All this political drama got us wondering: How unusual is foreign election interference? As it turns out, not unusual at all. Russia/USSR has been tinkering with other countries' elections for decades -- and so has the U.S.
Dov Levin, a political scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University, has found over a hundred examples of U.S. and/or Russian interference in other countries' elections from 1946 to 2000. About 30 percent of these interventions were Russian; the other 70 percent were organized by the U.S. In the slideshow below, we've put together a few of the American examples.
A note before we get started: This slideshow focuses specifically on U.S. interference in foreign elections. So it doesn't include some of the more egregious instances of U.S. meddling -- such as the 1953 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, or the 1961 assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. We do mention the U.S.-backed coup against Salvador Allende -- but within the context of U.S. interference in Chile's elections, which preceded the coup by almost a decade. So as you click through, bear in mind that election meddling is just one of the many ways that the U.S. has intervened in other countries' politics.