How is this any different from the US interfering in foreign elections since the end of WWII, hell they are even implicated in our 1975 constitutional crisis with Gough Whitlam right up to PM Hawke even now there are Chinese whispers trying to influence members of parliament on both sides of the house.
its up to the voter to do his research before voting on these important issues, unless there is fraud in the actual voter system foreign government will always try to influence an outcome for there own interests, just because you don't like the end result doesn't mean they have actually rigged the vote
Something to consider (and consider carefully since this abuts political discussion which is an appropriately unpopular and unhealthy topic to discuss here on DT) is how interference in foreign elections was accomplished by the US and other countries. Was the interference a gov't to gov't diplomatic effort? Was it foreign propaganda, or a foreign perspective/opinion/point of view? If it was propaganda, was it overt or covert?
One of the things which is different now vs. in the past is how people receive information, and then how they process what they receive. Behavioral scientists only just seem to be starting to get a handle on how some things occur now, but some of the discoveries seem to be at once both fascinating and disturbing.
Take confirmation bias as an example. A person has
nn belief. Initially they might not have a strong belief in
nn, but they encounter additional "people" who express or profess a similar belief in
nn, and those encounters with "people" serve to confirm the person's beliefs. This becomes very problematic when the "people" are actually bots and/or sock puppet accounts under the control of a person or group that has an agenda and are attempting to influence a situation or achieve an outcome in line with their agenda.
Going further with such an example, the activities of botnets and sock puppet accounts can dramatically amplify the apparent volume of noise coming from a person or group, or about an event or issue. A single blogger might write a nasty post about something, perhaps a complaint about a poor experience when dealing with a specific industry or company. If that post gets picked up by a botnet and re-used or repeated 10k times, then that industry or specific business might see or receive 10k complaints, when it was still just the original person who had an issue and not the perceived angry mob.
As for voters doing their research, that is also being complicated by the various botnets and sock puppet accounts. Claims are easy to make, and if very popular and/or 'hot' then the information will be readily available. What can be much harder, especially for most people, is to get honest confirmation of many claims which get made, especially over social media. Just look at the comments section of many news articles on the Internet.