There was a time when I was young and naive when I thought being able to vote over the Internet might be a good idea. That was maybe two decades ago, and I’m much more realistic now. I mention this because, last night, the Idiot-in-Chief gave a speech which was an absolute nothingburger. It took place at 9 PM eastern standard time, and only Fox News broadcast the thing in full.
Trump announced the declassification of documents on alleged election-system “vulnerabilities” and made three main claims:
- That China obtained access to roughly 220 million U.S. voter files;
- That more than 270,000 noncitizens are registered to vote across California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania;
- That U.S. voting machines are easily hacked.
He also accused intelligence officials of running a “shadow government” that suppressed evidence of Chinese election meddling and kept it out of his briefings.
Trump used the speech to push Congress to pass the SAVE America Act (with proof-of-citizenship voter registration requirements), which passed the House in February but failed a Senate procedural vote in March.
Notably, he stopped short of claiming votes were actually altered or results changed.
The answer to these three charges is:
- Yes, China has our voting registration data because it’s publicly available. Nothing nefarious there.
- The alleged noncitizen-voter figure comes from matching commercial data against voter rolls, a method experts say produces significant false positives (and has proven to be completely unreliable, often falsely flagging U.S. citizens).
- U.S. machines aren’t internet-connected and are backed by auditable paper ballots, making them hard to compromise at scale (this is where I had previously been naive).
Nothing new here, and nothing that could possibly be considered proof that votes were changed in 2020 at a scale that would have flipped the election to Trump.
Despite pre-speech teasers of “really big news,” Trump’s actual content was a meandering release of document tranches he framed as proving the system is “so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” We think not.
The SAVE America Act was the real ask; Trump explicitly tied the “crisis” framing to pressuring Congress. But there’s nothing to indicate that the Congress is shifting its position, especially the Senate.
And there it is. A big fat nothingburger until Trump tries to federalize the election in November.
