Three things to know about Trump’s election fraud allegations
July 16 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Thursday renewed his campaign to cast doubt on the U.S. election and declassified intelligence he said revealed fraud and foreign interference, despite intelligence findings and independent studies that refuted many of his claims.
Trump claimed the 2020 election was “rigged” more than 100 times in the first half of 2026 and used those claims to pressure Congress to pass a restrictive voter ID law called the SAVE America Act, which imposes strict ID requirements on voters and calls for greater federal intervention in elections.
The SAVE America Act has passed the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives several times by simple majorities, but lacks the 60 votes to overcome the filibuster in the Republican-led Senate.
Trump said the White House had released a trove of classified documents that he said exposed security vulnerabilities in US election systems; these include:
CHINA TRIED TO INCREASE DEMOCRATS IN THE LAST ELECTIONS
Trump accused the Chinese government of influencing the election to harm his fellow Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections and harm his chances of re-election in 2020. He also accused Beijing of compromising data on US voters.
An earlier US intelligence report had reached a different conclusion. A 2021 assessment concluded that China considered conducting influence operations to change the 2020 election results but decided not to do so. This was accomplished under the direction of John Ratcliffe, then Trump’s director of national intelligence and now CIA director.
The intelligence assessment concluded that China attempted to collect information about U.S. voters, public opinion, and political parties dating back to at least 2008. The voter data obtained by China was not secret and was not used to change votes.
VENEZUELA INSTALLED ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES
Trump claimed US voting machines were vulnerable to hacking, citing CIA documents about former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s alleged election rigging. He said Maduro’s government was able to manipulate vote totals digitally.
A CIA document summarizing intelligence reports between 2004 and 2020 revealed that the Venezuelan government had the ability to digitally manipulate votes.
There is no evidence that such voting fraud has occurred in US elections, and Trump has not claimed that these techniques were used in any elections in the US The theory spread by Trump supporters that the Maduro government hacked US voting machines in 2020 has been widely debunked.
A LARGE NUMBER OF NON-CITIZENS HAVE BEEN REGISTERED TO VOTE
Trump said an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security found nearly 278,000 non-U.S. citizens registered to vote in federal elections in violation of U.S. law. Trump and his allies have repeatedly used such arguments to demand tighter voting restrictions.
Many Republican-led states have voluntarily turned over private voter data to the Trump administration for the purpose of identifying and removing alleged non-citizens from voter rolls. The Trump administration has lost 15 lawsuits seeking to force other mostly Democratic-led states to submit voter data, according to Democracy Docket, an online election security publication.
Independent studies have found that it is rare for non-citizens to vote. The Bipartisan Policy Center found that when states tried to verify the eligibility of their voters, only 0.04% of cases were noncitizens. Election experts have expressed concern that eligible voters could be disenfranchised due to large-scale purges of state voter rolls.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward, Jonathan Landay, Erin Banco and Kristina Cooke; Editing by Michael Learmonth and Howard Goller)
