In a primetime address Thursday evening, President Trump alleged the U.S. election system falls “catastrophically short,” revisiting a topic that has drawn his attention for years — and making claims that election experts have heavily disputed.
The White House released a trove of newly declassified documents on election security in conjunction with the address. In a briefing with reporters several hours before the speech, a White House official acknowledged that none of the newly released information would allege that any votes were switched or voting machines hacked. The president and his allies have long insisted otherwise, falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him due to widespread fraud.
Mr. Trump used part of his speech to push lawmakers to pass the SAVE America Act, a suite of controversial proposed election law changes, including requirements to show proof of citizenship to register to vote. That legislation remains stuck in limbo, with some Senate Republicans skeptical. Mr. Trump’s allies in the GOP caucus largely praised the speech and echoed his calls to pass the SAVE America Act, while Democrats blasted it and accused Mr. Trump of seeking to undermine elections.
Shortly after the speech wrapped up, David Becker, executive director for the Center for Election Innovation and Research, argued that little groundbreaking information was revealed.
“This administration has been in total control of the federal government for 18 months. They’ve redirected untold taxpayer resources to try to uncover evidence of massive voter fraud,” he said. “And at the end of that 18 months, all we got is more rehashed, debunked conspiracy theories, many of which we’ve known about before and already knew didn’t affect our elections.”
Trump and China
One of the more notable allegations leveled by Mr. Trump was that the Chinese government had acquired 220 million U.S. voter registration files from 2020 to 2023 in what the president called “the largest compromise of election data in history.” The information, the president said, included voters’ names, addresses, phone numbers and party affiliations.
The president alleged that intelligence agencies “kept the information secret and hidden,” never disclosing China’s access to U.S. voter registration data to him or to Congress.
However, voter registration data is publicly available. Some states post the information online, and many others allow people to freely request it, though some personal information on voters is kept confidential. It’s also not clear how China intended to use the data, and having access to voter rolls does not necessarily allow people to commit fraud.
“It sounds bad when you hear about it,” said Becker, who is a CBS News election law contributor. “The reality is: voter files in the United States are public.”
A 2020 intelligence report declassified almost four years ago found China had obtained multiple states’ voter data “to conduct public opinion analysis on the 2020 US general election.”
There remains no evidence that China — or any other country — tried to manipulate the results of the 2020 election by interfering with voting processes. The U.S. intelligence community assessed in March 2021 that no foreign actor “attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process,” including the casting of ballots, the vote-counting process or voter registrations.
Mr. Trump also alleged that China “fought like hell” to prevent him from winning in 2020: “The Chinese government wanted [the] U.S. president to lose the next election, and the reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them.”
There is some debate about China’s role in the 2020 race, which the documents released Thursday reflect. The National Intelligence Council publicly assessed shortly after the election that China stayed on the sidelines, deciding neither a Trump nor Biden presidency would be “advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling.” But that assessment notes a “minority view” from one intelligence official that China did try to denigrate Mr. Trump, including through social media posts and official statements.
The National Intelligence Council’s assessment did find that Russia tried to influence the 2020 election by promoting the Trump campaign, while Iran tried to undercut the Trump campaign. Still, neither country tried to interfere with voting systems.
China, for its part, has strongly denied any interest in interfering in U.S. elections. The Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., told CBS News on Thursday it has “all along adhered to the principle of non-interference in other’s internal affairs.”
Dead and non-citizen voters
Mr. Trump also pointed to findings by the federal government that “hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls.”
In particular, he pointed to a Department of Homeland Security review of state voter rolls and public records that determined that more than 250,000 non-citizens are registered to vote in federal elections across four states — California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada.
Becker questioned those findings, arguing “we should take that with a great big grain of salt.”
“That’s based on using commercial data that cannot be used,” Becker said during a CBS News special report. “It’s going to create a ton of false positives. I guarantee you, that data includes a ton of people, maybe even a majority of people, who are absolutely eligible voters, and states would probably be breaking the law if they remove those voters from the rolls.”
It’s illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, and documented cases are extremely rare. The Brennan Center for Justice looked at 42 jurisdictions where a combined 23.5 million people voted in 2016, and found just 30 instances of suspected non-citizen voting.
State-level results are similar. A 2024 audit in Georgia found 20 of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters were not citizens, and the same year, Ohio found 597 non-citizen registered voters in 2024 out of its more than 8 million voters, including 138 who cast ballots. Last year, Texas found 2,724 “potential non-citizens” among its over 18 million voters, and Louisiana found 390 non-citizens out of just under 3 million voters, 79 of whom voted in at least one election.
Proven cases of voting by dead people are also rare. Georgia officials found just four cases of votes cast in the names of dead people in the 2020 election, and Arizona officials found one. Michigan lawmakers found two cases in the county that houses Detroit, but one of them was a clerical error and the other involved a person who died after mailing in her ballot.
The Justice Department has sued dozens of states for access to their voting records, saying it wants to screen the records for compliance with federal laws that require states to maintain clean voter rolls and check for non-citizen voters. To date, the federal government has lost in district courts 11 times and has not scored any legal victories in its fight for voter rolls.
The White House also declassified files about an FBI investigation into a 2020 Michigan voter registration drive that state and federal law enforcement agents believed included fraudulent registrations. The probe was closed, drawing pushback from investigators.
Mr. Trump called the target of the probe a “Democrat get-out-the-vote organization,” and argued the “Biden Department of Justice slow-walked the investigation and killed it.”
Those allegations of suspicious voter registrations in Muskegon County, Michigan, have been publicly known for years. State officials have said the questionable registrations were caught before any fraudulent votes could be cast.
Voting machines
The president alleged voting machines and ballot-counting systems are “extremely exposed to attack,” calling them “vulnerable” and “easily compromised.” He later pointed to CIA intelligence about plots to use voting machines for fraud in Venezuela.
However, the Venezuela-related intelligence released by the White House focuses on election systems made by the company Smartmatic — and that company’s technology is not used in the United States, aside from in Los Angeles County.
In general, experts say voting machines are extremely difficult to compromise: They are closely monitored, they aren’t connected to the internet, and in almost every state, they are backed up by paper ballots or receipts that can be audited to check the results by hand.
“They’re under lock and key until they are publicly tested to make sure they haven’t been tampered with,” Becker said. “And then they are used and we still don’t trust them. We have those paper ballots.”
For example, every 2020 general election ballot in Georgia was tallied three times: once by machines during the original counting process, once in an audit that involved a hand recount in every county statewide, and once in a machine recount requested by the Trump campaign. All three counts affirmed that former President Joe Biden defeated Mr. Trump.
Elsewhere in Thursday’s speech, Mr. Trump pointed to newly declassified intelligence that U.S. adversaries like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have the ability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.
The document that Mr. Trump appeared to reference — a National Intelligence Council memo from January 2020 — does state that U.S. adversaries have the “capability” to compromise election infrastructure. It points to voter registration databases as one possible vulnerability.
But it later explains that systems used to tabulate votes or display results would be “difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.” The memo said exploiting the systems often requires “physical proximity” and would likely be caught by audits.
The memo also warns that foreign adversaries could make “wholly fabricated” or “exaggerated” claims about their ability to manipulate voting systems, in an effort to “undermine public confidence.”