President Donald Trump recently delivered an Oval Office address, reviving a familiar litany of long-debunked claims about the 2020 election and alleging, without evidence, that China and Venezuela had conspired to steal the contest he lost to Joe Biden.
The president’s nearly 30-minute primetime speech, accompanied by the release of what the White House described as declassified intelligence documents, centered on assertions that Chinese actors had acquired millions of voter records and that Venezuelan officials possessed the capability to manipulate American voting machines.
Trump characterized the situation as an “unprecedented election security nightmare” and suggested the information had been concealed from the American people by what he termed the “deep state.”
Election experts who reviewed the documents and the president’s remarks found no new evidence to support the claims.
“What Trump did not do was even purport to show a single ineligible voter voted in the 2020 election, or that any voting machines were actually compromised,” wrote Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Charles Stewart, an elections expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that “nothing presented shows evidence of any vote manipulation.”
The intelligence community had already addressed these matters publicly in 2021.
A declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded with “high confidence” that China “did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election.”
The same report found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 U.S. election, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”
The president’s claim that China had illicitly acquired 220 million U.S. voter files misrepresented the nature of the data. Voter registration information is largely a matter of public record in the United States, available for purchase from commercial vendors.
One of the declassified documents acknowledged that “publicly available U.S. voter registration information for six states was downloaded” by a Chinese actor in 2022 but noted that “the actual motivations for collecting this information is unknown.”
Trump also asserted that the documents showed Chinese efforts to undermine his reelection campaign.
While a CIA note from mid-2018 stated that the Chinese Communist Party sought to “reduce the U.S. President’s votes and make him resign or prevent his re-election,” the 2021 intelligence assessment found that Beijing ultimately viewed neither Trump nor Biden as advantageous enough to risk getting caught meddling, given bipartisan consensus against China in the United States.
The president repeated a claim about noncitizen voting, asserting that the Department of Homeland Security had identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote.
The White House released two documents related to this claim, but neither provided supporting evidence or methodology.
Election audits and independent research consistently show noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare. An audit of Utah’s voter rolls found just one noncitizen registered among more than 2 million voters.
Trump also suggested that Venezuela could manipulate U.S. voting machines, echoing conspiracy theories pushed in 2020 about Smartmatic, an elections software company.
The declassified documents stated that while Venezuelan officials “developed sustained interest and likely some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems,” the intelligence “did not definitively confirm that large-scale electronic fraud was successfully executed in specific Venezuelan elections.”
The documents further noted that “neither Smartmatic nor the Venezuelan Government had the capability” to predictably “manipulate the outcome of an election outside of Venezuela.”
More than 60 courts, including judges appointed by Trump himself, rejected challenges to the 2020 election results. State-level audits and recounts confirmed Biden’s victory by more than 7 million votes in the popular count and 306-232 in the Electoral College.
In a joint statement issued in November 2020, while Trump was still in the White House and before his conspiracy theory resulted in the failed coup attempt on January 6, 2021, government and industry bodies overseeing election security declared the election “the most secure in American history.”
Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s top election official, said after the speech that he felt “a little bit cheated.”
“I was expecting some kind of delicious bombshell that we might be able to investigate,” Fontes said, “but instead I got a rehash of the same grievance.”
Susan Greenhalgh of the advocacy group Free Speech For People said that “two things can be true at the same time—that we have ignored vulnerabilities in our voting systems for a long time and there is no evidence that the election was rigged in 2020.”
The president closed his address by urging Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, legislation that would make civic participation much more difficult for tens of millions of citizens every election cycle and would outright disenfranchise millions more.
The bill remains stalled in the Senate amid criticism that it would impose unnecessary burdens on voters and potentially disenfranchise millions of Americans.
Election experts noted that nearly every state uses paper ballots that can be audited, providing a safeguard against manipulation. Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan organization focused on voting technology, argued that pre-election testing of equipment and chain of custody rules for ballots provide additional protections.
“And that is the most important safeguard of all,” Smith said of paper ballots.
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