Trump’s speech may focus on 2020 election. Here’s a primer on foreign interference, voting security

President Donald Trump is set to address the nation July 16 with an expected primetime focus on election integrity.

Trump's comments and news reports show he will focus on the 2020 election that he lost. 

The administration has been cagey about offering further details, saying Americans will need to tune in.

Trump alluded to the speech’s topic July 14; when a reporter asked whether his remarks would be about "election machines’ integrity," Trump said, "It will concern that subject." 

"Our country has to shape up," Trump said, adding, "it doesn't get bigger because without free and fair elections, you don't have a country." MS NOW, citing unnamed White House officials, had reported that Trump will talk about newly declassified intelligence reports about foreign nations’ plans to interfere in the 2020 election.

Trump has made unproven statements about elections and voting by mail for a decade. He has used those falsehoods to push for changing election laws and recently called on Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a bill that would tighten voter registration and voter ID requirements. 

Reports from intelligence experts show that the 2020 election was secure and foreign governments’ attempts at interference did not affect voting.

"Trump ran the (government) in 2020, services were led by his appointees, and there were many efforts to track foreign interference in 2020," wrote Renee DiResta, a Georgetown University expert on election rumors and influence operations. "Nothing major happened."

DiResta told PolitiFact it is important to distinguish between efforts at foreign influence and impact. If the Trump administration releases a trove of materials, she advised voters to look beyond sensational headlines to see what the documents show.

What is foreign influence and interference? 

Foreign influence is activity — such as misinformation on social media — by foreigners to sway voters and candidates, said Lawrence Norden, an elections expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Foreign interference targets election infrastructure and hardware to change election outcomes.

While there has been foreign influence in U.S. elections since 2016, there are no known instances of infiltration of election systems outside of Russian’s attempts in 2016, Norden said.

In 2016, Russian agents used hacking and disinformation campaigns in an attempt to tilt the election in Trump’s favor, government reports have shown. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, tasked with investigating it, found no criminal coordination between Moscow and the Trump campaign. 

There are multiple safeguards protecting elections from foreign interference, including regularly audited paper records for 98% of votes cast in almost every state, Norden said. 

The Trump administration has cut back on election security efforts launched during his first term, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. In a 2020 post-election tweet, Trump fired the head of CISA, Chris Krebs, after the agency released a statement that affirmed the election’s security.

What did the U.S. government conclude about interference and the 2020 election?

Federal government officials concluded that foreign actors attempted to undermine confidence in the U.S. elections, but were unsuccessful.

In March 2021, the National Intelligence Council issued a report that said it observed "no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results."

The same month, a report by the U.S. Justice and Homeland Security departments largely confirmed these results.

Both reports expressed high confidence in their findings and noted the extreme improbability of undetected election interference.

The National Intelligence Council report said Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized operations focused on promoting Trump at the expense of Joe Biden. Other countries such as Cuba and Venezuela made smaller-scale influence efforts. 

When it came to China, the intelligence community disagreed, said Geoff Hale, an election security expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology. The most commonly held belief was that China created plans and considered conducting influence operations but did not implement them. 

News reports and statements from the federal government before the 2020 election showed that foreign actors were attempting to influence the election. 

In October 2020, PolitiFact reported on a spoofed email threat to Florida and Alaska voters that U.S. intelligence officers said originated from Iran. The email, made to look like it was sent by the far-right U.S. group the Proud Boys, said the group would know if recipients voted for Trump. 

Four years later, the Justice Department charged three Iranian hackers with targeting people associated with U.S. political campaigns. The Trump presidential campaign also said it had been hacked by the Iranian government and lost sensitive internal documents.

What did Trump, allies say about 2020 interference, rigging?

After Trump lost the 2020 election, he and his team falsely blamed foreign actors.  

Sidney Powell, a Trump attorney, made a Pants on Fire statement that election machines were designed to change results. Powell said the machines that many Americans used to cast their ballots were originally created to falsify election results in Venezuela.

Smartmatic voting systems have been used in elections around the world. In Venezuela, the company said its technology was manipulated to report a skewed tally in 2017, but Smartmatic said the incident was an anomaly and likely due to the lack of election monitors. The company stopped its work there in 2018. Smartmatic has a pending $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox News and won a $40 million settlement from Newsmax.

Dominion Voting Systems won a $787 million settlement against Fox News for repeatedly airing false claims about the company.

The 2020 election was neither rigged nor stolen.

Biden won after receiving 306 electoral votes, compared with 232 for Trump. Biden also got about 7 million more votes nationwide than Trump. 

Trump and his allies lost more than 60 election lawsuits for reasons including that the allegations lacked proof.

In 2022, a group of Republicans, including former federal judges, examined Trump’s statements of fraud and miscount. They concluded that the claims "failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the (election) results." 

Norden said the 2020 contest "was perhaps the most examined election in US history, with counts, recounts and audits all showing the same thing: Trump lost."

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