Trump takes aim at US election system, which experts call ‘fundamentally secure’
President Donald Trump will deliver a prime-time address Thursday night on election security, promising “really big news” as his administration reportedly prepares to release newly declassified intelligence related to the 2020 election, foreign interference and voting machine vulnerabilities.
“It doesn’t get bigger,” Trump told reporters Tuesday in the Oval Office, “because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.”
Trump’s 9 p.m. EDT address comes less than four months before the Nov. 3 midterm elections that will determine control of Congress. Trump is expected to renew his call for Congress to pass the Republican-backed Save America Act, which would restrict the use of mail-in voting and require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo identification to cast a ballot in all states.
Election experts, however, warn that Trump could use the address to undermine confidence in U.S. elections and revive false claims that widespread fraud cost him the presidency in 2020. These allegations have been rejected by dozens of courts, ballot audits, state election officials and his own first-term Justice Department.
In fact, the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, which includes the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, concluded that the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history.”
US elections are ‘fundamentally secure’
“American elections are fundamentally secure,” said Daniel Tokaji, dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School and professor of law.
Tokaji told Straight Arrow he would be surprised if there is any significant new information.
Two other election experts made similar assessments: Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the founding director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, and Justin Levitt, a Loyola law school professor and former White House adviser for democracy and voting rights.
They both told Straight Arrow that U.S. elections are fair and secure, that it is pointless to revisit the 2020 election, and that Trump is highly unlikely to say anything we have not already heard.
Levitt predicts the speech to be “another iteration of the ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf ‘“ and a rehashing of discredited conspiracy theories.
The White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to Straight Arrow’s requests for comment.
Republicans call to ‘protect the ballot box’
The long-running and often bitter debate over voting laws — pitting Republican-led efforts to tighten election safeguards against Democrat-led measures intended to expand ballot access — has intensified in the Trump era.
Ally Triolo, the Republican National Committee’s election integrity communications director, said Americans deserve secure elections they can trust. In a statement to Straight Arrow, Triolo said the RNC is fighting in courtrooms across the country to protect the ballot box.
“From defending proof-of-citizenship laws to protecting voter ID and accurate voter rolls,” she said, “we’re on the front lines to secure our elections and protect every legal vote.”
Democrats and voting rights advocates, on the other hand, argue that such measures can violate constitutional rights by making it harder for eligible voters, especially Americans from disadvantaged groups, to register and cast ballots.
They also point to state reviews and independent research showing that voter fraud, including illegal voting by noncitizens, is exceedingly rare.
In her response to Straight Arrow, Triolo did not mention foreign cyberattacks or voting machine vulnerabilities, the issues Trump is expected to address Thursday night.
Can US elections be hacked?
Experts said it would be virtually impossible to hack a U.S. election, despite unfounded claims by President Trump and his allies that foreign actors may have already manipulated U.S. voting machines.
Last year, Mojave Research, a contractor hired by then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, conducted a forensic analysis of voting machines used in Puerto Rico’s 2024 elections. The analysts found some software and coding flaws, but no evidence the machines were hacked, according to Reuters.
The White House has delayed releasing a separate report that reportedly outlines broader voting machine vulnerabilities and recommends safeguards such as software updates.
The scrutiny follows years of false claims by Trump and his allies — including claims amplified by Fox News personalities — that Dominion Voting Systems machines were infected with malicious software to rig the 2020 election. In April 2023, Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million to settle Dominion’s defamation lawsuit.
Stewart explained why U.S. voting machines, which are not connected to the internet, are generally safe from cyber attacks and other significant threats.
“You would have to gain physical control of thousands of voting machines and manipulate each one in distinct and unique ways,” he said, describing a scenario in which machines would be stolen in the dark of night, altered and returned without detection. “That’s just pure fantasy,” he said.
Once votes are cast, Stewart said, tabulation, transmission and certification are typically conducted using physical ballots, and not over the internet.
“The most powerful weapon for fraudulent ballot returns would be the eraser on the back of a pencil,” he said, but with so many eyes on the process, even a low-tech vote-changing scheme would be extremely hard to pull off, especially at scale.
Foreign ‘influence’ vs. ‘manipulation’
U.S. intelligence agencies found that Russia and Iran conducted influence operations during the 2020 campaign, spreading false and inflated claims through social media and other channels. But they found no indication that any foreign actor attempted to change vote tallies or interfere with the voting process itself.
Experts said these influence campaigns do not amount to election “rigging.”
“I will be yawning through the entire speech,” said Stewart, if Trump argues that foreigners are trying to manipulate the American electorate. “Of course they are,” he said, “but so are the campaigns, your neighbors and lots of other people.”
Stewart said research generally finds this type of foreign influence has limited impact because Americans receive far more information from campaigns, news organizations, friends and other domestic sources.
Erosion of public trust
Some election experts say the greatest election threat right now is public distrust, not the security of the vote.
Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen helped fuel the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Critics fear that renewed election denial could lead to more unrest and political violence in the elections ahead.
Tokaji said his biggest concern is the “destabilizing effect that proliferating misinformation can have on public trust,” especially if voters are not willing to accept election results that do not go their way.
“We’ve seen what heated election denial can do to the popular imagination,” added Stewart. With hundreds of congressional seats on the ballot this fall, he said we could see even more opportunities than in 2021 for “voters to be driven into a frenzy.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
