In this essay, we will investigate the topic of Russian interference in the United States’ 2016 Presidential election.  This essay will contain a list of topics related to Russian meddling, possible titles for essays covering those topics, an outline of the essay, and an example demonstrating how to write a strong essay.  Our free example essay will not only explain how Russian interference influenced the election, but also show you how to write each part of an essay: introduction, thesis statement, and body paragraphs that combine evidence and analysis.  The essay will conclude with a review of the information presented in the essay and suggestions for further action.

Titles

A New Kind of Cold War: Russian Meddling in the 2016 Election

Is Putin the De Facto President of the United States: How Russia Influenced the 2016 Election

Should Russian Interference in the 2016 Election Invalidate the Results?

What Does Russian Interference in the 2016 Election Mean for the Future of America?

Related Topics

The Nixon Watergate Scandal- Mentions of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible Trump administration connections to the Russian efforts automatically make people think of Watergate and its fallout.  How do the two scenarios compare?  If Watergate is different because of the smoking gun evidence that made it clear Nixon was aware of the spying, what type of evidence would make the Russian interference the same?  Nixon avoided impeachment by resigning, but Trump does not seem to have a personality that would allow him to resign; what would it mean for the country to have the President impeached in the current political climate?

Potential Remedies for Russian Interference in the Election- If Russian interference determined the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, what remedies exist?  Do the remedies depend on whether the Trump campaign was complicit in the interference?  If voting machines were altered or tampered with, can individual voters whose votes were impacted by that tampering bring suit to challenge the election results?  Can Hillary Clinton bring suit to challenge the election if there is sufficient information to demonstrate that the election was influenced?  What type of remedy would exist?

Foreign Influence in the U.S. Government- While Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election is the current topic of interest, we know relatively little about what type of foreign groups or governments influence our congressmen.  Should candidates for office in the United States be permitted to accept campaign donations from any type of interest group representing foreign countries, or should that be considered a conflict-of-interest?

Do Social Media Sites Have a Moral Obligation to Present the Truth- While information about the extent of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election is still developing, one thing that has become clear is that social media sites, particularly Facebook, took money from Russian organizations to plant fake news stories that were negative to Clinton’s campaign.  Opinion polls suggest that a number of Trump voters believed those stories.  Do social media sites have an obligation to let their users know when news is fake or made up?  What about if a “news” article is from a paid source?  Does Facebook need to let its users know the source of the news?

Outline

I.  Introduction

II.  Body

A.  Background

B.  The Role of the Electoral College

C.  Was the Trump Campaign an Active Participant?

III.  Conclusion

Introduction

The 2016 Presidential Campaign was historic for a number of reasons.  First, it featured the first female candidate for President offered by either major political party.   It also featured an appeal to populism and isolationism that had not marked American politics in almost a century.  The Republican candidate, Donald Trump, had no prior political experience of any type.  Hillary Clinton, the projected winner, won a clear majority of the popular vote, but lost the electoral vote by failing to secure wins in states where she was the projected winner.  The Trump victory surprised many political pundits and American voters, who immediately began to wonder what role, if any, rumored Russian interference in the election played in Trump’s victory.  As of October 21, 2017, those issues remained largely unresolved.  Although Russian interference in the election became well-documented, the complete role that the Trump presidential campaign played in that interference remained unclear.  Furthermore, how that interference influenced the election had not yet been established at that date.  Was the interference limited to attempting to influence American... intelligence agencies had concluded that Russia interfered in the election in several significant ways, all with the goal of harming Hillary Clinton’s chances and promoting Donald Trump as President.  First, Russia hacked the computer systems for the national-level Republican and Democratic parties.  However, they did not release information from the Republican sights.  Instead, they arranged to have information from the Democratic organizations released at damaging times.  “Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks” (Sanger and Shane 2016).  Therefore, even before the 2016 election, the U.S. intelligence community was very aware that Russia was trying to influence the election and help secure a victory for Donald Trump.
However, since the election, there is an increasing amount of evidence that Russian interference in the election was more significant than initially believed.  The first type of interference was Russia’s meddling in American media, particularly in social media.  There is a growing body of evidence showing that Russian trolls played a significant role in social media prior to the election.  These trolls helped drive the nature and tone of political debates, which not only helped vilify Clinton, but also diminished some of the negative stories that surrounded Trump at the time of the election.

In addition, Russia was the source of many of the patently false stories that were circulating prior to the election.  Russian outlets have been found to be responsible for stories that had no basis in fact, but were treated like news, and which helped bolster the Trump Campaign’s characterizations of Clinton as crooked.  These stories helped create a narrative, but did not differ substantially in tone from prior propaganda campaigns by foreign governments hoping to influence an election in another country.  What made them different from prior efforts is the scope of their reach; social media provided an opportunity to target a much larger audience that traditional propaganda campaigns could reach.

More troubling than Russian propaganda is the fact that there is evidence that Russia may have managed to breach some U.S. voting systems.  According to a document leaked by a National Security Agency employee, Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier (Bump 2017).  This allegation is especially important given that election day results in several key districts throughout the United States had results that were substantially different from poll results in the days prior to the election and from exit poll results the day of the election.  If these voting systems were compromised, then Russia did not just manage to exert influence on the 2016 election, but actually managed to deprive American citizens of their votes in the election.

The Role of the Electoral College

Looking at the number of votes for each candidate, and the fact that Clinton won the popular vote by close to 3,000,000 votes, it can be difficult to see how Russian interference could have influenced the election.  After all, even if Russia’s had a successful three-pronged approach to influencing the outcome of the election, the majority of Americans still expressed a clear preference for Clinton.  In addition, third-party voters mean that Trump received substantially less than half of all votes cast for President.  In many electoral systems, this would mean that Russian attempts to influence the election had clearly failed.

However, the United States is not a pure democracy, but a representative democracy.  Therefore, the Presidential election is not one-vote per person.  Instead, votes have different weight, and, depending on where in the United States a person lives and how that state apportions its votes in the electoral college, Americans may actually not have a meaningful vote in…