A Voter Guide to Trump’s Election Claims
Trump Leans Into Long-Debunked Voter Fraud Claims
In a primetime White House address last night, President Donald Trump made a series of sweeping claims suggesting that U.S. elections are corrupt, insecure, and highly vulnerable to fraud. Citing newly declassified documents, the president also argued that intelligence agencies covered up the extent of Chinese interference in the 2020 election and suggested that China surreptitiously obtained voting information on 220 million Americans.
It was a lot to take in and sort out. For this special edition of Reality Check, NewsGuard sifted through Trump’s accusations and examined his purported evidence. Below we debunk three false claims advanced by the president, show how the White House address played into broader baseless narratives about election fraud that we have previously debunked, and explain the true focus of Chinese foreign interference efforts.
FALSE CLAIMS ADVANCED BY TRUMP IN HIS JULY 16 SPEECH
Trump’s speech included several provably false claims alleging that the integrity of U.S. elections has been undermined:
TRUMP: “Documents we are releasing prove that for many years, Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot-counting systems, dishonest, almost all. They’re vulnerable and they’re easily compromised.”
THE FACTS: The documents Trump appeared to be citing do not support any of this. In tandem with Trump’s address, the White House released a tranche of documents. One of them, a January 2020 memo from the National Intelligence Council, actually contradicted Trump’s claim, stating that “vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.”
- The memo noted two key safeguards against widespread fraud: that local election systems “are not connected to the Internet or to each other,” and that “postelection audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.”
TRUMP: “Mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt.”
THE FACTS: This longtime Trump claim has never been backed by evidence, and indeed, evidence indicates the opposite. Between 1982 and 2025, a time in which hundreds of millions of votes were cast across the U.S., there were 289 criminal convictions for “fraudulent use of absentee ballots,” according to a database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
- A 2021 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Statistics and Public Policy, written by analysts from the American Statistical Association, a statistician trade group, stated that there is “no evidence that voting by mail increases the risk of voter fraud overall.”
TRUMP: “In 2020, Michigan State Police raided a Democrat get-out-the-vote organization, corrupt group, in Muskegon, and were so concerned by what they found. … It was pay, play, and cheat.”
THE FACTS: It is true that the Muskegon City Clerk’s office identified irregularities in hundreds of voter registration applications, multiple Michigan TV stations reported in October 2020.
- However, the news reports said that the issues relating to voter registration did not ultimately lead to improper voting, and a local police captain told Grand Rapids TV station News 8 in October 2020, “There is no expected impact on any election.”
- Angela Benander, a spokesperson for the Michigan Secretary of State’s office, which oversees the state’s elections, told PolitiFact in August 2023, “There is no evidence that any of the invalid voter registration applications in question resulted in people getting registered to vote, receiving absentee ballots, casting absentee ballots, or voting in person in any election.”
FALSE CLAIMS IMPLIED BY TRUMP
In his remarks Thursday, Trump hinted at a number of purported voting irregularities that have fueled election claims that NewsGuard has previously debunked.
TRUMP: California “took a month to count the votes. I wonder what they were doing.” The comment suggests that slow vote-counting is evidence of wrongdoing.
THE FACTS: It is not uncommon for election results to not be certified on Election Day.
- In fact, counting votes after Election Day is legally required, if those votes were cast lawfully and the ballots were received by the deadline set by each state.
- Simply because a candidate is leading the vote count on the night of the election does not mean that he or she will ultimately be declared the winner.
- In California, election officials have 30 days to count final ballots before California’s Secretary of State certifies the results.
TRUMP: “Hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls.” The comment suggests that large numbers of non-citizens vote in U.S. elections.
THE FACTS: Under federal law, only U.S. citizens can cast ballots in federal elections.
- A 1996 federal law states that immigrants who unlawfully cast a ballot face fines, imprisonment, and deportation.
- Most states also have guardrails in place to prevent noncitizen voting. For example, people must attest that they are U.S. citizens when they register to vote and in many states, present proof of citizenship.
- The Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database noted above, which the think tank describes as a “sampling,” includes only 85 cases involving allegations of noncitizen voting between 2002 and 2023, according to The Washington Post.
- There is no evidence that living people have fraudulently voted in the name of dead people in significant numbers. In many states, election officials cross-check the list of voters with the Social Security Administration’s list of people who recently died in that jurisdiction.
WHAT ABOUT CHINA?
NewsGuard regularly identifies foreign malign influence operations by Russia, China, and Iran, including spreading false claims aimed at undermining democracies, but Trump’s focus on China did not include these risks:
Trump accused China of carrying out an “illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.” However, voter registration information is publicly available across the U.S. Trump also stated that “China engaged in other election-related activities to undermine my first administration and our 2020 campaign.”
In fact, NewsGuard has found that Chinese influence campaigns have focused chiefly on Taiwan’s sovereignty and on portraying the U.S. broadly in a negative light — not on targeting Trump. NewsGuard has identified 114 disinformation narratives spread by Chinese influence groups since 2020, none of which appeared aimed at damaging Trump.
Of those 114, 38 percent focused on global affairs involving Russia and the Middle East, 28 percent were about Taiwan, and 18 percent were about U.S. topics generally. Other claims focused on stoking COVID-19 anxiety and other potentially divisive issues.
Several claims were aimed at portraying U.S. elections as rigged against Trump. For example, Chinese state-owned outlet Global Times said on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform, “Vote Trump and the printed ballot will turn into Harris,” citing a purported “anomaly in the machines at the voting station [in Tarrant County, Texas].”
Zooming out: NewsGuard has compiled more than 260 false claims that spread during the 2020 and 2024 U.S. election cycles, including that Democrats committed widespread voter fraud to “steal” the election for Joe Biden in 2020, and that voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic switched votes to rig the election.
- Compilations of the false claims are available at NewsGuard’s 2020 Election Misinformation Tracking Center and 2024 Election Misinformation Monitoring Center.
Charlene Lin contributed reporting.
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In Case You Missed It … 380 False Election Claims and Counting
On July 9, President Donald Trump fired two Democratic members of the bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission and previously pressured the third member, a Republican, to quit. The EAC has been an independent federal agency that certifies voting systems and develops election administration guidance for states. The move came as NewsGuard tracked its 380th false claim related to U.S. elections, underscoring how election misinformation continues to proliferate as the 2026 midterm cycle moves into high gear.
Read the full story here.
This newsletter was edited by Sofia Rubinson and Eric Effron.
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