 We're live on YouTube, and I'm going to open up the room and start the recording. Welcome to tonight. And thank you for being here. We'll get started in a few minutes. I'm going to put some links in the chat box right now as well. And this is the link for tonight's event. It has library news as well as links to our presenter. This event is on YouTube as well, so you can catch it again or if you have friends that might want to watch it, you can direct them to that. All right, let's jump in. Let's get started, friends. It's our Tuesday night author series. Part of our big summer stride events. That's right. Every Tuesday night, June, July, all the way through August 31st, we have author talks. So definitely join us in the virtual library. And tonight we are here to see Dov Levin and talk about his book, Meddling in the Ballot Box. Thank you, Dov, for being here. Thank you for inviting me. Totally. And this is part of our summer stride events, which is graciously supported by our friends at the San Francisco Public Library. And this year we sponsor, we've partnered with Chronicle Books as we do always. And we have beautiful art from Kailani Juanita. So do your 20 hours of reading and get your iconic San Francisco Public Library tote bag. And we want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Ramutush-Aloni tribal groups and families and acknowledge them as the rightful stewards in the lands in which we reside. Our library is committed to uplifting the names of these lands and these community members from these nations with whom we live together. Our library is committed to providing useful and factual information on the topics of first person and land rights. The link that I put in the chat box has a great resource and reading list about first person culture, Black Lives Matter and lots of other great reading lists. So we love making reading lists at the library. So check that out. Coming up with the library quickly, we have a couple of literary campaigns. Total San Francisco, who is part of the Chronicle team. Peter Hartlop and Heather Knight will be doing a quarterly book club with us and the second one coming up August 24th. And we'll be talking about the book, The End of the Golden Gate. Writers on Loving and Sometimes Leaving San Francisco. And we'll have Daniel Handler and Gary Formilla in the house. On the same page for July and August. And this is our San Francisco Public Library's bi-monthly read, where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book and we're celebrating Jacqueline Woodson and her book Red at the Bone. Jacqueline Woodson will be in our virtual library on August 12th. And Jacqueline Woodson is mainly known for her children's and YA books. And that's what she will be discussing on the 12th. But this book is geared towards adults. And I think it's pretty palatable to all, to YA as well. So come read the book, come to the book club and come see Jacqueline Woodson. Tomorrow night, we have the Tenderloin Museum and San Francisco, Neon, along with the director of the Letterform Archive talking about neon and fonts on matchbooks. So pretty niche and pretty geeky. So come join me. And Saturday morning, we have Herbs and Edible Gardening as well as a film screening and panel discussion. The film is The Prison Within and it's about restorative justice movement in San Quentin Prison, which is our neighbor and the citizens that live there. And it's a I don't know if you know, the San Francisco Public Library has a jail and reentry services department that serves many folks inside. With reference by mail and in San Francisco provides books and they go into the jail's books, both for adults and for our youth prison. So very important work that they do. All right. So tonight, Dove Levin, author of meddling in the ballot box, will discuss foreign powers who try to determine election results of another country and the effects of this meddling on election results. Professor Dove Levin is an assistant professor of international relations at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. Levin was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon. He received his PhD from UCLA. His current research project is on the cause, effects and effectiveness of partisan electoral interventions by great powers, a topic on which he has published multiple scholarly articles. He has given interviews on partisan electoral interventions to CNN, NPR, BBC World and more. And without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Dove Levin, everybody. Thank you very much for this introduction and for inviting me. So let me just try to share my PowerPoint just a moment. OK, can everyone see me? Can everyone see the PowerPoint? Looks good. OK. OK, so what's the name you call it? So thank you again for this invitation. As noted, my name is Dove Levin, and I'm a professor of international relations at the University of Hong Kong. And as you can see on the slide, I'm going to be talking to you about my new book, meddling in the ballot box, the causes and effects of partisan electoral interventions. And basically to give you a quick overview of what I'm going to talk about, I'm going to first describe the phenomenon that my book studies, in other words, fine election interference, and then talk a bit about the historical record of such interventions and then talk a bit about what we know about why they occur and their effects on the election results. And then I will conclude with what we found in this regard in 2016. So basically to first clearly define what I am exactly talking about, when I talk here about partisan electoral interventions, I am talking about cases in which a foreign power intentionally intervenes in an election in another country