up arms against the government.   

The survey of 1,000 Americans found that 28% of voters, 37% of whom have guns in their homes, feel “it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government.”    

In addition, 73% of Republicans and 51% of Democrats feel the government is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me." 

“Overall, two-thirds of Republican and Independent voters agree that the government is ‘corrupt and rigged’ against them, while Democrats are evenly split,” revealed the survey.