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BY PHILIP ELLIOTT |
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President Donald Trump’s presentation Thursday night from the White House had all the drama of a final scene in a classic whodunnit. New documents pulled from the forgotten archives. Reports of guns, faked voter registration documents, gift card payments for forgeries. Documents that Barack Obama had tossed into “burn bags” to hide from his successor. Fake ballots printed by China, ballot rigging by Venezuela, North Korea eyeing changes to votes. |
For Trump’s base—of which 66% already believe the 2020 results were rigged—the night was a capstone confirmation of their suspicions that the system is so corrupt that nothing can be trusted. Trump, with documents he said he declassified with the help of his spy chiefs, had finally cracked the case and proven that foreign actors put their thumb on the scales in an election that Trump lost. |
But almost immediately, the trove of new documents posted on the White House’s website—some with heavy redactions—told a much more complicated story. Trump’s presentation was a rhetorical win but a fact-checker’s minefield. And while Trump met his goal of leaving his supporters incensed, even that may end up backfiring bigly. |
Election data is complicated… |
Trump made some incredible claims that left viewers with the impression that hundreds of millions of Americans’ personal information had been hacked in 2020 by China in “the largest compromise of election data in history.” |
But there’s a catch: in many cases, this information is already online. In fact, North Carolina’s State Board of Elections has online data that include individuals’ names, voter registration status, voter demographics, party affiliation, and address, as well as their county, precinct, and district information down to local school boards. In other states, the datasets are available from election boards or third-party vendors. |
So while China may have found out who could vote and, in many cases, if they were likely to show up based on elections they participated in and those they skipped, that alone is not enough to prove malfeasance. And it was far from evidence that Beijing was doing anything unusual let alone nefarious. |
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… so is Washington’s relationship with Beijing |
Even before Trump began his speech, the Chinese Embassy here in Washington had a denial for reporters: Beijing “has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the U.S.” |
After Trump's speech, China's Foreign Ministry again strongly denied his claims of election meddling. "The U.S. allegations have no factual ground and are aimed at vilifying China. Similar accusations have long been proved to be unfounded," said spokesperson Lin Jian. |
Complicating matters further is the late-September visit to Washington from Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Trump and Xi have a delicate relationship, one that may define the next century of geopolitical needs and turmoil. The White House, even before Trump’s speech, had started dialing back expectations for big breakthroughs for the summit in D.C. And the Trump posture toward China is as much about Xi as it is in regards to, frankly, the only other super power left on Planet Earth. An open feud between those two leaders—one that implicitly blames China, in part, on Trump’s defeat in 2020—is far from productive in the broader context. |
Which may partly explain why some of the allegations in the new documents, such as an unexecuted plan to fabricate votes for Joe Biden and to pay journalists for glowing stories, might have been excluded from the intelligence assessments that made their way to the Oval Office. It’s why raw intelligence gets put through a filter before it’s passed onto the boss. One of the biggest lessons that haunts the Intelligence Community to this day dates to a reliance on raw reports leading up to the invasion of Iraq. |
Then there’s this wrinkle: in Trump’s final days in office, then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe presented the findings of the nation’s spy organizations that, at least according to the unclassified version, there were no indications that any foreign actor—which would include China—attempted or succeeded in altering “any technical aspect” of the 2020 election vote. Ratcliffe is now running the CIA. |
Trump is trying to salvage the SAVE Act, which may already be doomed |
It took up just the last two minutes of Trump’s 27-minute speech, but the one action item that might actually be added to Washington’s agenda is a voting bill that doesn’t have the votes in the Senate. Trump’s obsession with the SAVE Act is rooted in his belief that voting is too easy for those who shouldn’t and that Democrats oppose the voter-ID requirements and mail-in restrictions only because phantom figures are propping up Trump’s political enemies. |
Under the current rules of the Senate, that legislation would need 60 affirmative votes. Republicans, when they’re all well enough to cast ballots and are in Washington, currently have 53 seats, meaning seven Democrats would have to sign onto the legislation that they almost uniformly reject. |
Trump has tried to cajole Republicans to pass high top-priority legislation by any means necessary, even if it means ending the 60-vote threshold baked into the filibuster or using some of the legislative trickery that allowed him to muscle through his One Big Beautiful spending bill. Until they do that, Trump is not interested in doing anything else, going so far as to allow perhaps the lone legislative win to get out of the Senate this year with bipartisan support—a bill addressing housing costs—to become law without his signature. |
It’s left plenty of lawmakers frustrated that Trump seems to be actively working against an already tricky electoral environment for the GOP to defend its narrow majorities. And on a practical level, it won’t actually affect votes this year but rather leave lawmakers exposed to criticism that they’re making it hard for older voters, communities of color, and rural voters to cast ballots. |
