The News
President Donald Trump’s warnings on Thursday night of massive risks to election security, which were backed by no new proof of threats to the November midterms, are designed to ramp up pressure on Republicans to back his voter ID bill.
But there’s no sign that Trump’s squeeze play will work, as Democrats decry his attempt to resurrect claims of manipulation in his 2020 election loss and battleground Republicans urge him to move on from sowing doubt about the safety of US elections.
Trump delivered a nearly half-hour primetime address that briefly touched on topics like the economy and the Iran war but largely focused on alleged election fraud. He announced the declassification of a cache of intelligence documents about election security — in part thanks to acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, who was tapped to push for more data releases — but little in the documents shed light on any meaningful new threat.
The president nonetheless portrayed the documents as underpinning “vulnerabilities” in US elections. He at one point argued that the only rationale for lawmakers resisting his push for voter ID would be if “your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get … elected any other way.”
“Congress must pass the Save America Act,” Trump said, referring to his voter ID measure. “How easy is that to do, unless you want to cheat?”
The legislation has slim odds of becoming law, with no path to breaking a filibuster in the Senate. But most House Republicans have embraced Trump’s call, and GOP leaders have moved to attach a form of the legislation to other bills moving through the chamber, even if it means zeroing out Democratic support.
Several Trump-aligned senators immediately touted his remarks and his push for voting legislation. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., called Trump’s speech “truly shocking,” calling for members to stay in Washington through their August break and even kill the filibuster to pass the voter ID bill, while Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said “the Senate should focus on nothing else until the SAVE America Act passes.”
The bill currently lacks a strategy to secure 50 Senate GOP votes and evade a filibuster.
“We must look ahead while also seeking to fully understand what went wrong and hold bad actors accountable. Telling the American people to just ‘move on’ is an arrogant and patronizing affront,” said House Intelligence Chair Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark.
Despite that buy-in, most Hill Republicans were skeptical of the president’s focus on his 2020 election loss even before Trump started speaking. With the midterms looming, Republican lawmakers would prefer that he talk about cost-of-living issues or the upside of the Iran conflict instead of relitigating his six-year-old loss.
“I’m going to focus on what’s going to happen in the next four months, rather than what happened six years ago,” Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., told Semafor before the speech.
“This constant circling back to 2020 is not doing him or anyone else any favors,” said purple-district Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa.
And Trump’s speech served to crystallize Democrats’ fears that the president would use his fixation on the 2020 election as a pretext to meddle in the midterms. Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., said Trump is “trying to lay the groundwork for claiming the next election is rigged if he doesn’t like the outcome.”
“Instead of using tonight’s address to lay out a plan to make groceries, housing, or health care more affordable, he spent it laying the groundwork to steal the midterms and ram through his partisan voter suppression bill,” said Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., after the speech.
Know More
Trump asserted in the speech that the trove of declassified documents would vindicate his allegations of voter fraud, noting that the Department of Homeland Security found that “over 250,000 non-citizens are illegally registered to vote” in four states, as asserted in documents released by Trump tonight.
However, a federal judge recently blocked DHS from work on a voter database, charging that inaccurate data had resulted in citizens being “wrongfully identified” as noncitizens. A recent study by the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research found that noncitizen registration numbers are often inflated.
Trump also mentioned China, saying the country in 2020 “carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.” Prior declassified intelligence showed that the administration has long been aware of China’s efforts to collect voter information, some of which is available publicly.
Trump referenced allegations related to Venezuela too, as Semafor first reported ahead of his speech; he alluded to CIA findings that he said showed “a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt regime in Venezuela.”
The White House-released declassified documents on that subject point to a different conclusion, however.
They state that there were “some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems” related to races in Venezuela, but that intelligence showed “neither Smartmatic nor the Venezuelan government had the capability to manipulate the outcome of an election outside Venezuela.”
Notable
- Trump’s then-director of cybersecurity said the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history,” per NPR; he was later fired.