prior to the voting during various costly measures, either covert or overt in an attempt to determine who wins that election. So such interventions include things such as, you know, for example, an open threat by the great power to harm that country if the wrong person or party are elected or promises to give it various quote unquote goodies if, you know, the right people are elected. It can include the provision of campaign funding by an intelligence agency or, you know, by other bodies or quote unquote dirty tricks designed to sabotage the chances of the other side or harm its candidates. Like, for example, spreading fake news about one of the sides competing in the elections. It can also include things like pre-election concessions and important issues or the provision of various benefits. And it can also include the secret production of campaigning materials for the side that the foreign power is trying to help or sending campaign consultants to advise the candidate on campaign techniques. And basically, for certain acts to be coded as an intervention there had to be clear evidence that were being done for this purpose. And basically, such meddling has been around as long as there have been elections of any kind. In the pre-modern era, for example, when some kings were selected by the nobility, you know, just like the ending of Game of Thrones and popes were selected by groups of cardinals, foreign powers frequently intervened in the proceedings. With Polish royal elections, for example, becoming infamous for being targets of Russian meddling by Zara Peter the Great and his successors. So the founding fathers, when they created the US Constitution in 1787, were already debating what could be done to prevent foreign meddling in US elections or what they called at the time, quote, unquote, Polish elections. And according to Alex Hamilton in Federalist 68, which you can see on the slide, one major reason for the creation of the Electoral College was to prevent such foreign meddling. Unfortunately, that section did not get into the play. The founding fathers were all right to be worried. So for example, the first competitive national election in world history occurred in the United States in 1796 when John Adams from the Federalist Party ran against Thomas Jefferson from the Democratic Republican Party. As you all remember from your high school history classes, George Washington ran unopposed in 1789 and 1792. What they didn't tell you in your high school history classes was that 1796 was also the target of a punch intervention against John Adams. The French really, really hated the Federalist Party and its leaders, George Washington and John Adams because they refused to help them in a big war that they were fighting with Britain, but eventually became known as the Napoleonic Wars. The French initially wanted to prevent George Washington from winning a third term. And when Washington decided anyway to retire and John Adams decided to run for the presidency as Washington's successor, the French then decided to prevent Adams election. So the French ambassador to the United States, a guy called Pierre Dix, the guy who could see his picture on here on the slide, basically threatened a week before the elections that if John Adams is elected, France will declare war on the United States. The United States was at that time a militarily weak country and France was a major superpower. So that was a quite intimidating threat. And this wasn't the last case of its kind of foreign interventions in U.S. elections. In 1940, for example, the Nazis didn't want Franklin Roosevelt to win a third term. Why? Well, because they were worried quite correctly that if FDR would be reelected, he would eventually find a way to get the U.S. involved in World War II against the Axis and use America's power to defeat their plans to take over the world. So the Nazis dug through Polish government archive that they captured when they conquered Poland, found some diplomatic documents that they thought made FDR look really bad and then tried to get them published right before the election in order to harm FDR's election campaign. Now, there was no WikiLeaks in 1940 and many American newspapers used to have anything whatsoever to do with the Nazis. So instead, the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. secretly bribed the editors of an American newspaper which then published these documents five days before the elections without, of course, informing the American public from where they got them. After World War II, the Soviets also began to meddle in American presidential elections and they intervened in 1948 in an attempt to get rid of Harry Truman and in 1984 in an attempt to get rid of Verhegan. So in contrast to what you may have read in some media organs about it, there's actually nothing unprecedented or special in the Russian intervention in the 2016 U.S. elections, except for the use of hacking for this purpose, which is basically a digital version of a much older intervention technique. 