Trump’s ‘Rigged Election’ Claims Are Short on Evidence, Again

President Donald Trump’s speech Thursday night on election administration surprised me. He didn’t relitigate the 2020 election (although he did say we “can never watch a stolen election again”). He didn’t attack Georgia’s elections, as many had predicted. He had some criticisms of election administrators, but many more criticisms of his first term’s national security and law enforcement teams (it’s safe to say Trump hates Chris Krebs, his former director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure).

And he didn’t announce radical steps like the federal control of election administration (at least not yet). 

But the biggest surprise: The documents shared by the White House in real time refuted, or failed to support, Trump’s speech. It’s even more remarkable that these are the documents the White House’s newly formed “government transparency task force” chose to publish in its opening salvo, and they are very bad for Trump’s claims. I can only assume further document releases will be even worse for Trump.

The speech divided (albeit roughly) into five topics: (alleged) Chinese interference, the (alleged) national security deep state, (alleged) voting equipment security vulnerabilities, the Department of Justice’s (alleged) failure to prosecute a voter registration agency in Michigan, and noncitizens (allegedly) registered in four states (California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada). Weirdly, the corresponding White House website and document portal only divide into four topics.

I’ll save the China and deep state allegations for national security experts. I’m better equipped to respond to Trump’s claims about election equipment and noncitizen voter registrations.

It’s important to remember that, unlike in many European countries, U.S. elections are largely governed by state law and administered in more than 9,000 local jurisdictions (typically counties). There is no election mothership that can be hacked to corrupt the elections of the entire country. Each state has its own set of rules and its own election equipment, unconnected to other states.

It’s also important to remember that about 98 percent of Americans vote with a paper ballot. The majority of U.S. voters hand-mark a paper ballot. Other American voters, about 26 percent, make their choices on a digital touchscreen that then prints a paper ballot to be verified by the voter and read by the tabulator. Paper ballots are unhackable, digitally immutable, and auditable; the security community loves them.

Trump, per usual, largely ignored these realities, stating that “our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems [are] dishonest, almost all. They’re vulnerable and easily compromised.” Remarkably, the documents released in the first “pillar” of the new White House website—“Vulnerabilities in Electronic Voting and Ballot-Counting Systems”—very much undermine Trump’s claims. 

Take the document titled “Foreign Threats to 2020 Federal Elections,” for example. Produced by the National Intelligence Council on August 19, 2020, the report states:

Similarly, in a January 15, 2020, document titled, “Vulnerabilities in US 2020 Election Infrastructure,” the national security experts wrote:

The same document considered the greater threat to be “wholly fabricated claims, such as announcing that [adversaries] have compromised all US voting machines, a claim that would be difficult and time-consuming–or impossible–for the US Government to disprove.” Trump didn’t quote that passage for some reason.

The reports did identify the comparative vulnerability of systems connected to the internet, like election office websites and voter registration information. But as the assessments note, successful attacks on these systems could “forc[e] voters to use provisional ballots” or “caus[e] delays.” Nowhere do these reports give any credence to “flipped votes,” “counterfeit ballots,” “phantom voters,” or any of the other theories popular among Trump-inspired election skeptics.

If anything, the documents can be read as a celebration of the progress election offices made in the lead-up to the 2020 election. As the report on potential vulnerabilities in election infrastructure states, “Direct recording electronic machines, which record and process votes digitally and store tabulation data in removable memory, are particularly vulnerable to cyber operations, especially machines with no paper backup. Such machines, however, are used far less than other, more secure types of voting machines.” In the years before November 2020, a number of states, including Georgia, switched from direct recording electronic machines to election systems with paper ballots. Only Louisiana continues to make heavy use of paperless systems.

Trump’s other major election administration claim—that “more than a quarter of a million foreigners illegally registered to vote”—isn’t undermined by the released documents, but is woefully unsupported. Trump stated that the Department of Homeland Security “identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.” That’s a big number, but the number of documents offered by the White House in support of the claim is much smaller: one. The one-page, undated document by the Department of Homeland Security reads:

That’s it. No discussion of the methodology. No theory of how such a large number of noncitizens registered. No explanation for how DHS identified those four states for scrutiny. And certainly no itemization of the unlawful registrants.

Careful listeners probably noticed two things about Trump’s brief noncitizens claim. First, he said these are registrants, not voters. They might not have ever voted. Every state investigation on this topic has found the number of noncitizen voters to be only a small fraction of the number of noncitizen registrants. Many noncitizens have paper voter registration forms stuck under their noses, only to find out later that they can’t vote unless they’re U.S. citizens. Others are registered when obtaining a driver’s license, a process so easy that quickly checking the voter registration box is understandable, especially for those less comfortable with English.

Trump also alleged that the four offending states “refused to share their voter files.” It’s highly unlikely, then, that the federal government could have performed “hard matches.” If the states didn’t share their voter files, the federal government would not have had access to Social Security or driver’s license numbers to pair with each registrant. “Soft matches” using only a full name and date of birth are notoriously unreliable. In 2021, when the Cyber Ninjas—a private company run by Doug Logan, who had previously endorsed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election—audited the Maricopa County, Arizona, election results, it used soft-matching techniques to allege that 33,102 voters cast unlawful ballots because they had moved. When Maricopa County, under my direction, spent hundreds of hours investigating these records, we found just five such votes had been cast. 

Hard matching and soft matching aside, the White House needs to show its work. A single one-page document doesn’t constitute proof. Compare this bare-bones approach to the recent citizenship audit done by Utah that resulted in a 27-page narrative of its process and conclusions. Of more than 2 million registered voters, Utah found 27 confirmed noncitizens, 12 of whom voted in the November 2020 election. Similarly, Michigan reported in detail its recent audit of Macomb County’s some 725,000 registered voters. It found four “apparent noncitizens” on their voter rolls, including one who voted. 

Ever since Trump entered politics, he has alleged stolen elections. He claimed widespread fraud when he lost to Ted Cruz in the 2016 Iowa caucus. He claimed fraud in his 2016 victory against Hillary Clinton. And he of course claimed massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

He promised proof. His speech didn’t deliver that proof. And the documents released by the White House? They didn’t help his case.