Fact Check: Trump's primetime speech rehashing election claims / Photo: SAUL LOEB - POOL/AFP
Fact Check: Trump's primetime speech rehashing election claims
US President Donald Trump resurrected long-debunked claims about fraud and foreign interference in the 2020 election, alleging in an address Thursday that China stole millions of voter files and suggesting Venezuela could manipulate American voting machines.
The White House declassified intelligence documents as Trump doubled down on his assertion that the election he lost to Joe Biden was "stolen," which has never been substantiated.
More than 60 lawsuits failed to uncover fraud capable of changing the 2020 result, while elections officials and members of Trump's own administration repeatedly rejected his claims.
Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, told AFP that Trump's speech consisted mostly of "recycled and debunked 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," he wrote on his blog.
Here is a fact-check of some of Trump's claims:
- Data compromised by China -
Trump accused China of "the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China's illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files."
He later claimed China attempted "to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden."
In the United States, however, voter files are largely matters of public record that states are required to maintain and which are regularly sold.
A declassified March 2021 report from the country's leading intelligence agencies reported "no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process."
The report said the agencies concluded with "high confidence" that Beijing "did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome."
A separate government assessment similarly determined that there was "no evidence that any foreign government-affiliated actor" compromised the election.
Such a conspiracy to create thousands of fake voters would require fabricated Social Security entries, residences and identification, all while evading detection, former Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer wrote on X.
- Venezuela -
Trump claimed Venezuela's elections were rigged under president Nicolas Maduro -- and suggested US voting machines were vulnerable to similar manipulation.
The comments echoed conspiracy theories Trump allies pushed in 2020 alleging a Venezuelan plot to flip US votes through the elections software company Smartmatic.
Smartmatic -- whose technology was only deployed in a single uncontested county during the 2020 election -- later won settlements and defamation lawsuits over the false claims.
The documents the White House released Thursday say Venezuelan officials "developed sustained interest and likely some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems," but that the intelligence "did not definitively confirm that large-scale electronic fraud was successfully executed in specific Venezuelan elections."
They add that "neither Smartmatic nor the Venezuelan Government had the capability" to predictably "manipulate the outcome of an election outside of Venezuela."
"Nothing presented shows evidence of any vote manipulation," Charles Stewart, an elections expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told AFP.
- Noncitizen voters -
Trump claimed hundreds of thousands of non-citizens were registered to vote.
Non-citizen voting is illegal and has been shown by both election audits and independent research to be exceedingly rare. Several safeguards prevent non-citizens from voting.
S.Papastathopoulos--AN-GR
