U.S. spy chiefs equate China’s targeting of American voter files to ‘election interference’

The White House on Thursday released a statement from its spy agency chiefs making clear that China's targeting of Americans' voter registration files that began during the 2020 election likely meets the intelligence community's definition for "election interference." Those declassified documents, the spy chief's noted in Thursday's fact sheet, included the intelligence community’s official definition for election interference, which includes a foreign power targeting voter registration infrastructure or data. "Election interference is a subset of election influence targeted at the technical aspects of the election, including voter registration, casting and counting of ballots, and reporting of results," it added. Under that definition—used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)—China’s acquisition of U.S. voter registration data constitutes election interference. The statement also noted that when China acquired 220 million American voter registration records, it "bought, stole or hacked" the data and obtained non-public information that could not be commercially bought.