Trump’s championing of debunked vote conspiracies casts shadow over midterms
By Raphael Satter and AJ Vicens
WASHINGTON, July 16 (Reuters) – If President Donald Trump gives a national address on Thursday and repeats claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, as many experts expect, he will not just revive old conspiracy theories.
They say it will threaten the integrity of upcoming US elections, including the November midterm elections.
Reuters reported earlier this week that Trump’s upcoming speech will cover alleged vulnerabilities in the voting machine and that the White House is weighing whether to release controversial intelligence about China’s intentions or capabilities to disrupt the 2020 election.
Both of these issues are the basis for Republican conspiracy theories that Beijing or other foreign powers tipped the election in favor of Trump’s rival, Democrat Joe Biden.
There is no credible evidence of meaningful tampering with the 2020 vote. Eight analysts, academics and security experts told Reuters the election was one of the most transparent, audited and most serious trials in recent history.
Three of them added that renewed claims that foreigners changed votes were part of Trump’s effort to seize control of US elections and cast doubt on any future votes he might not win.
“The purpose of filing this lawsuit is to set the stage for the upcoming midterms so that the Trump administration can claim that any election that does not go its way is illegitimate,” said Eva Galperin, cybersecurity director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization that has long worked on election security issues.
Eddie Perez, a board member of the OSET Institute, which works to increase public confidence in elections, acknowledged that the announcement would likely be at least partially aimed at future contests.
“If his party loses, he may fall foul of it,” he said.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said that reports about the content of Trump’s speech were speculative.
“The truth is, no one knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say,” he said. Trump still insists he won against Biden and three days ago posted a digitally altered photo of Biden wearing an “I Lost to Trump” hat. He and his allies have said in the past that they were denied victory through cheating.
Foreign hackers regularly attempt to influence US elections, and voting machines, like other devices, can be hacked. But no one has presented credible evidence of the latter, said Andrew Appel, a professor emeritus at Princeton University who has studied election security for two decades.
He said the outlandish theories about foreign vote fixing advanced by some Trump supporters — involving mysterious satellites, special ink or bamboo ballots imported from China, to name a few — “make no technological sense.”
As for foreign influence, a document prepared by Trump’s own intelligence officials shows that not much actually happened.
An unclassified summary of a classified assessment released by various intelligence agencies in early 2021 claimed that Russian spies were supporting Trump, while the Iranians were trying to undermine him, and that China remained completely out of the discussion.
Renee DiResta, an associate professor at Georgetown University who researches digital disinformation, said any attempt to retroactively change that assessment would serve to promote a narrative that “the elections are not free and fair, they are rigged, so we need to increase federal control over elections.”
(Reporting by Raphael Satter and AJ Vicens; Editing by Edmund Klamann)
