Jon Allsop in The New Yorker:

But claims and counterclaims of “election interference” are, it seems, ubiquitous these days. Recently, the right has accused the left of election interference for a wide array of behavior: directing federal agencies to promote access to voting, making the argument that Trump should not receive full intelligence briefings, orchestrating a supposed PsyOp involving Taylor Swift. Republicans have accused one another of doing it in primaries; Democrats have levelled the charge against Republicans, too. When the editorial board of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called on Joe Biden to drop out of the Presidential race, in June, Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Biden campaign adviser and former mayor of Atlanta, didn’t use the words “election interference” but did accuse the paper of exerting “undue influence” on the election. Three weeks later, when Biden did drop out, sixty-five senior Republicans called his withdrawal “a coup or said it amounted to election interference,” according to the New York Times. When Kamala Harris replaced Biden atop the Democratic ticket, Trump said that she was using artificial intelligence to counterfeit photos of big crowds at her events. (The photos were real.) Harris “should be disqualified,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.”

The term “election interference” is fuzzy and subjective and has, at different moments, evoked different phenomena. Broadly speaking, in the run-up to and during Trump’s time in office, election interference was something Russia did; by 2020, it was something Trump did. These significations have persisted. Warnings of foreign propaganda and hacking are back in the headlines. At least as news stories, the criminal cases alleging that Trump and his associates tried to subvert the 2020 result never went away.

But, as with other Trump-era catchphrases (see also: “fake news”), the meaning of “election interference” has in many respects grown more elusive as various political actors—not least Trump himself—have co-opted, warped, and weaponized it. In 2021, Joseph Bernstein wrote in Harper’s that the words “misinformation” and “disinformation” had, in their crudest usage, come to mean “things I disagree with.” If that’s the case, then “election interference” has perhaps come to mean “things I disagree with in the context of an election.”…

In writing this article, I tried mightily to come up with a definition of election interference that is both comprehensive and workable. I failed. Behaviors that are both legal and illegal, foreign and domestic, pre-Election Day and post-Election Day, direct and indirect—and, in each case, both broad and narrow—seem to qualify. The challenge, as I see it, is to look through the fog of claim and counterclaim to the types of election interference that are the most pressing in a given moment; the strains that, if unresolved, neuter our ability to debate the definition at all.

Hasen, the U.C.L.A. law professor, told me that he doesn’t mean to diminish the wide range of factors that might weigh on an election outcome, from the American campaign-finance system—which he once wrote a book about, and still describes as “fundamentally unfair”—to a foreign power stealing documents. But he nonetheless defines “election interference” relatively narrowly—as the use of illegal means to, say, manipulate vote totals or change results after the fact—and argues that including broader efforts to sway public opinion in the definition risks “cheapening” it. “This kind of language policing matters to me,” Hasen said. It’s about “reserving a very serious term for a very serious set of behaviors.” Bob Ferguson, perhaps, had it right the first time.