2016 is actually the sixth intervention of this kind in U.S. elections. And the third intervention of this kind by the Soviets or Russians in the United States. And just to make it clear, this isn't an attempt to be lit on in any way, shape or form this intervention. Just a statement of a historical fact. And the same scene goes for the most recent Russian intervention in the 2020 U.S. elections. And of course, the United States wasn't the only target of such intervention. And after World War Two, both the United States and the Soviets began to intervene quite a lot in elections in other countries. And for my research on this book, based on the definition I gave you a minute ago, I constructed the peak data set for partisan electoral interventions by the great powers. A data set of all American and Soviet or Russian partisan interventions in national level elections between January 1st, 1946 and December 31st, 2000, using various archival and secondary sources. The first ever data set of this kind to my knowledge. And I find that electoral interventions are a pretty common phenomenon. And during this period, there were 117 such interventions all around the world, as you can see on the map in the slide. Or just to give you an idea of how much that means in context. It means that there was about one such intervention in every nine national level elections, or national level competitive elections during this period. So as you wouldn't be surprised from the map I just showed you, these interventions occurred in 60 different countries. It was the most common intervention method, by the way, being the provision of campaign funding. Two-thirds of these interventions were covert and one-fifth occurred in founding elections. Any one of these interventions were done by the United States and another 36 were done by the Soviet Union or Russia. And from what I know about the activities of other countries, the United States seems to be the most common duo of these kind of interventions since World War II. And this is much larger than the number of interstate wars during this period. Or for that matter, the much more famous covert coup d'etats as were done in Iran or Guatemala. In other words, this book is discussing a policy tool, which is one of the main ways that great powers use to manage their relations with democracies, with competitive authoritarian regimes, regimes that have very flawed elections and are not very democratic, and with other countries as regimes between these two poles, which is somewhere between half to two-thirds of countries around the world nowadays. So to give you free examples of such interventions, in Italy there was a general election in 1948. And the United States was extremely worried that the Italian Communist Party would win them. And if the Italian Communist Party won, the United States was sure that they would, you know, end Italian and democracy, turn Italy into a communist dictatorship, and make Italy into an ally of the Soviet Union, which as you know was our main rival during the Cold War. So the United States intervened in this election for the non-communist parties, especially the Christian Democratic Party, the main anti-communist party that then ruled Italy, pouring everything including the kitchen sink against the communists. So for example, the U.S. government increased its foreign aid to Italy before the election and made sure that much of this new aid arrived with great fanfare in the weeks before the election. And then combined this aid increase was threat to cut off all American aid to Italy if the communists win. The United States also secretly funded the campaigns of the non-communist parties, with CIA agents literally bringing them the cash in big black bags. Around $10 million in total or in today's money around $100 million. Finally, it sent in American campaign experts who prepared campaigning materials for the Christian Italian Democrats, the main anti-communist party. And you can see on the slide two examples of the campaign materials the United States produced. So the poster on the right with the background that looks like the armies of Mordor are about to invade Italy and basically is directed at female voters. And it says, Mother, save your children from Bolshevism. Vote for the Christian Democratic Party. And the poster on the left, which looks like a scene out of a really bad, you know, horror movie, is a get out the vote poster trying to warn Italians of the terrible consequences that they don't come out to vote. The skeleton is, you know, a Soviet soldier and it declares in Italian, vote or he will be your master. After the communists lost that election, the United States had intervened for similar reasons in the next seven Italian elections. Likewise, in 2000, in 2000, the United States intervened in the elections in Yugoslavia, in order to prevent the then leader of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, from winning the election. Milosevic was directly involved in major crimes against humanity, both in Bosnia and Kosovo. And his behavior was destabilizing the Balkans. And the United States was afraid that if he stayed in power, he would continue doing such human rights violations and perhaps ignite new conflicts in this region. So the United States intervened in this election for the Serbian opposition and the main opposition candidate of the opposition, a guy called Bodislav Vekustunica. So for example, it gave the Serbian opposition 5,000 cans of graffiti spray, which the Serbian opposition used to spray Anton Milosevic propaganda on walls and 2.5 million bumper stickers with various Anton Milosevic's slogans for a country with a population of 8 million people. In other words, one campaign sticker for every free service. The United States also trained 5,000 members of the opposition in various campaigning and get-out-of-vote techniques, and even sent some American campaign advisors who conducted calls for the opposition and gave them advice on campaign strategy. Finally, in the week before the election, in a last-ditch attempt to boost Kustunica's chances, the United States also publicly promised to remove its sanctions on Yugoslavia, which were causing serious economic harm to the Yugoslav economy, and Milosevic would lose power in Yugoslavia. Likewise, the Russians also intervened in elections outside of the United States. So for example, in a prequel to recent events in the Ukraine, the