Trump repeats debunked claims about voting vulnerabilities
WASHINGTON— President Trump made a rare prime-time speech Thursday night to renew his attacks on the security of U.S. elections, telling Americans that the country’s voting system is “so broken” that “nobody can defend it”; This was an unprecedented effort by a sitting president to undermine public confidence in local elections.
Many of the claims he made after losing the 2020 election have been debunked by investigations, audits and court proceedings. Trump has not claimed that vote counts were tampered with or that election systems were hacked, and his warnings that the nation’s elections could be vulnerable to outside influence have long been echoed by members of both parties.
But the president amplified those allegations and others in an effort to cast new doubt on what he said was a “stolen” and “rigged” election and renew calls to pass federal voting legislation ahead of the November election.
“Addressing this election crisis requires Congress to pass the RELIEVE America Act,” Trump said. “How easy is it to do this? Unless you want to cheat.”
Trump said he directed the White House to release a portion of heavily redacted documents purportedly showing “weaknesses” in the nation’s voting system, with the goal of “fixing them very, very quickly.”
The 26-minute address to the nation, a platform traditionally reserved for rare moments of national significance, was Trump’s latest effort to assert greater federal control over state elections.
Major broadcast networks refused to air Trump’s entire speech, reporting instead. In his speech, Trump complained about NBC and ABC and said that they should lose their broadcasting licenses. He falsely claimed that “they and others in the media were part of a conspiracy to perpetuate this fraud.”
In his speech, Trump claimed that China carried out what is considered the “largest disclosure in the history of election data” starting from the 2020 election period and that “deep state members” in the American intelligence community covered it up.
He instructed the FBI, the director of national intelligence, and other agencies led by some of his loyalists to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the cover-up.
Democrats quickly condemned Trump’s claims as baseless and repeating ideas that have little to do with actual election conduct.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on
Multiple reviews of the 2020 election have concluded that Democrat Joe Biden legitimately won, and election experts say there is no evidence that widespread fraud affected the election outcome.
“More than half a decade has passed through multiple audits, recounts, and more than 60 lawsuits, each finding no evidence of widespread voter fraud,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “To be clear, this is no longer about an election that Donald Trump lost six years ago. This is about him laying the groundwork to ‘take over the vote’ in the upcoming midterm elections.”
Ahead of the speech, election and democracy experts had warned that the president might try to cast doubt on the security of the country’s election system or promote debunked claims of fraud.
Since taking office, Trump has taken a number of steps aimed at maintaining control over the elections. Some experts said Thursday’s speech could be interpreted as a sign that Trump is running out of moves ahead of midterm elections in which Republicans’ control of the House of Representatives is at stake.
“The fact that they are throwing everything at the wall at this point shows panic,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. “They’re not working strongly right now. They’re running weakly.”
Trump delivered the address with an approval rating that remained steady at 37%, according to one report. Washington Post-Ipsos poll It was released Thursday as Republican enthusiasm waned.
This is breaking news and will be updated.
