Politics
Trump Doubles Down on Election Fraud Claims. Here’s What to Know About US Voting Security
President Donald Trump has renewed his claims about threats to electoral security and integrity as the 2026 midterm elections approach.
In a recent speech, Trump discussed foreign interference, noncitizen voting and vulnerabilities in the American election system — reiterating some widely disproven charges. The administration released a trove of heavily redacted documents. One claim was that U.S. elections have been compromised for years and government officials plotted to bury the evidence. The documents do not corroborate that assertion.
For the last decade Trump has been advocating for greater distrust in American voting infrastructure particularly following his loss to former President Joe Biden in 2020, calling the outcome “rigged” and pushing the lie that undocumented or noncitizen residents were voting en masse.
That narrative was further pushed last week when Trump and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security penned letters to four states’ secretaries of state claiming that an internal DHS review found 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California and Nevada collectively.
“There’s no foundation to it,” Stephen Maynard Caliendo, professor of political science at North Central College, said of widespread voter fraud claims. “Up to 250,000 voters could be one voter, and it’s a federal crime to register to vote or to try to cast a vote if you’re not a U.S. citizen, if you’re not eligible to vote. It’s very rare. It doesn’t happen very often.”
Another claim the president made in his address was about foreign interference in federal elections, particularly meddling from Beijing. That, however, is not new news as U.S. intelligence agencies have long been aware that China has obtained U.S. voter data.
“Over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files,” Trump said Thursday.
There’s a longstanding practice among Chinese, Iranian and sometimes Venezuelan governments to spy and look into U.S. voting records. There’s no evidence, however, that a foreign nation has ever altered the outcome of any election. They’re instead more often using data for intelligence purposes such as learning information about U.S. citizens and elected officials and undermining faith in the country’s electoral process.
“I think what was dangerous about Thursday night was the conflation of foreign involvement in elections and foreign interference,” Caliendo said. “They’re not taking our ballots and changing them, and so the outcomes aren’t changing. I think just throwing all this together as one big soup and then suggesting that the elections aren’t safe, we have to be careful about what the implications are for that sort of messaging from the White House.”
There are still real, significant vulnerabilities in American election infrastructure despite incremental improvements since 2016. Technology is always vulnerable to hacking, and voting machines are often cheaply made, according to Jacob Braun, executive director of the Cyber Policy Initiative at the University of Chicago. Voting machines are built to count votes but not designed to fend off international hacking.
“Several of the reports that were released after the president’s speech highlight vulnerabilities that, by the way, we’ve known about for nearly a decade, but nonetheless still need to be fixed,” Braun said. “I do think both parties are at fault in the sense that Democrats often jump in and say just because Trump said it, it’s wrong, and then the administration wants to double down on election interference claims that have been debunked. It seems like nobody’s really getting after solving the actual problem, which is better security around our elections.”
Braun has three suggestions to remedy the issues plaguing the voting system. One is to fully return to hand-marked paper ballots so that if an error is detected, “a bunch of humans can go back and hand-count every single ballot.”
Second, Braun said, is investing in open-source voting equipment. “So this would be where anybody can see the code that’s in the voting machine or the voting equipment. Right now, the only people who see the code are the bad guys and the vendors, and we want everybody, including the good guys, to be able to see if there’s problems that need to be solved. That way, when somebody says that there’s a backdoor with Venezuela into the voting equipment, then everybody can see the code and say, is there one or not, and be able to have transparency on that.”
And finally, Braun said, do away with touchscreen voting machines. They’re not only vulnerable to hacks but there’s often not enough machines per voting site, which causes long lines and wait times and disproportionately affects high-density urban precincts that largely serve minority and student populations.
“I think that if both parties were to really focus on actually getting after this the way that they could, because cyber is often quite nonpartisan, we could solve the problem relatively quickly,” Braun said. “The solutions are not hard and they’re the cheapest solutions out there.”
