President Trump has sowed doubts about the integrity of U.S. elections for over a decade. What he has not done is furnish proof to support his claims that there was widespread fraud, that foreign powers have hijacked votes, or that federal or state officials plotted to rig either the 2020 election he lost to Joseph R. Biden Jr. or other contests he has questioned.
Mr. Trump is likely to revisit some of those assertions during a prime-time address to the country Thursday that is expected to center on election security, potentially intensifying his efforts to undercut faith in the results of American elections.
His false claims, however, have at times either exaggerated or obscured some genuine security concerns around elections, particularly as they relate to foreign meddling.
In recent years, foreign adversaries, especially Russia and Iran, have sought to influence presidential election cycles through a mix of online propaganda and hack-and-leak operations. But no evidence has ever emerged showing that vote counts have been manipulated or corrupted. Intelligence reports, state audits of vote tallies and lawsuits have repeatedly affirmed official results in 2020 and other years.
No, there is no evidence of foreign manipulation of vote counts in recent U.S. elections.
Despite extensive state audits, there has never been any public evidence to corroborate claims showing foreign manipulation either in the casting or tabulation of votes in the 2020 contest or other recent elections. Many of Mr. Trump’s own top officials at the end of his first term have repeatedly attested to this publicly.
Since he returned to office, Mr. Trump and some top officials have promised to reveal classified evidence of nefarious plots — either foreign or domestic in nature — to tamper with elections.
But there has been foreign meddling, right?
Yes, though the answer depends somewhat on what is meant by “meddling.”
Current and former U.S. officials, cybersecurity experts and executives at major social media companies have said that foreign trolls have for years pumped out disinformation online about the American elections and specific presidential and congressional candidates.
Russia conducted the most significant foreign influence operations during the 2016 presidential contest, according to former U.S. intelligence officials and the bipartisan conclusions of a multiyear investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee released in 2019 and 2020. Social media companies, including Facebook and Twitter, and the Obama administration were caught flat-footed by the Russian playbook, which China, Iran and others have mimicked in more recent elections, including the 2020 and 2024 presidential races.
In general, U.S. intelligence officials have said it is unknowable to what extent, if any, foreign disinformation efforts might have affected voters’ choices in 2016 or in other elections.
Regardless, officials in the first Trump administration and the Biden administration drew a sharp line between foreign influence campaigns, which over the years were viewed as serious but not existential, and efforts to manipulate actual vote tallies. Some senior policymakers have argued that the latter, if it did occur, would be a flagrant violation of sovereignty that could be nearly tantamount to an act of war.
There are valid concerns about the security of election infrastructure.
There is no evidence that foreign actors have been able to change any votes, or even that they have desired to do so. Still, cybersecurity experts for years have tested voting machines and other systems connected to the election process, like electronic poll books used to check in voters, and found various flaws. Generally, however, such issues either require physical access to the election systems or would not enable manipulation of vote counts.
The Senate report on 2016 foreign activity did conclude that Russian hackers probably targeted election systems in all 50 states during the 2016 election cycle, but officials and experts have long stressed that such activity was a basic form of cyber-reconaissance, like scanning public election-related website domains to hunt for potential vulnerabilities, that was akin to a burglar driving around a neighborhood to identify potential homes to rob. Even then, the systems at issue were not ones that could have allowed for direct vote tampering.
In addition to inauthentic coordinated activity on social media, in which Russia’s trolls posed as American voters to support Mr. Trump’s candidacy and denigrate his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, the Kremlin also engineered a hack-and-leak of Democratic emails that were published online during the final months of the campaign.
Perhaps the most serious discovery in 2016 was that Russian hackers breached an Illinois voter registration database and could have potentially deleted or altered voter information, but investigators said they did not find any evidence that took place.
“The committee has seen no evidence that any votes were changed or that any voting machines were manipulated,” the Senate report said. Two Florida counties also suffered similar breaches of voter databases.
Still, the discovery of the Russian activity — which the heavily redacted Senate report found began in at least 2014 and continued into at least 2017 — cajoled states to spend millions to safeguard their election equipment in subsequent years.
As a result, election infrastructure cybersecurity has improved significantly, in part thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars of funding appropriated by Congress. Nearly all votes cast in the United States now have verifiable paper backup, for instance, and vote machines are virtually never connected to the internet.
The 2020 election also saw foreign influence campaigns.
A high-confidence U.S. intelligence assessment released in early 2021 during the first months of the Biden administration concluded that Russia had engaged in a broad range of intelligence operations to hurt Mr. Biden’s campaign, while Iran sought to harm Mr. Trump’s re-election chances with online influence efforts.