Russians intervened in the 2004 Ukrainian election. And you can see here on the slide some of the posters that they prepared in order to help Yushenko. What you see are covertly supplied campaign materials. Two samples of campaign posters captured by the quote-unquote Orange Party. The one on the left shows opposition candidate Yushenko as a supposed devil in disguise. And the one on the right has George W. Bush shown as supposedly saying, we are for our Ukraine, which is Yushenko's party. Okay, so we see that these interventions are pretty common. So why do they occur, and what are the effects on the results? Well, there's actually very little scholarly research on this topic until the last few years. And this book is the first academic book focused on answering this question. As for why electoral interventions occur, I argued that electoral interventions occur when two concurrent conditions exist. First, the great power sees a particular domestic actor as severely endangering its interest as to that country. Basically, it's the motive for such an intervention. Secondly, very importantly, the great power can get cooperation and inside health, which is basically the opportunity for such an intervention. Now, the first condition is pretty common sensical. As you can see from some of the examples I just gave, so I won't get much into it. But basically, when an important actor in another country has very different and inflexible preferences than the great power, and an issue that is important for both countries, the great power would need massive efforts to get what it wants from it. Basically, it's like, you know, trying to get the hardcore vegetarian to agree to eat the steak or to get a devout Christian Jew or Muslim to convert to another religion. So under that situation, the great power has an incentive to intervene in an election because by replacing an unfriendly leader with a friendlier leader, it is easier for it to get quote unquote a good deal on the relevant issues. And because that an electoral intervention is cheaper than say a war, or giving massive amounts of foreign aid as quote unquote a bribe, it may be cheaper, more effective option in countries with competitive elections. But usually, this is not a sufficient condition. It is not the only available option for the would be intervener. And if an electoral intervention isn't feasible, it will choose other costlier means, except in the various cases where it has no other options. And I argue that it's feasible, only a few as defined power to get another significant political actor in that country to agree to receive such aid from the great power. Why is that? Well, I claim that electoral interventions are basically inside jobs. The would be intervener needs a local actor to cooperate in such an intervention, because an electoral intervention basically means running or helping someone's election campaign. So in order to succeed, you need the same kinds of high quality information that domestic candidates have and use for this purpose, you know, country specific electoral data, preferences of important voter groups, what are effective messages and so forth. And if the great power doesn't have this information, they're likely to pay or even her the preferred candidate or party. The same game that such information is really hard to get. Local politicians don't usually publish tell all moneyball style books and keep this data to themselves as a secret, which is why there is no idiot's guide on how to win an election available for sale at your local bookstore. And because American and non American policy makers don't understand other countries politics, they're unable to collect enough. So South cooperation, they won't have the data they need in order to intervene effectively. Just to make it absolutely clear, there are of course, you know, some exceptions. For example, in the Soviet intervention in 1984 US elections, which I mentioned a few minutes ago, there was no cooperation whatsoever between the Soviets and the Democrats. But the Soviets tried to intervene anyway in those elections against Reagan. But usually, if the great power cannot get cooperation from a domestic actor in the target, they simply won't do it. However, getting outside help can also hurt the domestic actor. If it's covert, the exposure can harm, of course, the assisted side. And in general, such interventions may reduce its electability in the long term, because it can get tagged as quote unquote, the stooge of the foreign power. And many countries having that tag is the end of your political career, becoming known in the United States that you hate the American flag, motherhood and apple pie. And its own voters may hate the fact that it's getting help from a foreign power and not vote for it in later elections. Also, this foreign help can come with streams or conditions, which in other words, I need to agree to certain policies if they are elected. And the local politicians may not be willing to agree to them. So local politicians will agree to such interventions only if they're in a pretty bad their political shape. I use the term a fragile victor or blocked weakening loser. Basically, in those situations, you have a very good reason to believe that you will not win the next elections and the ones after it, either because of an extremely weak political position, or being knocked out of power, either formally or informally. And an intervention is a way for you to try to dramatically improve your political situation. The football term for it is a quote unquote, hey man. So in my book, in order to study the process of why such meddling happens, I went to archives all across the United States and let thousands of declassified documents