US President Donald Trump renewed accusations of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, saying in a speech on Thursday that China had stolen voter files and suggesting that Venezuela could manipulate electronic voting machines.
• Also read: Beijing calls Trump’s election interference accusations ‘pure fabrications’
• Also read: Address to the nation: Trump accuses China of “the biggest hack of electoral data in history”, without supporting it with evidence
The White House declassified intelligence documents on Thursday evening, proving his allegations according to Donald Trump.
The US president claims Joe Biden “stole” his victory in the 2020 election, accusations that have never been proven. More than 60 legal actions were taken, without revealing any fraud likely to change the result of the election. Even within the Trump administration, officials have repeatedly rejected the allegations.
Here is a verification of some of Donald Trump’s claims:
Chinese hacking
Donald Trump accused Beijing of being behind “the largest hack of electoral data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million voter files.”
He also accused the country of trying to “manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden.”
But in the United States, voter files are widely publicly available. States are responsible for taking care of them and they are often sold.
A declassified March 2021 report from the country’s main intelligence agencies found “no indication that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process.”
According to this report, the agencies concluded with a “high degree of certainty” that Beijing “did not carry out interference actions and considered, but did not implement, influence actions aimed at changing the outcome”.
Another government assessment also found that there was “no evidence that any actor linked to a foreign government” impacted the election.
Such a plot, aimed at creating thousands of fake voters, would require fabricating Social Security numbers, home addresses and identification documents, without being detected, former Maricopa County (Ariz.) clerk Stephen Richer wrote on X.
Machines rigged by Venezuela
Donald Trump has claimed that Venezuelan elections were rigged under Nicolas Maduro’s regime, and suggested that voting machines in the United States were likely to have been manipulated in the same way.
These comments echo theories put forward by allies of the American president, claiming in 2020 that a Venezuelan plot aimed to distort the results via the electoral software company Smartmatic.
This company’s products were only implemented in 2020 in one county, the outcome of which was not disputed. Smartmatic subsequently obtained out-of-court settlements and won defamation cases.
The documents declassified Thursday establish that Venezuelan officials “developed a sustained interest in and likely some ability to manipulate electronic voting systems” but that the intelligence “did not conclusively confirm that large-scale electronic fraud was carried out in specific Venezuelan elections.”
“Neither Smartmatic nor the Venezuelan government were capable” of “manipulating the result of an election outside Venezuela,” these documents specify.
“Nothing that has been published contains evidence of any manipulation of the vote,” Charles Stewart, an elections expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told AFP.
Non-citizen voters
Donald Trump assured that thousands of people who did not have American citizenship were registered on the electoral lines.
Voting without being an official citizen is illegal and there are many measures in place to prevent it. Cases of voting without citizenship are extremely rare, according to election audits and independent research.
