Trump’s decl***ified election do***ents fall short of primetime claims

Aug. 3 (UPI) — The 2026 midterm elections are fast approaching and President Donald Trump has launched a multipronged effort to change how they are administered.

The president took to the national airwaves on July 16 to air the same kinds of claims he has espoused since his loss in the 2020 presidential election. In his address he told his audience that the U.S. election system is “dangerously” exposed.

“Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately in a system, and that is to make that system secure; one where cheating and interference are not just difficult but virtually impossible,” Trump said. “Unfortunately, the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard.”

Along with these claims, Trump announced the release of “decl***ified files” to support his claims. He said of the release of these files that they are “revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.”

The White House has uploaded dozens of files on its website available to download. Some are heavily redacted do***ents and others only redact the names and email addresses of people communicating in email exchanges or the subjects of investigations.

A do***ent titled “CIA Wire Memo Summer 2020” warned of potential Chinese espionage activities ahead of the 2020 election. However, the threat identified by U.S. intelligence did not seek to harm Trump’s campaign. It targeted his opponent, Joe Biden.

“As the 2020 election approaches, the IC has detected Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors targeting the former Vice President’s presidential campaign, probably to gather intelligence that could enable future operations, the first instance this election cycle that we have seen them directly targeting a U.S. presidential campaign,” the memo reads. “The IC ***esses that China does not currently intend to covertly interfere or try to sway the outcome of the election, although this activity could enable such operations if Beijing made a decision to do so.”

A separate report from the FBI’s field office in Albany, N.Y., to Sen. Chuck Gr***ley, R-Iowa, alleges that the People’s Republic of China used U.S. user data collected from TikTok to create fraudulent driver’s licenses. The licenses were to be distributed to “tens of thousands of Chinese students and immigrants sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party.”

Those voters would then be enabled to illegally cast mail-in votes for Biden but the report warns that the information shared had not been fully vetted by U.S. intelligence officials.

It also highlighted flaws in the allegations, noting that a person’s address information is not submitted when creating a TikTok account.

There are also FBI do***ents on an investigation into voter registration in Michigan in 2020.

The case focused on Muskegon, Mich., where the city clerk’s office marked a series of voter registration applications for irregularities. The applications were submitted as part of a voter registration drive, delivering between 8,000 and 10,000 forms to the city clerk’s office.

The office submitted 42 voter registration applications to the Muskegon Police Department. There were more forms that were rejected due to information not matching state records.

Investigators ultimately determined that fraudulent voter registration forms were created but none of them were processed and nobody cast a vote with a fraudulent registration.

The fraudulent registration forms were also determined to not be part of a scheme to change the results of the election. Rather, they were created by canv***ers that were embellishing how many voters they had registered in order to be paid more.

“[Redacted] thought people might be forging voter signatures because the younger employees would return with a lot of signed registration forms and she would only have three or four for the entire week,” an FBI investigation do***ent dated Dec. 20, 2023, reads.

Voting rights advocates have pushed back on Trump’s claims that U.S. elections are not secure, noting that cases of election fraud are “exceedingly rare.”

“Voter fraud is not a crisis in this country,” Andrea Hailey, Vote.org CEO, said in a statement. “It is exceedingly rare, and our elections are already secure because they are run with real safeguards, transparency, and accountability built in at every step.”

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that laid out the framework for Trump’s second term policies and has dozens of members in his administration, found about 100 cases of election fraud between 1999 and 2024. That is a hundred thousandth of a percent of votes over the course of 25 years that have been fraudulent, too little to influence any general election results over that period.

After losing the 2020 election, Trump sought to overturn the results, filing lawsuits in nine states. Judges around the country, including those appointed by him, routinely found Trump’s claims that the election was rigged against him to lack evidence. All of the cases, dozens of them in total, ended in defeat for the president.

Hailey added that Trump’s primetime address was “baseless,” “dishonest” and “dangerous.”

“The 2020 election was secure and accurate — that has been affirmed and reaffirmed in five years of audits, recounts, court cases, and intelligence reviews,” she said.

Molly McGrath, ACLU director of national democracy campaigns, told UPI that while Trump focused his address on the 2020 election, his goal was to sow doubt in the November midterms.

“What we are hearing from voters is that we know this is a very clear attempt to try to deter people from voting, to try to cast doubt on the results before even one vote is cast,”McGrath said. “We know voters aren’t buying it.”

McGrath said the ACLU has been taking the pulse of voters in 50 states as it holds outreach events and meetings to educate voters on their rights ahead of the election.

Time is running out for states to change election procedures, something the president has no role in. Most states prohibit any changes to the administration of elections within 30 days of Election Day.

The president also used his primetime speech to urge Congress to p*** the Save America Act, which proposes a do***entary proof-of-citizenship requirement in all federal elections. Congress has the constitutional authority to address the time, manner and place of federal elections. Its authority is limited when it comes to state elections.

The president is not alone in getting out ahead of November’s elections, McGrath said. The ACLU has either intervened in or filed “friend of the court” do***ents in more than two dozen cases around the country to oppose the Trump administration’s efforts to obtain state voter rolls.

“There are many scenarios that are top of folks’ minds and we want to ***ure voters that here at the ACLU we have contemplated these scenarios,” she said. “We are preparing. We have the expertise. We have the training and we have people and we have volunteers who want to get engaged. We are ready.”