Lies, Damn Lies, and Trump's Election Fantasies: Fact-Checking Trump's Speech

Fact: Repeated reviews have found no evidence of hacking. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal agency responsible for cybersecurity, stated that there was no evidence of any voting system being compromised in the 2020 election.

Fact: Conspiracy theories about voting machines were so false that they resulted in one of the largest defamation settlements in US history. FOX News paid $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for promoting claims from Trump allies that their voting machines had flipped Trump votes to Biden votes. Records in the case revealed that FOX hosts and executives knew the claims about the voting machines to be false but aired them anyway.

Fact: Manual recounts of paper records have reaffirmed machine-counted totals. A statewide audit of Georgia's 2020 presidential election results found only minor discrepancies between the audit's count and machine-counted results that Georgia's election administrator said were “well within the expected margin of human error that occurs when hand-counting ballots.” The difference would not have changed Trump's Georgia election loss.

Fact: An intelligence report focused specifically on identifying foreign interference with election infrastructure, including voting machines, found that no foreign actors were able to do so. A 2021 report from the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on “Foreign Interference Targeting Election Infrastructure” found “no evidence that any foreign government-affiliated actor prevented voting, changed votes, or disrupted the ability to tally votes or to transmit election results in a timely manner; altered any technical aspect of the voting process; or otherwise compromised the integrity of voter registration information of any ballots cast during 2020 federal elections.” The election infrastructure studied by the report included voting machines as well as voter registration and vote transmission systems.

Fact: Two separate intelligence community reports investigated these claims and found no evidence of them. A report prepared by seven intelligence agencies during Trump's first term stated with “high confidence” that China “did not deploy interference efforts” and “considered but did not deploy influence efforts.” A separate report, focused specifically on foreign interference with election infrastructure, investigated claims that foreign governments including China manipulated election infrastructure and vote counts and “determined that they are not credible.”

Fact: Noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare. A review of 42 jurisdictions overseeing 23.5 million votes found only about 30 suspected incidents, a rate of 0.0001 percent. Recent audits in Georgia, Ohio, and Iowa found that noncitizen registered voters constituted “only a tiny fraction of the states' overall number of registered voters.”

Fact: Documented fraud via mail ballots is practically nonexistent. A nationwide review of biennial elections from 2016 to 2022 found “between six and 46 cases” of mail voting fraud in each election, equating to an average of 0.000043% of votes, or “about four cases of mail voting fraud out of every 10 million mail votes.”

Fact: States use several layers of security to combat mail voting fraud. States use signature matching, other forms of identity verification, ballot tracking, bar codes to prevent duplicate ballots, postelection audits, and harsh penalties for fraud to effectively protect the integrity of mail ballots. In fact, states that offer every registered voter the opportunity to vote by mail were found to comprise “the smallest percentage of the already very low mail voting fraud.”

Fact: The delay in vote counting is designed to ensure accuracy and security. Long vote counts are effectively mandated by California law, as election officials are required to conduct signature matching of mailed ballots, ensuring election integrity, and give voters with rejected signatures the opportunity to prove their identity, ensuring both integrity and accuracy.

Fact: Trump has fired thousands of workers devoted to protecting our elections. At the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the government's top cyber defense body protecting U.S. election systems, nearly 1,000 members of the staff — or nearly one-third of the agency's workforce — have left or been removed from active service since Trump took office in 2025.

Fact: The SAVE Act will block tens of millions of Americans from voting. Trump and the GOP's SAVE Act will block millions of Americans from voting and disenfranchise many U.S. citizens — especially married women, Americans living abroad, and the approximately 21 million Americans who lack access to their citizenship documents like birth certificates and passports.

Fact: The SAVE Act particularly targets married women. The SAVE Act “makes no mention of being able to show a marriage certificate or change-of-name documentation,” meaning that as many as 69 million American women without a birth certificate with their current legal name would be unable to prove citizenship and vote.

Fact: Despite Trump's claims, the SAVE America Act does not ban no-excuse mail voting. Trump has pushed for additional provisions to be added to the bills, including a prohibition on no-excuse mail voting. In recent weeks, he has even claimed that the SAVE America Act does so, despite that provision not currently being part of the bill.