The national security community is "keenly focused" on the threat of possible election interference in the 2024 elections, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

"It is not seriously disputed that our foreign adversaries have tried and are continuing to try to interfere in our elections," Wray, who has run the FBI since 2017, told Senate lawmakers last week, though he added, "We’re keenly focused on the risk that foreign adversaries, whether it’s Russia, whether it’s China, whether it’s Iran or others, would seek to interfere in our elections."

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The leader of the FBI acknowledged that the threats of external influence on the 2024 presidential election are "elevated."

"I think it’s fair to say that they are elevated from where they were before," Wray explained. "And to elaborate just slightly on that point, obviously we saw, and it’s not disputed, that the Russians tried to interfere in the 2016 election and then continued. But what we’ve seen since then is other adversaries attempting to take a page out of the Russians' playbook."

There is the threat from outside countries that could influence views and public opinion prior to the election in addition to the threat from election machinery. Last month, Meta, Facebook's parent company, announced that it shut down roughly 4,800 fake accounts created by someone in China designed to appear to be from Americans with the intent to spread polarizing political content.

The left-leaning group Free Speech for People, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on election and campaign finance reforms, wrote a letter earlier this month expressing concern about previous efforts to access voting system software to Wray, Attorney General Merrick Garland, special counsel Jack Smith, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly.

The group of roughly two dozen computer scientists, election security experts, and voter advocacy organizations who signed the letter requested a federal investigation into what it alleged was a “multi-state conspiracy to obtain voting machine software, carried out through cooperation of a network of Trump allies."

Former President Donald Trump, who is also the 2024 GOP front-runner, repeatedly and vociferously doubted the integrity of the 2020 election that he lost to President Joe Biden. His claims, which were parroted by a majority within the Republican Party, delegitimized the validity of his election loss in the eyes of his tens of millions of supporters, many of whom still believe, without evidence, that the election was stolen from the former president.

There was no evidence to support the Trump team's claims that there was a level of fraud so significant it changed the outcome of the election, and their arguments were roundly dismissed in dozens of court cases.

The past election was conducted during the coronavirus pandemic, and voters relied on early voting and mail-in voting more heavily than ever before, which some GOP and Trump officials claimed was the source of some of the fraud.

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Now, though, Trump and the Republican National Committee are looking to use early voting to their advantage.

The former president said in October, "I will secure our elections, and our goal will be one-day voting with paper ballots and voter ID. … But until then, Republicans have to compete, and we have to win." RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel explained in April, "Our approach to election integrity is: We fight in the courtroom, but we play by the rules we’re given in the field.”