No voting machine was hacked: What we know from what President Trump didn't say in his address
I was expecting to hear that the outcome of a specific election was in question. Instead, the President listed failed and hypothetical threats and offered no new solutions.
No votes were altered
Here’s the bottom line of Trump’s speech according to Fox News:
Trump did not claim China changed votes or altered election results.
No votes were altered in recent elections, according to what the President didn’t say.
“We know that they can change voter registration and your vote. We know it’s possible,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said this morning. He offered no details, and did not say that any voter registrations or votes were changed.
The President also mentioned China’s “attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden.” Based on what he didn’t say, the attempt presumably failed.
The President described a world in which foreign powers are trying to hack election systems. That’s true and concerning. But at least when it came to altering votes in past elections, any attempts failed. (He did mention votes being changed — only a thousand miles away in Venezuela.)
No mass non-citizen voting
He also discussed finding “278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote” in California and three other Democratic states.
But the President did not say that they voted, and although fraudulently registering to vote is illegal and one of his top priorities, he still did not announce any prosecutions. DHS Secretary Mullin promised this morning that they would look at who votes in the 2026 elections later this year and pursue “prison time” for state officials who do not purge voter rolls.
Fox News described the “278,000” finding as a “preliminary review.” That’s probably because there is no direct correlation between voter registration records and immigration records. Name mixups, naturalization, and states registering people who didn’t ask to be registered are common.
Expect only a small fraction of that count to turn out to be voter registration fraud, and an even smaller fraction of that might have improperly voted — far, far fewer than could alter the outcome of an election.
The SAVE America Act might prevent these improper non-citizen voter registration in the future, but until Trump finds mass non-citizen voting, the bill’s most significant impact would be to make voter registration harder for married women (or anyone else) who changed their name.
Breach of voter registration information
The President also disclosed intelligence that China had obtained 220 million voter files and that election systems are “vulnerable and they’re easily compromised.”
As one of our readers wrote to us this morning, every computer is hackable. That’s not being flippant. It’s a deeply serious concern, and it’s unfortunately not a shocker anymore when a major data breach like this is announced.
And yet:
The President did not announce restoring funding he cut for cybersecurity assistance for state and local elections officials.
The President did not announce appointing bipartisan officials to the Election Assistance Commission, restarting the agency, to push higher standards for election systems.
The President offered no policy proposal to prevent a future data breach or hack. In his speech this morning, DHS Secretary Mullin referred to a policy announced last week that grants to prevent or respond to terrorism would be withheld from states that don’t comply with new election security demands. Mullin also promised a new election infrastructure security plan in 30 days.
Fortunately, the President didn’t say that any voter registrations had been altered. And according to an analysis of the newly declassified reports by Just Security, the President's claims about hacked voter files may be overblown:
the documents reviewed thus far are too heavily redacted to show how the claim involving 220 million voter files was derived, how the data was obtained, how much came from protected election systems rather than public or commercial sources
Voter registration information is widely circulated already. Every candidate and party already gets access to voter information. That’s how they know whose doors to knock on and who to target with mailings.
In fact, DHS Secretary Mullin said they would enforce voter fraud laws using “public records” of who voted, in his speech this morning. Voter registration information is, unfortunately, not much of a secret.
And much of the same information has already been stolen from commercial sources, like the 2017 Equifax breach of credit information of 147 million people, or can be purchased from data brokers. China could have gotten voters’ information any number of ways, unfortunately.
China worked to prevent Trump’s election
We said that Wednesday. It was known since the first Trump Administration that China was attempting to influence U.S. elections against Trump.
The President conveniently didn’t mention the efforts by Russia or Iran, much of which was in support of Trump’s reelection. Foreign influence is a national problem, not a partisan one.
Yet the President did not address why he closed the Foreign Influence Task Force at the Department of Justice early last year, and he did not offer any new solutions to combat China’s foreign influence. To the contrary, he downplays foreign influence when it helps him, as in last night’s address.
A coverup and Michigan voter registration fraud
The President also discussed government employees burying some of this information from his briefings and “fraud by a large scale voter registration operation in Michigan”.
If these were true and as serious as the President implied, one would expect that the President would have announced that individuals were already fired or announced unsealed criminal indictments. He did neither, promising those actions in the uncertain future.
The threat of foreign influence and interference is real and has been happening for years, as we wrote Wednesday. Both federal and state officials work to keep elections secure, and that must continue. But President Trump’s speech last night shows that our elections have been successful despite those threats — at least so far — and offered no new solutions to the very real cybersecurity threats we face.