LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Election watchers say President Trump did not deliver on his promised really big news in a primetime address last night on election integrity.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
For days, President Trump and his team have teased a bombshell announcement. Experts who spoke with NPR say there was nothing of the kind, including in a raft of documents the administration released purporting to show evidence of widespread election fraud. We'll hear from one of those experts in just a few minutes. First, though, some context.
FADEL: NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks has been up all night going through those documents, and he joins me now to talk through it. Hi, Miles.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hey. Good morning.
FADEL: Good morning. OK, so the president has been making false claims for almost six years now that the election he lost in 2020 was rigged. Last night, he gave a speech about voting integrity. Was it more of the same?
PARKS: It was. I mean, he hit on a bunch of the themes that will sound really familiar to anyone who's heard the president over the last few years - the idea that voting machines can't be trusted, the idea that noncitizens are voting en masse in American elections, shadowy schemes by foreign governments to try to influence voting, that sort of thing. But our team at NPR started looking through all of these documents that the White House published, and it's not really clear what is actually new here that impacts our understanding of the security of America's elections. I talked with Adrian Fontes after the speech. He's Arizona's top voting official. He's a Democrat. Here's how he described it.
ADRIAN FONTES: I kind of felt a little bit cheated. I was expecting some kind of delicious bombshell that we might be able to investigate, but instead I got a rehash of the same grievance.
PARKS: Fontes was struck by how closely all these classified documents aligned with what was already public about the 2020 elections.
FADEL: So tell us a little bit more, like the details here. What's actually in these documents?
PARKS: So, I mean, take the idea about America's voting systems being vulnerable to hacking, for instance. The president said Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure. They're vulnerable - referring to the machines - and they're easily compromised. But the documents released really just lay out concerns with voting equipment that were already known.
FADEL: Like what?
PARKS: So in some places, it's just really old. Election administration is known to be chronically underfunded. And for the past 10 years, American adversaries have targeted it. In some cases, that's looked like actually trying to break into registration systems, in other cases, trying to influence American voters online. But there's no evidence anyone has ever actually changed votes. That is a critical distinction. I was talking about that with Susan Greenhalgh at the advocacy group Free Speech For People. For years, she has worked to shine a light on some of the same problems that Trump is now focusing on.
SUSAN GREENHALGH: Two things can be true at the same time - that we have ignored vulnerabilities in our voting systems for a long time and there is no evidence that the election was rigged in 2020. And everything that has been put forth purporting to provide that evidence always falls apart like a cheap suit.
PARKS: You know, even with those vulnerabilities, the bottom line is that almost everyone in the United States votes on a paper ballot. And those paper ballots after the 2020 election were investigated and audited over and over again, and widespread fraud was never found.
FADEL: Now, another topic that came up a lot was China. The president said the country had amassed hundreds of millions of voter records and worked to undermine his election campaign in 2020. Is that true?
PARKS: It is, but it's also not really news. You know, at the time in 2020, the intelligence community publicly said that China preferred Joe Biden as a candidate, although there was some public disagreement on what the country was actually willing to do in terms of pushing that outcome. On the voter data stuff, this is a great example of something that sounds really scary but actually didn't really shock people who work in elections. A lot of voter roll data is actually already public and easily accessible. And it was publicly known that China has long been interested in accumulating information about American voters and candidates. But again, did any of this actually impact votes? No. But still, the president and his allies are using it as justification to push for big changes to the voting process, and experts expect to see more of that as midterms get closer.
FADEL: NPR's Miles Parks. Thank you for that reporting, Miles.
PARKS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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