Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference - Paperback

by David Shimer (Author)

The definitive history of the covert struggle between Russia and America to influence elections, why the threat to American democracy is greater than ever, and what we can do about it. This is "the first book to put the story of Russian interference into a broader context.... Extraordinary and gripping" (The New York Times Book Review).

Russia's interference in the 2016 elections marked only the latest chapter of a hidden and revelatory history. In Rigged, David Shimer tells the sweeping story of covert electoral interference past and present. He exposes decades of secret operations--by the KGB, the CIA, and Vladimir Putin's Russia--to shape electoral outcomes, melding deep historical research with groundbreaking interviews with more than 130 key players, from leading officials in both the Trump and Obama administrations to CIA and NSA directors to a former KGB general. Throughout history and in 2016, both Russian and American operations achieved their greatest success by influencing the way voters think, rather than tampering with actual vote tallies.

Understanding 2016 as one battle in a much longer war is essential to comprehending the critical threat currently posed to America's electoral sovereignty and how to defend against it. Illuminating how the lessons of the past can be used to protect our democracy in the future, Rigged is an essential book for readers of every political persuasion.

Author Biography

DAVID SHIMER is an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. From 2021 until 2025, Shimer served at the White House National Security Council, including as the Director for Eastern Europe and Ukraine and as Director for Russian Affairs. In these roles, Shimer helped to shape and execute the U.S. response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Shimer is the author of the book Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference (Knopf, 2020), which was named a notable book of the year by the Washington Post and an editor's pick by the New York Times Book Review. Shimer's research has been published in the New York Times, The New Yorker,  Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.  Shimer received his doctorate in international relations from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar and a Truman Scholar, and his bachelor's and master's degrees in history from Yale University.