US President Donald Trump addressed the nation in which he announced the release of a package of “critical intelligence showing shocking vulnerabilities in the election system.” The president accused China of trying to influence the results of the 2018 US midterm elections and the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. According to Trump, American intelligence services knew about the compromise of election registers, but chose to hide this information. The president also pointed to allegedly illegal voter registration schemes, including the inclusion of non-U.S. citizens and deceased people on the rolls.
Four sets of documents published on the White House website, according to Trump, show that the US election system is “dangerously and previously unimaginable to a degree open to hacking, exploitation and foreign interference.”
One of the documents dated January 15, 2020, included in the block “Vulnerabilities of Electronic Voting and Ballot Counting Systems,” states that “adversaries of the United States, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, as well as non-state actors, have the ability to compromise the US election process.” It is emphasized that their specific plans for intervention have not been confirmed, and “it would be difficult to manipulate the systems for counting, transmitting and displaying election results on a scale sufficient to change the outcome of the elections.”
At the same time, Trump pointed to the alleged “largest compromise of election data in history” by China, which, according to him, is evidenced by published documents.
The president said Beijing gained access to the names, addresses, telephone numbers and party preferences of millions of Americans and created a special unit to work with this data as part of its own projects. In total, the Chinese side allegedly received files with information on 220 million American voters.
According to the documents, the Chinese Communist Party “sought to use all internal and external forces opposed to the President of the United States to reduce the number of votes cast for him, force his resignation or prevent his re-election.”
The alleged strategy included using Beijing's connections with major American companies to influence business leaders, as well as placing custom publications in American newspapers, according to the White House website.
“As part of this campaign, China analyzed the results of the 2016 US presidential election and identified the states that voted for the US President. The Chinese side then identified industries in those states that supported the president's political party and tried to harm them economically by imposing tariffs on the products they supplied to China. China hoped that such measures would encourage representatives of these industries to put pressure on the US President,” the document says.
Trump stressed in his address that in the run-up to the 2019 election, China sought to “portray that the president is not so cool, despite his excellent job.” During this period of Trump's first term, Trump's job approval rating remained at 41%, according to PRRI. He lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden.
The head of the White House added that American intelligence agencies began to receive information about the compromise of election registers back in 2020. However, he said, “unscrupulous officials” suppressed this information, and dozens of important CIA and National Security Agency reports on Chinese activities were never included in presidential briefings.
The president also cited alleged improprieties in Michigan that emerged after police raided Democratic Party headquarters in Muskegon in 2020. According to published materials, some agitators admitted to the FBI that they signed registration forms on behalf of other people, submitted fraudulent applications to register non-existent persons and received “gift cards” based on the number of applications prepared.
The fourth block of documents is devoted to the Department of Homeland Security's verification of electoral rolls. The materials claim that the department has identified about 278,000 non-US citizens registered to vote in federal elections. According to Trump, the real number of such cases could be much higher.
To reform the election system, the president called for the SAVE America Act. The bill would require proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections.
It was first proposed by a member of the House of Representatives from Texas, Republican Chip Roy, in May 2024, and again in January 2025. The bill was actively promoted by Republicans, including Trump himself after his return to the White House.
