President Donald Trump’s primetime speech Thursday was billed in advance as the moment when he was finally going to provide support for his claims of election theft, and perhaps move to take control of voting once and for all.
Of course, it turned out to be nothing of the kind. In fact, it only underscored how, more than half a decade after the 2020 election — and despite mobilizing the vast resources of the federal government in a desperate hunt — Trump and his allies still don’t have a shred of evidence for their false charges.
Democracy Docket covered every step of the whole revealing episode. Ahead of the speech, Jacob Knutson reported that Trump planned to declassify intelligence that showed irregularities in the 2020 contest. And Yunior Rivas laid out all the ways that Trump might try to use the address to advance his anti-voting agenda.
On Thursday night, within minutes of Trump wrapping up, Yunior cut to the chase: Despite a barrage of sinister-sounding rhetoric about China’s access to voter files, the speech hadn’t even so much as claimed that votes or registration records had been manipulated or any election outcomes altered.
Jacob quickly followed up with a look at Trump’s key anecdote: a tale about voter registration fraud in Michigan. As Jacob explained, the episode, which involved low-level workers forging registration applications, was thoroughly probed by state and federal law enforcement, leading to no charges, and authorities said no illegal votes were cast.
“[T]he fact that Trump selected this episode as his best example of voter fraud for us in a primetime speech,” Jacob wrote, “underscores the utter lack of substance behind his sweeping claims about election insecurity.”
On Friday, we reported on the deeply underwhelmed responses. Matt Cohen brought us reactions from the conference of secretaries of state he was attending in South Dakota. (Perhaps the bluntest came from Nevada Sec. of State Cisco Aguilar (D): “That was some bullshit.”) And Natalie Hausmann heard from election experts who had a similar take.
“They are just trying to grab as much garbage and throw it up against the wall, and it’s not sticking,” one said.
Finally, Jacob debunked perhaps the central plank of Trump’s address: that China gained illicit access to voter files containing over 200 million voter registrations. That sounds troubling, but experts told Jacob that the data likely came from publicly available sources — and there have been no signs that China did anything to interfere with the election itself.
“Everyone has this data,” one leading election administration expert said. “It would be a shock if China didn’t have this data.”
Meanwhile, Jacob — who didn’t stop this week — reported that Department of Homeland Security Secretay MarkWayne Mullin followed up on Trump’s speech by threatening that election officials could face jail time if they decline to run their voter rolls thru a flawed federal database to purge noncitizens. Mullin also said states would lose fuds for election security if they don’t hand over their voter rolls.
One reason Trump and his tam are getting desperate? Their bid to assert control over elections is floundeirng in court.
We reported this week on four more losses — in West Virginia, Virginia, New Mexico, and Connecticut — for Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) in its quest to obtain state vote rolls. That brings the tally in these cases to 16 losses and zero wins.
And as Yunior noted, with help from Democrcy Dokcet Researcher Maya Bodinson, most of the rulings were issued GOP-appointed judges, while nearly half came from judges appointed by Trump himself. That’s something no one other news outlet has appeared to notice — because no one else is looking at the docket as closely as we are.
But despite so much going on in Washington, we didn’t take our eye off the states, we didn’t take our eye off the states.
Jen Rice has bee tracking developments in North Carolina, where a GOP operative this week resigned from a staff position on the state election board, after pressuring local admiistrators to restrict early voting, spurring a major backlash.
But the danger to voters in the Tarheel State is far from over. On Thursday, Jen reported on a rule change made by the Republican-controlled board, making it easier for election administrators to throw out ballots when voters don’t provide the proper ID.
With the threats from Trump demanding constant vigilance, it’s easy for these kinds of local- and state-level schemes to fly under the national media radar. But that’s exactly why, as November approaches, we’ll be paying them special attention.