“I have been trying to explain for nearly a year that the SAVE Act, whether it’s the SAVE Act, the SAVE America Act, the new SAVE legislation that’s being proposed in the House, SAVE goes to Hollywood, SAVE goes to Hawaii, whatever the sequels are, all of them are fundamentally flawed and impossible to implement by this election,” Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican who is retiring and has been given true freedom to speak his mind, said Thursday on the Senate floor. Like many Republicans, he supports the idea but sees little benefit of walking the plank to help nurse Trump’s paranoia. |
“If I see a reconciliation bill come from the House with another failed attempt to confuse this election, I will use every device I have available to slow down the wheels of government until people cop a clue and do the math,” said Tillis. |
Scary allegations are not the whole story |
If voters listened to Trump’s speech without the benefits of fact-checkers or even Google, things sound really, really scary. China and Venezuela and Iran, oh my! |
But while there are, no doubt, kernels of truth to what Trump is saying, it’s likely a lot more nuanced when an objective reading of the newly declassified documents is applied. After all, it’s one thing to find a low-confidence observation in a file and it’s another to uncover a verified operation. |
It’s been understood for years that America’s adversaries and allies alike take a keen interest in how this country practices an imperfect democracy. It’s been well documented by now that Russia and Iran have looked at ways to influence outcomes, either through hack-and-publish campaigns of stolen emails or troll farms to spread conspiracy-minded trash. But there has, at least to this point, been no verified evidence that their meddling changed votes let alone outcomes. |
A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report released during Trump’s first term outlined the extent of Russia’s disinformation campaign in 2016. But it’s not clear just how many votes Moscow’s meddling moved into Trump’s column—something his defenders have long pointed to. |
Still, that has not meant Trump has any less zeal for this 2020 rabbit hole. In recent weeks—and with a new acting Director of National Intelligence in place—Trump has hinted that he has finally found evidence of a rigged election. |
And the newly declassified material released in part Thursday was enough to justify Trump’s innuendo that Venezuela too might have had a hand in 2020’s results—not because there was any proof that Venezuela’s since ousted leader Nicolás Maduro did anything in the U.S. but because he was able to do it in his own country. |
That’s not to say U.S. elections are problem-free endeavors. There are places where the U.S. can harden its defenses against foreign interference—and, in recent years, millions of dollars have been spent to do exactly that. Back-up paper ballots and air-gapped—meaning not connected to the Internet—voting machines are now the norm. |
Trump’s gut fears are actually justified. It’s now understood that Russia in 2016 poked the election systems in all 50 states to check what protections were in place and accessed—but did not change—some very local registration rosters in Florida and Illinois. Two Iranians were indicted on charges they broke into Alaska’s voter system in 2020, although they were not accused of making any changes. In the Intelligence Community’s assessment, China tried to shape the narrative around Trump’s third campaign for the White House but not the actual vote counts. (The report also noted Cuba, Venezuela, and Hezbollah also ran small-scale efforts to weaken Trump’s return to power but concluded it was negligible.) |
In general, most experts agree that for a foreign vote-changing scheme to work, spooks would have to get physical access to the casting and counting systems used in thousands of different locations scattered around the country. That, to this point, has never been a real consideration. |
This presentation may backfire on Republicans |
Certainly, the main headline from Trump’s base will be a guttural toldjaso. At face value, Trump’s speech left voters with the impression that Trump had finally blown open the vault of evidence that the Deep State had buried findings that the 2020 election was not on the up-and-up, foreign influence was everywhere in plain sight, and no one should really trust those results—or maybe even those happening in just a few months. |
But here’s the thing about Trump’s message Thursday night: it might be factually specious but it’s politically resonant. In an Economist/YouGov poll last month, half of Republicans think the 2020 presidential race was “rigged.” Among Republicans who identify with the Trump-led MAGA movement, that rises to two-thirds. |
Presented with this new argument and buttressed by hand-picked evidence, that base is only going to further distrust the entire democratic process. Presented as chicanery, it’s tough to convince would-be voters that waiting in line to cast ballots is anything but a sucker’s game. Eroding confidence in the system may work for blaring claims that the Democrats (maybe) stole majorities in the House and Senate, but it’s bad for democracy and, perhaps more germane to Trump’s last two years in office, GOP turnout. |
If Trump is going to avoid endless oversight hearings and maybe even a third impeachment, he needs some Republican cover. It’s mighty tough to do that if the Republicans only have a minority of either chamber. Trump may have felt good about his performance Thursday night, but he may end up regretting it the morning after Election Day if his base sits-out the balloting because Trump convinced them that voting is rigged and a waste of time. |
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