What Trump’s newly declassified documents do – and don’t – say about threats to US elections
By Marshall Cohen, Kevin Liptak, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump in his primetime speech on Thursday is alleging vulnerabilities exist in American election systems, using a large trove of newly declassified documents as evidence to suggest future elections could be at risk of foreign interference, particularly by China.
Though the documents are newly declassified, they largely discuss vulnerabilities that have been known for years and election officials around the country have tried to address.
None of the declassified information supports the claim that any previous election results — including the 2020 presidential contest that Trump lost — were manipulated by foreign interference or fraud in a way that would’ve changed the outcome.
Instead, White House officials have framed the disclosures not as an attempt to re-litigate past elections, but rather as an attempt to correct vulnerabilities ahead of November’s midterm elections. That’s despite the fact that the second Trump administration has shuttered many federal organizations that were tracking and publicizing foreign influence campaigns.
And White House officials suggested the information, some of which has been known for years, was withheld from senior top elected US officials, including Trump, for political purposes.
Among the points Trump plans to discuss:
– Claims that there are major vulnerabilities with US voting machines
– Claims that China has obtained voter data on millions of Americans
– Claims about systemic voter registration fraud by Democrats in Michigan
– Claims there are far more non-citizens on voter rolls than known before
There are indeed some new revelations in the hundreds of pages of documents declassified Thursday. But it appears, based on CNN’s review, that a decent chunk of the documents rehash information that has already been public and widely understood in the US intelligence community.
The documents are part of an attempt by the Trump administration to make the case that foreign countries are aggressively interfering with US elections. It’s worth noting that Trump has spent nearly a decade denying the unanimous conclusions from many of these same intelligence agencies that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.
The documents and notes released Thursday were intended to round up everything the US government had information about that was tied to past reports, said a source with direct knowledge of the US intelligence community’s assessment of foreign interference efforts around the 2020 election. But once that additional underlying information was vetted, the source said it was not considered consequential or credible enough to include.
CNN is reviewing the hundreds of documents that were declassified by the Trump administration and released Thursday night. Here is a breakdown of the main findings.
Claims about vulnerabilities with US voting machines
The White House has declassified intelligence reports saying that American voting machines are hackable by at least five foreign powers.
One National Intelligence Council report from January 2020 offered the concerning conclusion that Russia, China, Iran and North Korea “have the capability to access and potentially manipulate” US election data, like centralized voter registration databases and pollbooks.
However, the report noted that, because US elections are decentralized and run by states and counties, any breaches would likely be localized and it “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.”
The White House also said the documents show that Venezuela conducted an experiment on voting machines that swapped out votes in a way that was undetectable in a post-vote audit or a hand count.
This claim has been touted by ex-Venezuelan spy chief Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, who pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and wrote a letter to Trump in December embracing many of Trump’s election conspiracies.
The machines were made by Smartmatic, a company that Trump allies have falsely accuses of rigging the 2020 US election, largely because of its past ties to Venezuela.
A declassified CIA memo from June said the US intelligence community determined in 2006 that Venezuela and Smartmatic didn’t have the capability “to manipulate the outcome of elections outside Venezuela.”
The report also noted that when Venezuela did manipulate elections in its country, it was possible because officials had “insider access” to voting systems – which Venezuelans obviously wouldn’t have for US elections.
Smartmatic software is currently only used in one jurisdiction across the entire US – Los Angeles County. In a previous statement to CNN, a Smartmatic spokesperson said the company “vehemently rejects the completely baseless and repeatedly debunked accusations about the integrity of our election systems.”
There are well documented vulnerabilities in voting systems used by the US, but no one, including Trump and his allies,, have provided evidence that those vulnerabilities have ever been successfully exploited by a foreign adversary to change votes.
Those vulnerabilities have been cited in several lawsuits, however, filed by Trump allies since 2020, intended to call the 2020 election results into question.
Claims about China accessing US voter rolls
The White House says these documents allege that China obtained more than 200 million American voter registration files in a period between 2020 and 2024. They say this includes individuals’ names, addresses, phone numbers, military status, party registration and record of whether they voted.
The files, according to the White House, were purchased illicitly, stolen, hacked, or otherwise illegally obtained by China. (Many states openly and non-controversially sell versions of their voter data, but only the part that contains public information.)
A foreign adversary can learn a lot about Americans from accessing US voter rolls. And it creates a real possibility of chaos on Election Day, if the foreign actor somehow accesses live databases and starts manipulating entries. But the US has never accused China of tainting or deleting voter records.
A 2019 report from a redacted government agency said eight states’ voter databases were compromised by China.
However, the report also describes Chinse hackers targeting a wide swath of American society, including medical databases, social networking sites, think tanks, and defense contractors. These are not necessarily shocking new findings: US intelligence agencies have long understood China to be trying to hoover up data on as many Americans as possible. scrambling to illicitly breach as many records about Americans as possible.
China has a long history of espionage like this. Chinese hackers breached federal government servers in 2015 and stole more than 20 million sensitive records from the Office of Personnel Management.
Beyond accessing voter rolls, on the topic of trying to influence or interfere with election results, one new report from the National Intelligence Council from October 2020 said China’s activities regarding that year’s presidential election were “low-level” and confined to “exploratory steps.”
After the 2020 election, Trump appointees at the DNI later publicly announced that China considered trying to influence the outcome but decided not to, due to concerns of upsetting US-China relations.
Non-citizens on the voter rolls
The White House says these reports indicate that the Department of Homeland Security believes that at least 250,000 non-citizens were on the voter rolls in several key states. However, there are doubts about the reliability of the datasets that DHS analyzed.
The newly released DHS document says these 250,000 non-citizens are registered in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada.
The White House said that the analysis was done from commercially available databases, which are less reliable than government data. Those states have refused to hand over their voter lists for a federal audit from the “SAVE system,” or the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, a government tool used to identify potential noncitizen voters.
The DHS document said a total of 28,000 non-citizens were found illegally registered to vote, drawing from data from 25 states that processed more than 68 million registration records through the more thorough SAVE system.
Even if there are more non-citizens on the rolls than previously known, there is still no indication from the documents that there has been a massive uptick in non-citizens actually casting ballots.
It is illegal for foreign nationals to vote in federal elections, and experts say it rarely happens.
However, some jurisdictions, including San Francisco, California, have passed ordinances allowing people who are noncitizens to vote only in local elections, such as school board contests. Which would explain why non-citizens are registered in states like California.
Trump has long peddled false and fantastical claims about thousands of possibly even millions of undocumented immigrants voting in US elections. (He most famously claimed that he lost the popular vote in 2016, by about two million votes, because of undocumented immigrants.)
The right-leaning Heritage Foundation’s database of confirmed fraud cases lists less than 100 examples of non-citizens voting between 2002 and 2022, amid more than one billion lawfully cast ballots. And the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice analyzed more than 23 million votes from the 2016 election and found an estimated 30 examples.
This story has been updated.
CNN’s Sean Lyngaas, Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, Zachary Cohen, Fredreka Schouten, Aleena Fayaz, Tierney Sneed and Holmes Lybrand contributed reporting
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