from the White House, the CIA, and the State Department, in which they discuss whether to intervene or not in various elections all around the world. And in my book, I have six in-depth historical case studies from various countries around the world, in Latin America, Asia, and Europe, in which the United States intervened in elections or seriously thought of doing that. And I will now describe one of these six intervention cases in depth. The American partisan electoral intervention in the 1953 West German election. And in the case of the 1953 West German elections, the main issue in dispute was the EDC, or the European Defense Community, a planned EU-style organization, just one focused on military, not economic integration. And this was supposed to create a common European army that would help the United States defend Western Europe against the Soviets. As you all know, this is the early Cold War era. And one of the early heights of the American rivalry was the Soviets doing this era. And the Soviets had in the early 1950s a big well-equipped army of five million soldiers in Eastern Europe. And the United States was worried that they may use that army to invade Western Europe and quickly conquer it. And the only way to defend Europe from such a possible Soviet invasion, you know, basically hold off the Soviets until the US could chip in large numbers of American gun tubes, was to get a West German military contribution for this purpose. But naturally, given that World War II just ended a few years beforehand, the United States wanted to avoid the creation of an independent West German military for this purpose, which the United States was very afraid could lead to a new wave of German aggression. In order, for example, to reunify Germany, which was divided in this era into two separate countries, West Germany and East Germany. But to take back German territories handed over to Poland at the end of World War II. And that could lead potentially to another World War. So the Eisenhower administration saw the EDC as a way to solve this big problem, helping it with its main interest that it had as to West Germany and as a way to square the circle, avoiding the creation of a German military, but granting a German military contribution by a European military. So the EDC would both prevent such possible German aggression, because the German government would not control directly any military tubes, and at the same time have defend Europe from the Soviets. However, the SPD or the German social democrats were completely opposed. They saw the EDC as preventing the reunification of Germany, a cause to which the SPD leadership was deeply attached, both for personal and nationalist reasons, as well as protecting it politically from accusations of being insufficiently nationalist. At the same time, the CDU and Eisenhower are in a very bad political situation in early 1953. Sorry, to just give a few examples, Eisenhower, the German chancellor, the guy whose picture you can see in the back of this slide, has a 34% approval rating. The CDU is badly organized, and Eisenhower by then is a 77-year-old person and is seen as a temporary placeholder. You know, there was literally headlines, you know, where many times of the nickname of Eisenhower, of the mummy, because they were seen as so old. You know, you literally see headlines of the mummy said this, or the mummy said that in some German newspapers, because they all saw him, you know, as he's about to die. The CDU only won the previous elections in 1949, only because of a huge last moment gap by the then leader of the SPD. The CDU has not stopped behind the SPD in all surveys for nearly three years, and was the CDU losing one lander, or German midterm election after another, getting an avid only a quarter of the vote. So Eisenhower decides to acquist American help in the upcoming German election. And because of the American fear of the SPD coming to power and killing the EDC, the United States agrees to Eisenhower's request. So following Eisenhower's request, and the American agreement to help him in this election, the United States began to help Eisenhower in various costly ways in the run-up to this election, in the ways that Eisenhower requested them to. And I'll describe to you here three of the ways that the United States intervened in this election. The first example, that the United States agreed to a new trade agreement with Germany that gave West Germany major trade benefits. The second example is a food aid program. In June 1953, three months before the West German elections, a revolt broke out against the East German regime in East Germany. The June 17th revolt. This revolt was brutally suppressed by East German and Soviet troops, with hundreds of East Germans killed. But given the circumstances of the Cold War, the West German government couldn't do anything to help the East German protesters, despite West German public pressures to quote unquote, do something. And that made Eisenhower look very bad. So Eisenhower fought off a creative way to do something, but he lacked the resources to do it itself. So he asked the United States to fund it, which it agreed to do. Basically, the United States gave Eisenhower food, which the West German government then handed out to hungry East Germans, at the cost of $15 million or $115 million in today's money to the United States. Giving Eisenhower a way to quote unquote, do something, and make the West German public happy with it. Finally, three days before the elections, following a last moment request by Eisenhower, who seemed to have been worried by a tightening of the polls, the then Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, threatened in a press conference, quote