By Raphael Satter and AJ Vicens
WASHINGTON, July 16 (Reuters) – If President Donald Trump repeats claims in a national address on Thursday that the 2020 election was stolen from him, as many experts expect, he would not just be rehashing old conspiracy theories.
He would, they say, be threatening the very integrity of forthcoming U.S. elections, including the November midterms.
Reuters reported earlier this week that Trump’s forthcoming speech would cover purported voting machine vulnerabilities and that the White House was weighing whether to release controversial intelligence to do with China’s intentions or abilities to disrupt the 2020 vote.
Both of those topics are staples of Republican conspiracy theories that Beijing or other foreign powers swung the election in favor of Trump’s opponent, Democrat Joe Biden.
There is no credible evidence of meaningful tampering with the 2020 vote. Eight analysts, academics and security experts told Reuters that the election was one of the most transparent, audited and heavily litigated in recent history.
Three of them added that renewed allegations that foreigners had swung the vote were part of Trump’s effort to seize control of U.S. elections – and to cast doubt on any future vote he does not win.
“The purpose of litigating this is to set the stage for the upcoming midterms so that the Trump administration can claim that any election that does not go their way is illegitimate,” said Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization that has long worked on election security issues.
Eddie Perez, a board member at the OSET Institute, which works to build public confidence in elections, agreed that the announcement would likely be geared at least in part toward future contests.
“If his party loses, he can cry foul,” he said.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt has said reports about the content of Trump’s speech were speculative.
“The truth is, nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say,” she said. Trump still insists he won against Biden, posting three days ago a digitally altered photograph of Biden wearing an “I Lost to Trump” hat. He and his allies have said in the past that they were robbed of victory through fraud.
Foreign hackers do regularly attempt to influence U.S. elections, and voting machines — like other devices — can be hacked. But no one has produced any credible evidence of the latter, said Princeton University professor emeritus Andrew Appel, who has been working in the field of election security for two decades.
He said outlandish theories around foreign vote-fixing advanced by some Trump supporters – a few of which have involved mysterious satellites, special ink or bamboo ballots imported from China – “make no sense technologically.”
Regarding foreign influence, a document produced by Trump’s own intelligence officials shows that not much actually occurred.
An unclassified summary of a secret assessment issued by several intelligence agencies in early 2021 alleged that Russian spies had boosted Trump while Iranians tried to undercut him, and China stayed out of the fray altogether.
Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University who studies digital disinformation, said any attempt to retroactively change that assessment would be in the service of promoting a narrative that “elections are not free and fair, they’re rigged, ergo we need to increase federal control over elections.”
(Reporting by Raphael Satter and AJ Vicens; Editing by Edmund Klamann)
