Trump to attack voting systems, undermine elections in primetime address Thursday

President Donald Trump is expected to take to the airwaves Thursday to again push false claims of widespread voting fraud during the 2020 election. Despite losing the race by over 7 million votes, he has spent the last five and a half years alleging it was stolen from him.

But this time, Trump will cite soon-to-be-declassified intelligence information purporting to show irregularities and vulnerabilities in voting machines in the 2020 contest, according to MSNOW and Reuters.

Trump’s televised address, slated for 9 p.m. ET, is likely aimed at accelerating the White House’s multi-pronged campaign to restrict the right to vote and increase the executive branch’s control over U.S. elections ahead of the 2026 midterms. 

By continuing to sow doubts about election systems, Trump also may be looking to create a pretext to challenge potential Democratic victories this November. And the effort also appears intended to bolster the SAVE America Act, Trump’s sweeping anti-voting bill that would disenfranchise millions of eligible voters if it became law.

“It’s really big news,” Trump said in the Oval Office Tuesday after confirming he will speak about voting machines and elections in his address. 

“Our country has to shape up,” he added. “What we’re going to be talking about Thursday — it doesn’t get any bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.”

Trump will reportedly base his assertions on intelligence files that a White House task force is set to declassify this week. The documents pertain to reported flaws with voting machines that Trump officials believe could allow foreign cyber intrusion, Reuters reported, citing a source familiar with the White House’s plans.

Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Bill Pulte, a Trump loyalist who has previously pushed allegations of mortgage fraud against the president’s opponents, has been heavily involved in the declassification effort, NBC News reported last month. 

When the president tapped Pulte, who has no intelligence experience, for the DNI position last month, Trump ordered him to look into “rigged” elections. 

Should Trump allege voter fraud or foreign interference led to his loss in 2020 — one of the most scrutinized elections in U.S. history — his claims will conflict with numerous recounts, the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusions and, most importantly, the findings of his first-term Department of Justice (DOJ).

Trump’s address will also come days after he dismissed or forced out all three remaining commissioners on the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), a federal agency that helps states administer elections and creates certification standards for voting machines. Trump previously attempted to order the commission to decertify all voting machines currently used by states.

If Trump alleges foreign interference in 2020, his claims will go against the U.S. intelligence community’s longstanding findings on the election.

In a declassified report in March 2021, the country’s leading intelligence and security agencies said they found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”

However, the report — drafted by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the FBI, ​the State Department’s intelligence bureau and the National Security Agency — did find that several nations embarked on influence operations aimed at denigrating both Biden and Trump’s campaigns and undermining public confidence in the electoral process. 

Russia, it said, pushed false narratives about Biden’s campaign, while Iran carried out an influence campaign intended to undercut Trump’s reelection prospects. China, it noted with high confidence, “did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”

A separate report that same month from the DOJ, DHS, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded that they had “no evidence that any foreign government-affiliated actor prevented voting, changed votes…  or otherwise compromised the integrity of voter registration information of any ballots cast during 2020 federal elections.”

Since Trump’s re-election, however, numerous federal agencies have opened probes into the 2020 contest and other recent elections, sometimes at the direct orders of the president.

Those agencies include the U.S. intelligence community. Pulte’s predecessor, former DNI Tulsi Gabbard, probed 2020 conspiracy theories, with a particular focus on voting machines. 

In addition to taking part in the FBI’s raid on a Fulton County, Georgia, election facility at Trump’s behest earlier this year, Gabbard also oversaw the seizure of voting machines from Puerto Rico, whose residents do not vote in federal elections.

The Puerto Rican machines were probed for security vulnerabilities by a cybersecurity firm contracted by Gabbard’s office. While the firm found flaws in the machines, it did not find evidence that they had been previously hacked, according to Reuters.

The probe into Puerto Rico’s machines may have been motivated by claims that Venezuela hacked voting machines to defeat Trump, an assertion long peddled by election deniers and far-right influencers. 

Trump endorsed those discredited claims in a social media post last year. Days after capturing Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, in a military operation in early January, the president once again resurfaced those conspiracies. 

Prominent election conspiracy theorists with close ties to the White House have claimed that disclosures in Trump’s address will demand new voting restrictions.

“All hell is going to break loose with the president’s address Thursday on election interference,” Seth Keshel, a leading anti-voting activist, wrote on social media. “It will compel action and make the pressure to pass the SAVE America Act overwhelming and will mandate change at the highest levels,” Keshel added.

Republicans currently cannot pass the SAVE America Act without first making structural changes to the Senate’s filibuster rules.

On Monday, the Washington Reporter, a media outlet founded by Republican consultants, citing “a well-placed source in Georgia,” claimed in a social media post that Trump would allege that Georgia’s two Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, were “illegitimate” because of fraud.

In a follow-up post, the Washington Reporter retreated from its initial claim. Instead, it said that Trump’s speech would not focus on Georgia’s 2020 elections and that its “Georgia Republican source” was tipped off on Trump’s speech and ODNI’s report’s “Georgia election focus” in advance.

Responding to Washington Reporter’s claims, Ossoff denounced Trump’s upcoming address as part of the president’s broader campaign to restrict and undermine the vote before November.

“The failed president, pocketing billions as he drives up prices, is afraid to lose the midterms,” Ossoff wrote in a post. “So he will reheat debunked election conspiracy theories and tell bizarre new lies to deny his 2020 defeat and attack voting rights.”

The U.S. Constitution gives states and Congress, not the president, the power to determine the time, place and manner of elections. Despite that, Trump has attempted to assert control over elections through multiple executive orders.