unquote, disastrous effects to Germany if Eisenhower wasn't reelected. Then Eisenhower and the CDU win the elections. Okay, so this is why such meddling occurs. So what are the effects of such interventions? Well, I will now discuss few of my findings in my book on election results. And these findings are all based on a statistical analysis that I did using that data set that I told you about earlier in the talk. And the first thing that I find is that such interventions are usually pretty effective in their immediate goal. In other words, in helping the electoral chances on the side that you are trying to help, was the average effect being a 3% increase in the vote share of the assisted side? But not to make it absolutely clear, this is an average. So naturally, the effect may vary between cases. In some cases it may be very effective, and in some cases less. And the basic reason why electoral interventions are usually effective comes from the process in which the great power and a domestic actor agree on an intervention. Great powers usually don't aid lost causes. And domestic actors won't accept support when they are likely to win because of the significant potential cost to the client of receiving this aid that I mentioned. So most interventions will occur in marginal elections when the gap between the two sides isn't too large. So because more resources that a candidate has usually mean higher chances of victory, electoral interventions are likely to have the intended effect. Another thing my book finds is that interventions done overtly are usually more effective than covert interventions when it comes to helping the side that you want to win the election. And I find that overt interventions increase intervener's vote share by 3% more than covert interventions do. Why is that? Well, the idea here basically is that overt is usually more effective because they are trying to change voters' behavior directly. In overt interventions, great powers like the United States or Russia are speaking to voters above the local politicians ahead. And because the US government has a lot of resources at its disposal, usually more than those of the local politicians, it can, you know, way outbid them. You know, you can see basically about an election as many times being, you know, one of those bidding competitions, you know, one politician promises, you know, if you vote for me, you'll get a chicken in every pot. Another politician says, you know, if you vote for me, there'll be two chickens in every pot. And then the foreign power can come in and say, if we vote for this guy, then there will be, you know, two chickens in every pot and a brand new stove. In covert interventions in contrast, the United States and other interveners only try to affect voter behavior indirectly, like, you know, you know, giving money to a campaign that will then be able to put, you know, more election ads on TV. Of course, sometimes the United States cannot use overt cases in which there may be a nationalist backlash against any open American meddling. However, when the United States intervenes, its local allies usually warn it against doing overt interventions when the backlash is likely. So the United States overtly intervenes only in cases where backlash won't happen, and will usually be quite effective. The only exception is in cases of founding elections. In other words, the first competitive elections ever in that country after a long period of full authoritarianism. In those situations, electoral interventions usually harm the side the United States is trying to help. Why is that? Well, the side of the foreign power is trying to help, usually knows very little about winning elections, because it never ran in them before. You know, basically what they call it for any of us is, you know, riding the bicycle for the first time. So frequently the local actor asks for the wrong things from the US government, and the United States unintentionally makes its political situation worse rather than better, reducing its vote share by 6.7% on average. Now, of course, you may ask how these estimated effects applied in real life intervention cases. So in this table that you can see on the slide, you can see the estimated election results in six intervention cases, with and without the electoral interventions that are derived from my statistical analysis. Now, I cannot go over each one of these cases in detail due to time constraints, although I'd be happy to talk about any of them if you are interested in the Q&A. But to give an example from one case that I mentioned earlier, the 2000 Yugoslav presidential elections, when the United States aided the challenger, Vodislav Kustunica, in order to a move slower than Milosevic, the incumbent and president of Yugoslavia. And I estimate that this intervention against Milosevic was quite effective. And without this Western intervention against Milosevic, his opponent Vodislav Kustunica would have not gained an absolute majority in the first round and would have finished neck to neck with Milosevic. And in that scenario, Milosevic would have probably was the help of various shenanigans and his control of state resources won the second round and stayed in power without triggering the master demonstrations that led to his downfall. Now, actually, you'll all be interested in how these findings apply to Dalashian intervention in the 2016 case. And in one of the chapters in my book, I analyzed the 2016 case. And I will give you here my key findings. As for the causes, we still have very limited information about why Putin intervened. But the key reason seems to open is very deep fear of Hillary Clinton, whom he saw as some Russia expert described as an existential threat. Why? Because