In a primetime speech Thursday, President Trump alleged voting machines and ballot-counting systems are “extremely exposed to attack,” pointing to intelligence that was declassified and released by the White House — following years of similar claims about voting machines.
But some of the newly released documents are tied to a company that largely isn’t used in the United States, and experts say voting machines are subject to intense controls.
“They’re vulnerable and they’re easily compromised, and people within our government knew that,” the president said during the speech.
Mr. Trump later pointed to CIA intelligence about a plot to use voting machines to “do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela,” referring to voter fraud in that country.
However, the Venezuela-related intelligence released by the White House focuses on election systems made by the company Smartmatic — and that company’s technology is not used in the United States, aside from in Los Angeles County.
Smartmatic has said it does not currently have any operations in Venezuela. While it worked in the country for about 13 years starting in 2004, it has said that in 2017, “our technology helped prove that the government was reporting false turnout numbers, so we blew the whistle on them and stopped doing business there at that time.”
In general, experts say voting machines in the U.S. are extremely difficult to compromise because they are closely monitored, they aren’t connected to the internet, and in almost every state, they are backed up by paper ballots or receipts that can be audited to check the results by hand.
“They’re under lock and key until they are publicly tested to make sure they haven’t been tampered with,” said Center for Election Innovation & Research Executive Director David Becker. “And then they are used and we still don’t trust them. We have those paper ballots.”
For example, every 2020 general election ballot in Georgia was tallied three times: once by machines during the original counting process, once in an audit that involved a hand recount in every county statewide, and once in a machine recount requested by the Trump campaign. All three counts affirmed that former President Joe Biden defeated Mr. Trump.
Elsewhere in Thursday’s speech, Mr. Trump pointed to newly declassified intelligence that U.S. adversaries like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have the ability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.
The document that Mr. Trump appeared to reference — a National Intelligence Council memo from January 2020 — does state that U.S. adversaries have the “capability” to compromise election infrastructure. It points to voter registration databases as one possible vulnerability. But it later explains that systems used to tabulate votes or display results would be “difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.”
“The systems in each voting location are not connected to the Internet or to each other, and many methods for exploiting them rely on physical proximity,” the document said, adding that “conducting such a campaign would be difficult and that postelection audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.”
The National Intelligence Council also found in a long-public March 2021 assessment that no foreign entities attempted to “alter any technical aspect of the voting process” in 2020.
“We assess that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around voting systems across the country, or in post-election audits,” the intelligence community said in the March 2021 report.
