Donald Trump has used an extraordinary prime-time speech to accuse “deep state” bureaucrats of hiding the truth about compromised US election systems and an alleged Chinese operation to influence American voters.
The US president, who has for years claimed without evidence that the 2020 election was “rigged”, said he had declassified documents that would prove his new claims.
The address represents the latest in Mr Trump’s years-long series of attempts to undermine confidence in US voting systems.
Dozens of audits, investigations and court rulings have found no evidence of significant fraud or other issues in the 2020 election, but Mr Trump has never accepted the result.
The speech comes as his Republican Party faces the prospect of losing control of Congress at the midterm elections in November.
Mr Trump’s approval rating is at historically low levels for a modern-day president, and polls show voters are increasingly unhappy with cost-of-living issues and the Iran war.
In the speech, Mr Trump said he had discovered China had run an influence campaign in a bid to stop him from winning the presidency.
He accused China of paying journalists to write negative stories, and said the country had stolen 220 million US voter files, including names, addresses, phone numbers and party preferences.
Election authorities, courts and intelligence agencies have previously dismissed dozens of voter fraud claims. (ABC News: Brad Ryan)
The claims go against a joint report by US intelligence agencies released in 2021 which found Russia and Iran ran influence campaigns during the 2020 election cycle, but China decided not to.
Mr Trump said officials had downplayed the Chinese operation. He said they would now be investigated and charged.
Trump pushes contentious bill
Mr Trump also alleged that vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines meant they were “extremely exposed to attack”. He said Americans had been “blatantly lied to” about their security
He also said a “stunning investigation” had found about 278,000 non-citizens had registered to vote, but the “real number was much higher” because some states had blocked scrutiny of voter rolls.
“These disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it,” Mr Trump said.
For weeks Mr Trump has been trying to convince Congress to pass legislation that would ban mail-in voting and force voters to show citizenship documents, such as birth certificates or passports. He used the speech to renew those efforts.
Opponents argue the legislation, known as the SAVE America Act, would disenfranchise millions of voters. It has failed to get through the Senate because it lacks bipartisan support.
Previous probes counter claims
Many of the issues raised by Mr Trump have been investigated in the past, after he and his allies pushed conspiracy theories to persuade Americans the 2020 election was corrupted.
In 2021, US intelligence agencies released a joint report that concluded China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome” of the 2020 election. The conclusion was reached with “high confidence”.
“China sought stability in its relationship with the United States and did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk blowback if caught,” the report said.
The report also said there were “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process”. But it said Russia had run influence operations to support Mr Trump, while Iran ran a covert campaign to undercut him.
Basic voter data, including the details Mr Trump accused China of stealing, are publicly available in the US. It is not clear what private information was allegedly obtained.
Mr Biden defeated Mr Trump in the 2020 election with more than 81.2 million votes, compared to Mr Trump’s 74.2 million.
That translated into 306 electoral college votes for Mr Biden, as awarded under the US’s unique system, compared to Mr Trump’s 232.
Voter fraud allegations have been investigated, audited and tested in court dozens of times since then, but there have been no credible findings of significant fraud.
The relevant US agencies universally endorsed the accuracy of the result at the time, and all 50 US secretaries of state certified their results.
The Trump-appointed director of the Cybersecurity and Intelligence Security Agency (CISA), Christopher Krebs, described the election as “the most secure in American history”. Mr Trump fired him five days later.
Mr Trump’s then attorney-general and close ally William Barr said in December 2020 that US attorneys and FBI agents had looked into complaints but: “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
