Courts, Audits and Federal Agencies Found No Evidence 2020 Votes Were Altered
U.S. President Donald Trump will address the nation Thursday night on what he billed as “really, really big news” about elections and voting machines, potentially invoking claims that his own government, more than 60 courts and multiple statewide probes have already tested and rejected.
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The speech is scheduled for 9 p.m. EDT in the East Room of the White House, a time slot typically reserved for presidents’ most consequential addresses. Trump said Tuesday that the speech would in part address election machines and integrity, adding: “Without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.”
The president is expected to unveil newly-declassified intelligence connected to alleged voting machine vulnerabilities and foreign access to U.S. voter data, according to reports. Reuters reported that administration-commissioned reviews identified flaws that could require software updates, but found no evidence that any system was hacked to alter an election outcome.
The White House has not confirmed what Trump might address in regards to election security. “The truth is, nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say, which is why everyone should tune in,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
The 2020 election remains among the most heavily scrutinized voting cycles in the United States – and despite the president’s claims, investigations, court findings and other probes have proven it was one of the most secure in history.
Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said as much in a joint statement with state and local election officials at the time, describing the 2020 election as “the most secure in American history” and finding no evidence any voting system deleted, lost or changed votes. Trump fired CISA Director Christopher Krebs days later for refuting his fraud claims.
A National Intelligence Council assessment declassified in March 2021 found no indications any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in 2020, including voter registration, ballot casting, vote tabulation or the reporting of results. Then-Attorney General William Barr also said at the time that the Department of Justice had uncovered no fraud on a scale that would have changed the outcome.
Federal judges – including several appointed by Trump – dismissed or rejected more than 60 lawsuits challenging the 2020 results for lack of evidence. Fox News later paid Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit over stolen-election claims broadcast on its airwaves. A federal jury also ordered Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani to pay $148 million to two Georgia election workers he falsely accused of manipulating ballots.
Georgia counted its roughly 5 million presidential ballots three times, including a full hand tally of paper ballots, and each count confirmed the result. Arizona’s Republican-commissioned review of Maricopa County ballots also affirmed the outcome.
Security experts say the architecture of U.S. voting systems is what makes a remote hacking scenario – a foreign adversary in Moscow or Beijing silently manipulating votes – virtually impossible. Voting machines that record ballots are not connected to the internet, and the central scanning equipment that is networked runs on air-gapped systems walled off from the public web.
Election administration is decentralized and spread across thousands of jurisdictions running different equipment under different procedures, which experts say makes any large-scale attack extremely difficult to execute. Because there is no singular national system to breach, an adversary would need to compromise thousands of offline machines across multiple states without detection.
Voting systems are tested in federally accredited laboratories before deployment, undergoing stress tests and software checks against voluntary federal guidelines administered by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. States then add on their own additional certification requirements and conduct accuracy testing, tamper-evident seals and chain of custody controls.
Nearly 95% of ballots cast in 2020 also carried a paper record, allowing officials to verify machine tallies against physical ballots. And a growing number of states have begun conducting risk-limiting audits, manually tallying a statistical sample of paper ballots to confirm the electronic count.
None of this means voting machines are flawless. But CISA’s own 2022 advisory on those flaws found no evidence they had ever been exploited in an election.
“Voting systems, like all critical infrastructure, have vulnerabilities,” Geoff Hale, who previously led CISA’s election security initiative and is now with the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in a statement sent to ISMG. “But just because a vulnerability exists doesn’t prove that it’s been exploited, let alone that an exploitation altered something technically during an election.”
“The public should be aware that neither a mountain of documents nor technically complex claims are enough to credibly prove that an election security incident actually occurred,” he added.
Thursday’s speech comes a week after Trump fired the three remaining EAC commissioners, leaving the agency that certifies voting systems without a quorum and unable to act. A White House official defended the firings, saying the president “reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.”
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