Putin feared that Hillary would start a cold war with Russia if she became president, such as expanding American sanctions on Russia due to Putin's invasion of Crimea and sending high level weapons to the Ukrainian government. Likewise, we shouldn't let Trump's later victory in 2016 obscure how bad his political situation was in mid-2016. And now everyone, including probably himself, was sure that he would lose. You know, he was lagging constantly behind Hillary in the polls for months at end, for months at end, at 20 to 1 disadvantage in campaign funds in early June 2016, and a large of the GOP establishment refusing to unify behind it, with many, for example, being no shows in the 2016 GOP convention. And while we don't have yet definite poof of collusion, which given all the tools came out in other electoral intervention cases, will probably take a few decades to come out, there's lots of strong circumstantial evidence from the Mueller report and other sources that someone quite senior in the Trump campaign probably did collude in some manner with Russia. As for the effects on the election results, I found strong evidence from three different sources that the Russian intervention played a key role in Trump's electoral college victory in 2016, giving him the winning edge in the free swing states. First, I plugged in the data for the 2016 US elections into the model I used to estimate the effects of electoral interventions. And it found that the Russian intervention increased Trump's vote share by 2.03% and 75 electoral college votes. And you can see on the slide what the electoral college would have looked like without that Russian intervention. And basically without this boost by Putin, he would have won the popular vote by 4.13% at the electoral college by 307 to 231. Results pretty similar to what most of us expected in the last days of the 2016 campaign. Second, I examined pre-election polls which asked questions about the various leaks by WikiLeaks. And these polls, like the one you can see here on the slide, find that many people who were exposed to these leaks, like in this case, the October 2016 leak of really Clinton's speeches to donors, was significantly less likely to vote for Clinton. And that erased much of the anti-topic of other domestic exposés, such as the Access Hollywood tape. Third, I examined Google keyword search data at the state level, using a special Google tool used by advertisers called the Google keyword planner. And I found a big increase nationwide, as well as in the key swing states that gave Trump his electoral college victory in 2016. In searches of WikiLeaks and Google, after the leaks of the documents stolen by Russia, began to come out. Increases much larger than the number of votes Trump won in all three states. So we have a very strong reason to believe that the Russian electoral intervention in 2016 was the hinge of history that enabled Trump's victory in 2016, just like many of other such electoral interventions were in the past. The book also talks about the implications of this research to cybersecurity and many other things. But in order to leave time for questions, I will now stop and we'll await your questions. Thanks, Dov. And if anyone has questions out there, you can put them in the chat box or you can unmute. And you too, we are accepting questions from there as well. This has been your main research, Dov? Yeah, this has been my main research project. What's it called? For much of the past decade, I began working on it long before Vladimir Putin decided to meddle in 2016. Questions? Let me check you too. I have a question. Yes, Robert? Yeah, I just wanted to know if the US ever interfered in the Russian election where the person was chosen that was favorable to the US intervention? Yes. What's it called? Basically, the United States intervened in the 1996 Russian presidential elections for Boris Yeltsin. The United States was really worried that basically his main opponent, which was Yuganov of the Communist Party, if elected with a verse, all of the economic and political reforms in Russia, the preceding years, and go back to the bad old days. And other opponents of Yeltsin were equally not desirable. One of the people who was another one of the main candidates was a guy who wanted literally to restore the Soviet Union and take back Alaska from the United States. And at the same time, Boris Yeltsin was in deep political trouble because of Chechnya and the economic problem because of the transition from communism. And literally in one of these surveys, one survey in late 1995 was only getting support of 6%. So the United States basically intervened for Yeltsin in order to help him win the election and prevent such a scenario for getting the IMF to give him an aid package of US$10 billion, which Russia was not eligible at the time under IMF criteria, as well as, for example, sending secretly campaign advisors from the Pete Wilson campaign after he failed in 1996 to help the Yeltsin campaign and prove its campaigning techniques and its messaging, so to speak. And thanks to that, it was able to basically help Yeltsin win that election after starting in such a bad shape. So that's the main case we know of the United States intervening in Russian elections. Was it every time they intervened during the USSR's tenure before Yeltsin? No. Soviet elections during the Cold War were not competitive. You know, the old joke about Soviet elections was, you know, that Sif broke into the Kremlin and stole next year election results. So basically, there was no intervention in those elections in that era because they were not competitive. And there was no value for the United States in intervening in them. Thank you. Okay, I see