President Trump used a primetime address Thursday night (July 16) to revive disputed claims about election security, including assertions CBS News rated false, misleading, exaggerated or unsupported by evidence.
Trump opened by alleging that China "carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history" during the 2020 election cycle. CBS News rated this claim misleading.
What Trump didn't mention: most voter data — names, addresses, party affiliations — is already publicly available in most states, either for free or for purchase by campaigns and political organizations, the outlet reported. U.S. intelligence agencies have said no foreign actor altered any technical aspect of the 2020 voting process, including ballot casting, vote counting or voter registration. A joint bulletin from the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency also found no evidence that cyberattacks affected election infrastructure or the integrity of any ballots cast.
The Chinese Embassy also denied the allegations before Trump even finished speaking, saying China "has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the U.S."
Trump then declared the U.S. election system "falls catastrophically short" of preventing cheating and interference. CBS News rated this false.
CISA said there was "no evidence of any malicious activity" affecting the integrity of the 2024 elections and called the 2020 election "the most secure in American history," the outlet reported.
Georgia and Pennsylvania both conducted post-election audits of the 2024 general election and confirmed their results were accurate. Notably, a White House official acknowledged in a briefing with reporters hours before the speech that none of the newly declassified documents released alongside it would allege that any votes were switched or voting machines were hacked, per CBS News.
On voting machines, Trump claimed they are "vulnerable and they're easily compromised, and people within our government knew that." CBS News rated this as lacking evidence.
The documents concerned Smartmatic, whose technology is not used in U.S. elections outside Los Angeles County, according to the outlet. While CISA's 2022 review of Dominion Voting Systems did identify some technical vulnerabilities, the agency found no evidence they had ever been exploited in any election. Experts told CBS News that voting equipment is closely monitored and, in nearly every state, backed by paper ballots or records that allow results to be audited by hand.
"They're under lock and key until they are publicly tested to make sure they haven't been tampered with," Center for Election Innovation & Research Executive Director David Becker said.
Trump claimed "hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls." CBS News rated this exaggerated.
North Carolina identified roughly 34,000 deceased individuals on its voter rolls earlier this year, but its own State Board of Elections clarified that the finding "does not necessarily indicate that illegal votes were cast in their names," the outlet reported.
Iowa initially estimated 2,186 potential non-citizen registrations. After a full statewide audit, officials identified 277 confirmed non-citizen registrations, of which 35 people voted in the 2024 election. The Center for Election Innovation & Research concluded that non-citizen voting allegations "arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications," per CBS News.
Trump also accused ABC and NBC of refusing to cover his speech. The networks did not interrupt their primary broadcast programming, but both carried the address on their digital streaming platforms.
CBS aired part of the speech on television before cutting away for fact-checking and analysis.
Trump also declared mail-in ballots "inherently corrupt." CBS News rated the claim false.
A Brookings Institution analysis found an average mail voting fraud rate of 0.000043 percent across the 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 general elections — roughly four cases of fraud per 10 million mail votes, per CBS News.
Mail-in voting has been used in the United States since the Civil War. And Trump himself voted by mail in a Florida special election earlier this year — despite being in Palm Beach during at least one weekend when early voting was available.
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