As President Donald Trump prepares to deliver a national address, election security experts are warning that if he uses the speech to once again claim the 2020 election was taken from him — something many analysts anticipate — the consequences could reach far beyond old grievances.
According to those experts, such claims could pose a real threat to the legitimacy of future American elections, including this November’s midterm contests.
Reuters reported earlier this week that Trump’s upcoming speech is expected to touch on alleged vulnerabilities in voting machines and that the White House is considering releasing sensitive intelligence related to China’s role — or potential role — in disrupting the 2020 election. Both subjects have been central to Republican theories suggesting that Beijing or other foreign governments manipulated the outcome in favor of Trump’s opponent, Democrat Joe Biden.
However, eight analysts, academics, and election security professionals told Reuters there is no credible evidence that the 2020 vote was meaningfully tampered with. They described it as one of the most transparent, thoroughly audited, and heavily contested elections in recent memory.
Three of those experts went further, saying that renewed suggestions of foreign interference are part of a broader effort to gain control over U.S. election administration — and to pre-emptively discredit any future election outcome that does not go Trump’s way.
Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation — a digital rights group with a long track record on election security — put it bluntly: “The purpose of litigating this is to set the stage for the upcoming midterms so that the Trump administration can claim that any election that does not go their way is illegitimate.”
Eddie Perez, a board member at the OSET Institute, an organization focused on building public trust in elections, agreed that the upcoming announcement appears aimed at least partly at future races. “If his party loses, he can cry foul,” Perez said.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt pushed back on reports about the speech’s content, calling them speculative. “The truth is, nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say,” she said. Trump has continued to insist he defeated Biden, posting a digitally altered photo of Biden wearing an “I Lost to Trump” hat just three days ago. He and his allies have long maintained they were cheated out of victory through widespread fraud.
Experts acknowledge that foreign hackers do attempt to influence U.S. elections and that voting machines, like any technology, are theoretically hackable. But Princeton University professor emeritus Andrew Appel, who has spent two decades working on election security, said no credible evidence has ever surfaced that voting machines were actually compromised. He added that some of the more extreme theories circulating among Trump’s supporters — involving mysterious satellites, special inks, or ballots made from bamboo and shipped from China — “make no sense technologically.”
On the question of foreign interference, a document produced by Trump’s own intelligence community tells a different story. An unclassified summary of a classified assessment released by multiple intelligence agencies in early 2021 found that Russian operatives worked to benefit Trump, Iranian actors tried to hurt him, and China largely stayed out of the election entirely.
Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University who specializes in digital disinformation, said any effort to retroactively revise that intelligence assessment would serve a specific narrative — that “elections are not free and fair, they’re rigged, ergo we need to increase federal control over elections.”