a question by Kate Epler. Can you say more about what forms election meddling might take in the future and how to prevent it? Well, basically, I expect to a large extent the message to continue similar to those that have been done in the recent past. You know, what basically the main shift seems to be the shift of many of this stuff to the internet, you know, the use of same old techniques, but this time using digital tools like what Russia did in 2016. They basically used techniques that the Soviet Union was frequently using during the Cold War that, you know, Putin himself probably learned in KGB school just now moved it to the internet, so to speak. So probably many of it would be similar to the message that have been used in the past, just, you know, who using the digital forms. One major difference would be that there could be an attempt to directly affect vote tallies who, you know, when hacking into, you know, digital voting machines, or, you know, if you go to online, if companies move to online voting, to that message as well. How could you prevent such meddling? Well, changing the vote tallies can suddenly be prevented by, you know, not not moving to digital voting, and they're going back to a paper and pencil ways of voting in various ways, so to speak. Other methods of intervention, you know, the type which are frequently used are much harder to prevent, but one way that you can, at least, and it's really not, we don't have a case that you can prevent them, but there are probably some way that you can manage them and reduce their effectiveness, like for example, you know, when it comes to covert interventions, exposing them by a reliable actor and that way discrediting the source of that information and weakening as a result in some cases its effects, so to speak. So that would be some of the ways I see such meddling taking place in the future and how you can either prevent it or at least, you know, reduce or manage it in a way that would be less damaging to the country in question. Another question by Gianna, besides the United States, what other countries are in danger of how the outside influences in their elections? Well, basically such interventions are possible in almost any country that has a relatively competitive election, so to speak. As I note, basically foreign powers see a relatively competitive elections as an opportunity and almost any, and as I mentioned earlier in my talk, basically almost any form of competitive elections they will try to interference. So basically almost every country that has relatively competitive elections to the main executive office can expect, you know, that they are in danger of such interference if foreign power seems to they could affect their interests, so to speak. So that's basically, you know, something like somewhere around two thirds of countries around the world nowadays. Another question here by Mason Waller, I'm wondering about your thoughts about the legitimacy of any interference. There's certainly pragmatic elements, but it seems mainly self-interest. So do you have any thoughts about the Essex in a general sense? Well, I would basically argue that buying very special circumstances, you know, like say, would be Hitler's literally running in an election, so to speak. Such stuff are very problematic legitimacy and have deep ethical problems. I find from, you know, first, except, you know, the fact that it, you know, reduces the ability of the local population to determine its leaders, which, you know, literally reduces its self-determination and its ability to control its own fate, which is, you know, a major moral and ethical damage. You also find that in other research, that this stuff has a lot of negative effects on the target. And, you know, it, for example, increases the chances of a democratic breakdown under certain circumstances, as well as the chances of more terrorism in the target. So I would argue that such stuff is very essentially problematic and that states should avoid whenever possible doing such meddling buying very special and unique circumstances. Anyone else like to ask any questions in person? I don't see any more questions on our YouTube or coming through Dove. Wait, thanks? No, there's a thanks to the follow-up. How do we deal with, yeah, go ahead. How do we deal with the apocasy of the United States then? Well, that's a very good question, what's name you call it. I would just say what's name you call it. That's a question for people who are much better knowledgeable about making the political change than I am an expert in this regard, so to speak. I'm just leaving the data out and I hope that eventually it will lead to changes in the way stuff is done, so to speak. I like that. Data is the way to go. So thank you very much, Dove. Last chance for questions, friends. Library community. All right, so Dove generously has a 30% discount code on his book and you can email him there and I put it in the chat as well. I'm going to one more time put the links to tonight's events with library news and links to Dove's sites and how you can check out the book at our library, but also pick it up from 30% up. And wait, let me come back home. We appreciate you very much being here tonight, Dove, and library community. We appreciate you coming out. Come by tomorrow night, same time, same channel for some SFN. Go ahead. And thank you very much for this invitation for any of your questions and for all of your questions. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, this is a meeting everyone can unmute if they want. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, friends. Have a good night, Alan. Thank you for the tech hosting and Dove. We appreciate you being here. Good night.