Updated July 16, 2026 at 11:57 PM EDT
President Trump, who for years has sowed doubt about the security of American elections, raised claims on Thursday that the country's voting systems are vulnerable to being "rigged and stolen," without providing new evidence of a single fraudulent vote cast in any election.
In a 25-minute primetime address from the White House's East Room that included many baseless claims, Trump said he was declassifying intelligence documents that he said reveal "shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure." Those include allegations of Chinese efforts to influence American elections, concerns over voting machine security, and that noncitizens are found on certain states' voter rolls.
However, many of the documents the White House posted online during the speech did not appear to fully support sweeping claims the president made.
Trump said during the address his goal was "not to weaken confidence in elections." However, he has long contended that he won the 2020 election — a lie that still comes up often in his speeches and social media posts. Numerous reviews have debunked his claims about that election.
"Tonight, Americans heard the president once again repeat claims about our elections that have been investigated for years and repeatedly rejected," Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the vice chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said in a statement. "The greatest danger to our elections right now is false narratives seized upon here at home as a pretext to convince Americans their elections cannot be trusted — or worse, to justify unprecedented federal intervention in elections that the Constitution entrusts to the states."
China accesses voter data, Trump claims
In his speech, Trump accused China of carrying out "the largest compromise of election data in history" by acquiring 220 million U.S. voter files, beginning in the runup to the 2020 election. Many of the supporting documents published by the White House are extensively redacted.
Many states make their voter information publicly available — something one of the newly released documents mentions.
Foreign countries, including Russia and Iran, have tried to influence American elections by spreading false or misleading claims and attempting to hack campaigns. But the intelligence community and election experts draw a distinction between those influence activities and interference with election infrastructure, including voting and counting systems.
A federal intelligence report released in March 2021 concluded: "We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results." The report was a declassified version of a report that was provided to Trump and other officials on Jan. 7, 2021.
The 2021 report concluded that China "probably also continued longstanding efforts to gather information on US voters and public opinion; political parties, candidates and their staffs; and senior government officials."
A memo about the voter data released in the White House trove on Thursday does not include any evidence that China used that data to influence voters or impact the outcome of the election.
Voting machine vulnerabilities
Another section of the White House website discusses voting tabulators, saying they "are extremely exposed to attack."
That is something election security experts concede.
"Vulnerabilities in voting systems are real and worth fixing," Geoff Hale, a visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, wrote in a post Wednesday. But he added that "claiming that vulnerabilities in voting systems exist is different from claiming that vulnerabilities in voting systems have been exploited."
And experts point to elections' multiple layers of security, including the fact that there are thousands of individual election jurisdictions across the country with their own voting tabulators, and the vast majority of those jurisdictions use paper ballots that can be audited and recounted.
Noncitizens on the voter rolls
The White House also released a fact sheet claiming that more than 250,000 non-U.S. citizens are illegally registered to vote in four states: California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada. But there was no detail about how the White House arrived at that overall figure.
The fact sheet references the Department of Homeland Security's SAVE database, which the Trump administration has revamped so that states can more easily check their voter rolls for noncitizens.
Past NPR reporting has shown that SAVE has incorrectly flagged U.S. citizens as well. Research and reviews have found actual voting by noncitizens to be vanishingly rare.
The White House also references allegations of voter registration fraud associated with a Democratic-aligned firm in Michigan. State police raided the organization in 2020, the White House says, but added that "the Biden Department of Justice slow-walked the investigation for years."
Trump used his remarks Thursday to make a new push for the SAVE America Act, which would among other things require Americans to present proof of citizenship when registering to vote and a form of ID when voting. Opponents point to evidence that voter fraud is extremely rare and that some citizens do not readily have access to these documents. Trump has been pushing Congress for months to pass that legislation, which has stalled in the Senate.
In a statement after the speech, Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters echoed the call to pass the bill. "Americans deserve elections we can trust," he said.
"Cherry-picked grievances"
After the speech ended, election experts began sifting through the documents and the president's claims, with many pointing out the lack of new evidence provided.
"Tonight, the president offered nothing but cherry-picked grievances from selectively declassified material — not evidence, not facts, just noise. It's clearer than ever that he doesn't understand how elections in this country actually work," said Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan organization that supports state officials in protecting elections. "Americans trust the officials who run their elections. They don't want a president trying to insert himself into that process."
Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state of Arizona, said his staff was still working through all the documents, but at first glance he was mostly struck by how similar the disclosure was to what was already publicly known about the 2020 election and the broader state of election equipment.
"It was unimpressive. There is nothing new here," Fontes said. "I kind of felt a little bit cheated. I was expecting some kind of delicious bombshell that we might be able to investigate, but instead I got a rehash of the same grievance."
With reporting by NPR's Miles Parks and Danielle Kurtzleben
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