Fact-Checking 3 of Trump’s Biggest Claims From His ‘Fair Elections’ Speech | National News

President Donald Trump aired familiar grievances and unsubstantiated claims about the 2020 presidential election in a nationally televised address from the White House on Thursday that may have been as much about undermining future elections as trying to expose irregularities in past ones.

The half-hour speech saw Trump cover allegations of China meddling in the 2020 election, which Trump lost to former President Joe Biden, claim that “hundreds of thousands” of noncitizens and dead people registered to vote and raise concerns over “vulnerable” and “easily compromised” electronic voting machines.

Some analysts have raised concerns that Trump’s actions are in preparation to cast doubt over the midterm election results if they don’t go his way. He has made serious efforts since returning to the presidency to revamp elections ahead of November, though many of those efforts have been stopped by federal judges.

Here are three key claims Trump made in his remarks.

Trump claimed that Beijing “carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history” during the 2020 presidential election in an attempt to sway the results in favor of Biden.

Notably, Trump stopped short of alleging that China actually altered any election results, instead arguing that the country “was working to influence the results” of the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential election.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian on Friday said “the relevant allegations by the U.S. are entirely fabricated and aimed at vilifying China.”

The spokesperson added that “we urge the U.S. to stop making an issue of China in its elections and do something conducive to China-U.S. relations.”

The U.S. intelligence community previously concluded “that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.”

The White House released documents on Thursday to support Trump’s claim that “hundreds of thousands of noncitizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls.”

The Department of Homeland Security said that a preliminary review found that “over 250,000 non-citizens are illegally registered to vote in just the four states for which public data files have been reviewed.”

But DHS didn’t say whether these errors led to actual voting by noncitizens. Nor did it say how it obtained the data or reached such a conclusion.

Trump has put a lot of focus on noncitizen voting, though “there is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome,” according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Trump in his speech said that electronic voting machines are “vulnerable” and “easily compromised.”

While researchers have found that machines can be hacked, there is little evidence this happens. The Center for Democracy & Technology stipulates: “A vulnerability assessment describes a weakness and what an attack could look like; it does not document an attack that occurred.”

In Georgia, for example, conspiracy theorists claimed there was fraud in the 2020 election due to the vulnerability of Dominion Voting Systems. However, a review by Federal cybersecurity officials found that while the systems had vulnerabilities, there was no evidence they had been exploited.

Voting machines are regularly tested for susceptibility. In 2007, California instituted a top-to-bottom review of voting machines made by Diebold Election Systems, Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic. When researchers found them liable to compromise, Secretary of State Debra Bowen overhauled the security system before voters could use the machines again.

Many states have also adopted the practice of risk-limiting audits, in which a random sample of paper ballots is checked against the results reported electronically to verify accuracy.