As part of his pressure campaign to get Congress and states to make changes to election administration, President Donald Trump is preparing to give a primetime address on Thursday, in which, according to news reports, he will present newly declassified intelligence related to the 2020 election.
Mr. Trump has long claimed fraud and irregularities made Joe Biden’s victory illegitimate, despite a lack of evidence to support those assertions. Reports suggest that the president’s speech could include allegations that China interfered in U.S. elections.
Federal investigators have concluded that foreign manipulation had no practical impact on the 2020 election, and numerous state election audits found no evidence of the voter fraud or voting machine failure alleged by Mr. Trump.
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump has kept election security a front-burner issue since his loss in 2020, though his claims of fraud have been disproved. He is again elevating the issue ahead of this year’s midterms, which could see Democrats regain control of at least one chamber of Congress.
Several election observers say it’s unlikely the information Mr. Trump discusses on Thursday will reveal anything that wasn’t already known in January 2021, when Mr. Trump was still in his first term.
“I expect most of this to be just declassified versions of stuff we already knew publicly,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said on a call with reporters Wednesday.
More broadly, Mr. Becker and others say they are concerned that Mr. Trump is undermining voter confidence in the integrity of elections, as the nation is gearing up for the fall midterms, in which Democrats could win control of one or both houses of Congress. And they underscore that U.S. elections are more secure than they’ve ever been.
“The states are doing an incredible job of running elections right now,” Mr. Becker said. “They’re going to continue doing a great job, regardless of whether in deep red states or deep blue states, run by Republicans or Democrats.”
No evidence of manipulation
President Trump has long argued that voting machines can be hacked by foreign rivals. But the allegations have not been proved.
Following the 2020 election, Mr. Trump and his allies alleged that Dominion Voting Systems machines deleted millions of Trump votes or switched them to Mr. Biden. Supporters of Mr. Trump claimed a reporting error in Antrim County, Michigan, was evidence that Dominion’s machines could secretly switch votes. But state and federal investigators concluded that Dominion software did not alter ballots or vote totals, and the error in Antrim County resulted from human mistakes, ballot-design changes, and mismatched software configuration.
Trump allies made a wide range of other claims regarding voting machines. They alleged that Dominion was connected to Smartmatic, another voting machine company, and that the machines were vulnerable to manipulation. In all cases, investigators found no evidence of fraud or malfeasance by election officials or of manipulation by foreign powers.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded in December 2020 that there was no evidence of tampering with voting machines, and that the claims themselves were “intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of US elections.” This report was issued while President Trump was still in office.
On April 18, 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion $787 million in a defamation lawsuit, avoiding a trial that would have exposed how the cable-news giant had promoted false claims about the 2020 presidential election.
Still, the Trump administration has continued to look for evidence of tampering or fraud. In May 2025, a team led by then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard seized voting machines in Puerto Rico and claimed to have found “cyber security and operational deployment practices that pose a significant risk to U.S. elections.” Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, and its citizens cannot cast votes in presidential elections. In January 2026, FBI agents executed a search warrant at the election office of Fulton County, Georgia, seizing boxes of ballots from the 2020 election.
On July 9, President Trump ousted the three remaining board members of the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan federal commission that develops election administration guidance and helps states comply with federal voting law.
Matt Blaze, a professor of computer science and law at Georgetown University, says, “Elections are really more robust and more secure than they’ve ever been.”
That doesn’t mean hacking is impossible, he says. “There are still some technical weaknesses in U.S. election systems that, if exploited under some circumstances in some jurisdictions, could alter an election outcome potentially.” But to date, “there is no evidence whatsoever that any U.S. election outcome has ever actually been changed through technical tampering.”
What have states done to enhance election security?
Since 2020, nearly every state has enacted laws to improve election security and address vulnerabilities.
All 50 states now require some form of postelection audit. Georgia, for instance, codified statewide risk-limiting audits, which use randomly selected hand-counted ballots to affirm the accuracy of vote counts. Many states have improved their systems for updating voter lists, with New Jersey, for example, requiring enhanced review of death notices two months prior to elections to remove deceased people from voter rolls.
On technology, many states revamped their rules on election infrastructure, prohibiting voting systems from connecting to the internet, enhancing testing before elections, and requiring stronger password management and physical security standards for equipment.
And many states have strengthened chain-of-custody procedures for the transfer of ballot documents from one person or place to the next.
While Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen praised the Trump administration’s direction for the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agencies to aid his state in removing “half a million ineligible voters from our voter files,” other states say the administration is attempting to overreach the federal government’s powers under the Constitution.
“The courts have been clear time and time again: states run elections, not the federal government,” said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel in a July 6 statement. Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, added in her own July 6 statement that her state’s elections are “transparent, accurate, accessible, and secure. And while the U.S. Department of Justice continues to pursue baseless allegations to confuse voters about those facts, we welcome anyone who wants to – in compliance with the law – observe Michigan’s elections process.”
How are states and the Trump administration at odds?
The president’s speech Thursday also comes after his administration filed some 30 lawsuits against state election officials demanding voter registration rolls, and followed up with a letter earlier this month to all 50 states, reminding state officials they could be prosecuted if they allow undocumented immigrants to vote in elections. To date, federal judges have dismissed 15 of those lawsuits; the rest are pending.
Among the latest cases to be dismissed was a lawsuit against West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner on July 14. In a statement, Mr. Warner, a Republican, said the decision affirmed his state’s position to follow the law preventing disclosure of “sensitive personal information.”
Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, also a Republican, is being sued for refusing to hand over confidential data. On July 7, he was one of 50 secretaries of state who received a letter from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, warning that state officials could be prosecuted if they don’t follow federal law.
On July 10, the state’s Republican attorney general, Raúl Labrador, responded, suggesting that Justice “stop threatening your friends in Idaho. Idaho is fully committed to supporting President Trump’s goal of ensuring that only US citizens are registered and actually vote in Idaho.”
Mr. McGrane says in an interview that Idaho’s procedures are “exactly in line with a lot of what you see the president and others wanting to see happen.”
Even so, Mr. McGrane says Idaho values its independence and the principle of local control over elections. “We want to be able to share what we’re doing and best practices, but also always want to have control of our own destiny,” he says.
– Olivia Fletcher, Emily Staunton, and Donald Keough contributed reporting for this story.