US President Donald Trump, in a primetime speech on Thursday, attacked the country’s voting system and made several unverified claims about the electoral process.
He cited newly declassified evidence about alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 election, highlighted an old case in Michigan about voter fraud and reiterated a campaign favorite: that non-citizens are illegally registered to vote.
Trump has long cast doubt on the integrity of US elections, falsely claiming that the 2020 election was “stolen”. Every relevant investigation, including dozens of court decisions, state-level audits and recounts, all reached the same conclusion that Trump lost that election, by more than 7 million in the popular vote and 306-232 in the Electoral College.
“The November 3 election was the most secure in American history,” ReadingA joint statement in 2020 from government and industry bodies overseeing US election security. The statement said no evidence shows that votes were removed, altered or compromised from any voting system.
DW Fact Check examines some of Trump’s latest election-related claims and the trove of declassified documents behind them.
Did China interfere in the 2020 elections?
ClaimTrump said in his speech, “The People’s Republic of China conducted what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illegal acquisition of 220 million American voter files. That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening.”
DW Fact Check: misleading
This claim extends far beyond the documents made public.
First, voter records are often public or available for commercial purchase. one of the following declassified documents states that “publicly available U.S. voter registration information for six states was downloaded” by a Chinese actor on January 14, 2022, and “the actual motivation for collecting this information is unknown.”
Additionally, the official view of the US intelligence community, from a reportDeclassified in 2021, it is that “There was no indication that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 U.S. election, including voter registration, ballot casting, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”
They found evidence that Russia had authorized an influence campaign to support Trump’s re-election and that Iran had done the same to undermine him.
As for China, he wrote, “We assessed that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. We have full confidence in that decision.”
The report said China prioritized stable US relations over election interference. However, China “took some steps to try to undermine former President Trump’s re-election.”
According to documents, there was a dissenting viewpoint Within the intelligence community, a senior intelligence official wrote a memo that “Beijing has taken some low-level, exploratory steps to discredit the President and shape voter perception ahead of the election.”
But nothing in the documents amounts to Trump’s claim of an “unprecedented election security nightmare.”
This preliminary review is based on more than 20 declassified documents. DW will continue to investigate this claim as reporting develops.
What the FBI really found in Michigan
Claim: “The documents say some canvassers admitted to FBI agents that they signed voter registration forms and other people’s names, submitted fake registrations for people who did not exist and received gift cards tied to the number of applications they produced. In other words, it was pay, play and cheat. FBI agents working on the case believe crimes were committed, yet the Biden Justice Department slowed the investigation and ended it. Gave it,” Trump said.
DW Fact Check: misleading
In 2020, a Muskegon, Michigan clerk informedSeveral suspicious voter registration applications, all of which came from a woman working for GBI StrategiesA Democratic get-out-the-vote operation that works to sign up unregistered voters.
Michigan State Police, the Attorney General, and local police investigated the suspicious applications in 2020 before turning the case over to the FBI. The FBI discovered that some of the canvassers’ registrations were actually fraudulent, including nonexistent addresses, invalid telephone numbers, and mismatched signatures.
According to a spokesperson for Michigan’s top elections official, no registration actually resulted in people being registered to vote or voting. toldBridge Michigan, a local nonprofit news site.
“The Muskegon Clerk followed the law and promptly reported this situation to local law enforcement and the Elections Bureau in late 2020,” the spokesperson said.
This type of voter outreach campaign, where paid employees gather potential voters, is legal and common. A practice called “bounty-hunting” is even allowed in some states, where canvassers can be paid per person who signs up, according to the FBI. Explained2021 in email.
FBI too concludedIn 2025 canvassers at the GBI were “not instructed to falsify voter registration information.”
In that most recent report, the FBI determined: “No further investigation is necessary because logical investigations and/or leads have been exhausted, and the investigation to date has not identified criminal violations or a primary threat to national security.”
Officials investigated the case between 2020 and 2025 under both the Trump and Biden administrations. And the final FBI report came while the agency was under Trump’s purview, not Biden’s.
Actual measure of non-citizen voting
Claim: “To highlight just how insecure our elections are, we are releasing the results of an astonishing investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. According to a DHS review, state voter rolls and public records, they have identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.”
DW Fact Check:unverified
The White House released only two documents related to this claim: one is from DHS It states that “more than 250,000 noncitizens are illegally registered to vote” in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada, but provides no explanation or information about where this number comes from.
Trump has long claimed that non-citizens are involved in widespread election fraud, dating back to 2016. ClaimThat he “won the popular vote if you subtract the millions of people who voted illegally.” But he has presented no evidence for these claims, and experts agree that they are greatly exaggerated.
“Non-citizen registration is already rare, and non-citizen voting is even less common,” writesBipartisan Policy Center.
At the beginning of the year, Utah did an audit Its complete voter registration list. After reviewing over 2 million voters, they identified only one non-citizen registered and found no instances of non-citizen voting.
Trump’s own citizenship verification program, the SAVE System (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement), found that just According to the U.S., 0.04% of registered voters were non-U.S. citizens. Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Yet, according to Reuters/Ipsos, nearly half of Americans agree that non-citizens are casting fraudulent ballots in large numbers. votingHeld in April.