Defending 2020: What Worked, What Didn't, and What's Next

Brandt and Hanlon's post-mortem of foreign interference in the 2020 US presidential election provides a frank assessment of what the defensive architecture built since 2016 actually achieved. The findings are mixed: the most severe cyber threats were contained; disinformation operations continued at scale but with measurably reduced impact; malign finance operations persisted with limited disruption.

The honest accounting of failure alongside success is what makes this report particularly valuable. The specific lessons — around the importance of pre-election attribution and the limits of platform content moderation as a sole counter-measure — are directly actionable for election security practitioners.