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States have beefed up election security, but Trump is still pushing for federal role
States have beefed up election security, but Trump is still pushing for federal role.
As part of his pressure campaign to get Congress and states to make changes to election administration, President Donald Trump is preparing to give a primetime address on Thursday, in which, according to news reports, he will present newly declassified intelligence related to the 2020 election. Federal investigators have concluded that foreign manipulation had no practical impact on the 2020 election, and numerous state election audits found no evidence of the voter fraud or voting machine failure alleged by Mr. Trump.
Several election observers say it's unlikely the information Mr. Trump discusses on Thursday will reveal anything that wasn't already known in January 2021. "I expect most of this to be just declassified versions of stuff we already knew publicly," David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said on a call with reporters Wednesday.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded in December 2020 that there was no evidence of tampering with voting machines, and that the claims themselves were "intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of US elections." On April 18, 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion $787 million in a defamation lawsuit, avoiding a trial that would have exposed how the cable-news giant had promoted false claims about the 2020 presidential election.
Matt Blaze, a professor of computer science and law at Georgetown University, says, "Elections are really more robust and more secure than they've ever been." That doesn't mean hacking is impossible, he says. But to date, "there is no evidence whatsoever that any U.S. election outcome has ever actually been changed through technical tampering."
While Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen praised the Trump administration's direction for the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agencies to aid his state in removing "half a million ineligible voters from our voter files," other states say the administration is attempting to overreach. "The courts have been clear time and time again: states run elections, not the federal government," said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.