President Donald Trump renewed his effort to raise doubts about U.S. elections on Thursday, releasing declassified intelligence documents he claims reveal widespread fraud and foreign meddling — even as existing intelligence findings and independent research contradict several of his assertions.
Throughout the first half of 2026, Trump has repeated claims that the 2020 elections were “rigged” more than 100 times. He has used those claims to push Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a restrictive voter ID measure that would impose strict identification requirements on voters and expand federal involvement in elections. The bill has passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives multiple times with a simple majority, but falls short of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster in the Republican-led Senate.
CLAIM 1: China Worked to Help Democrats in Recent Elections
Trump accused the Chinese government of attempting to hurt Republican candidates in the 2018 midterm elections and undermine his 2020 reelection bid. He also alleged that Beijing obtained and compromised data on American voters.
A prior U.S. intelligence assessment tells a different story. A 2021 report concluded that while China considered launching influence operations to affect the outcome of the 2020 election, it ultimately chose not to move forward. That assessment was carried out under John Ratcliffe, who served as Trump’s director of national intelligence at the time and now leads the CIA.
The intelligence report did find that China had been collecting information on U.S. voters, public opinion, and political parties going back to at least 2008. However, the voter data China gathered was not classified, and there is no evidence it was used to change any votes.
CLAIM 2: Venezuela Tampered With Electronic Voting Machines
Trump pointed to CIA documents about alleged election manipulation by former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to argue that American voting machines are vulnerable to being hacked. He claimed Maduro’s government was able to digitally change vote tallies.
A CIA document summarizing intelligence gathered between 2004 and 2020 did find that the Venezuelan government had the technical ability to digitally alter election results.
However, there is no evidence that any such manipulation has taken place in U.S. elections, and Trump himself did not claim these methods were used here. A theory promoted by Trump’s supporters — that Maduro’s government hacked American voting machines in 2020 — has been thoroughly debunked.
CLAIM 3: Hundreds of Thousands of Non-Citizens Are Registered to Vote
Trump stated that a Department of Homeland Security review identified approximately 278,000 non-U.S. citizens registered to vote in federal elections, which would be a violation of federal law. He and his allies have repeatedly cited such figures to argue for stricter voting requirements.
A number of Republican-led states have voluntarily shared private voter registration data with the Trump administration in an effort to identify and remove alleged non-citizens from their rolls. According to Democracy Docket, an online publication focused on election security, the Trump administration has lost 15 lawsuits in which it sought to force other states — most of them led by Democrats — to hand over similar data.
Independent research suggests that non-citizen voting is extremely uncommon. The Bipartisan Policy Center found that when states reviewed voter eligibility, only 0.04% of cases involved individuals identified as non-citizens. Election experts have also warned that large-scale efforts to purge voter rolls could result in eligible citizens being wrongly removed from registration lists.