This time, however, Russian hackers did not probe election systems as they did in 2016. Instead, it was Iran that alarmed U.S. officials with its activities, which included gaining access to a confidential voter registration database in Alaska and attempting to intimidate voters with threatening emails sent under the guise of a far-right group. In the Alaska case, the database was accidentally accessible online because of a website misconfiguration and no voter information was altered. The Justice Department later indicted two Iranian nationals for the schemes.
The intelligence report found that China did not try to influence voters, though it included a minority view from an intelligence analyst contending that Beijing had, in fact, also tried to undermine Mr. Trump’s campaign “primarily through social media and official statements and media.” That dissent, however, agreed with the view that China had not tried to interfere.
Why does China keep coming up in relation to 2020?
Supporters of Mr. Trump have claimed that U.S. officials suppressed evidence of the extent of Beijing’s meddling, among other assertions. But nothing in the public record suggests China manipulated votes. Instead, the intelligence assessment said China “probably also continued longstanding efforts” to gather information on U.S. voters and public opinion and to use that information to influence U.S. policy “as it has during all election cycles since at least 2008.”
“We assess Beijing did not interfere with election infrastructure, including vote tabulation or the transmission of election results,” the report states.
Separately, the report concluded Cuba, Venezuela and the militant group Hezbollah all had intentions to undermine Mr. Trump as well, though such efforts were described as small in scale.
“We have no information suggesting that the current or former Venezuelan regimes were involved in attempts to compromise U.S. election infrastructure,” the assessment said.
Mr. Trump’s claims about 2020 lack evidence.
Among Mr. Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, none have been more persistent — or more specious — than those concerning the purported vulnerabilities of voting machine technology.
The false assertions have generally focused on a company called Dominion Voting Systems, which is now known as Liberty Vote. Between Election Day in 2020 until the day before a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump posted conspiracy theories on social media related to Dominion nearly three dozen times, according to the final report of the congressional committee that investigated the events of Jan. 6.
Often, Mr. Trump was egged on in his attacks against Dominion by his lawyers at the time — chief among them, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who made the company a center of his messaging strategy, and Sidney Powell, who filed four failed lawsuits baselessly asserting that Dominion machines were used to flip votes in key swing states away from Mr. Trump.
The claims have often shifted in their details, but have mostly centered on debunked allegations that a cabal of conspirators seeking to defeat Mr. Trump hacked Dominion machines to rig the vote count. Among the purported conspirators were Chinese and Venezuelan intelligence agents, the liberal financier George Soros and election officials in states like Georgia.
In 2021, Ms. Powell and other lawyers who made claims about the company were penalized by a federal judge in Michigan, who called their lawsuits about Dominion “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.” Two years later, Fox News, which often amplified Dominion conspiracy theories, agreed to settle defamation claims by the company for an extraordinary payment of $787 million.
Mr. Trump and his allies also pushed unfounded claims that Dominion machines had been manipulated in Antrim County, Mich., to change votes. His own attorney general, William P. Barr, called the Dominion claims “idiotic” and “complete nonsense.” Election officials say they did find, and quickly corrected, a clerical error in the tabulation of votes in Antrim County.
What about Smartmatic?
Another voting technology company, Smartmatic, has also often been roped into conspiracy theories about the 2020 election — largely because Mr. Trump and his allies have long claimed that it has close ties to Dominion. But the company has loudly and repeatedly denied the claims.
Moreover, company officials said, Smartmatic technology was used only in a single county in the entire country — Los Angeles County in Southern California during the 2020 election. And the system Smartmatic provided to county officials did not count, tabulate or store votes, the company said
Recently, Mr. Trump and his allies have renewed their interest in Smartmatic because of the company’s purported ties to Venezuela, whose former president, Nicolás Maduro, was seized by U.S. special operations forces during a military raid in January. Smartmatic’s founders were born in Venezuela and did election work in the country between 2004 and 2017, according to a company fact sheet.
What has Mr. Trump done to address election security concerns?
Despite his stated concern about the security of U.S. elections, Mr. Trump during his second term has overseen significant cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, including to its election work. That agency had been a lead federal partner for states on election security efforts since the 2016 election, working with them to share cybersecurity best practices and intelligence about foreign intentions around elections.
But Mr. Trump developed disdain for the agency — and the government’s election security work generally — after its director at the time, Chris Krebs, validated the integrity of the 2020 election, which prompted the president to fire Mr. Krebs. Mr. Trump has continued to try to punish his former CISA director, signing a memo last year ordering his administration to investigate Mr. Krebs.
Other federal agencies have also downsized their election security work. And earlier this month, Mr. Trump forced out the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan commission that supports states in administering their elections. In recent years, much of the small commission’s work also focused on cybersecurity support to states.
