China has scooped up America’s voter lists, U.S. states’ voter rolls are filled with noncitizens who have managed to register, and Venezuela has tried to develop methods to alter electronic voting machines, President Trump said Thursday in a primetime speech to alert the country to what he called “shocking” vulnerabilities.
He said he was declassifying intelligence documents to back up the claims about foreign governments, including that China had bought, hacked or stolen some 220 million names of registered voters from states’ rolls.
The White House also released a Homeland Security analysis of U.S. voter lists that identified nearly 300,000 names of noncitizens on states’ voter rolls.
“Our purpose in disclosing this information is not to weaken confidence in elections but to earn that confidence by confronting vulnerabilities and correcting them very, very quickly,” the president said.
Mr. Trump said evidence that China compromised voter information was actively suppressed and downplayed by members of the “deep state” to prevent him and the American people from knowing about the alleged meddling. The president accused U.S. intelligence agencies of knowing about the compromised voter registration files in 2020.
“Those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden,” Mr. Trump said. “They did not disclose to me as president or to anyone else, and to the best of our knowledge, they did not inform Congress.”
Mr. Trump said he’s ordered the Justice Department to prosecute anyone involved in the cover-up of Chinese efforts to influence the 2020 election, including top CIA and NSA officials.
Mr. Trump also decried the popularity of mail-in ballots and states that collect and count them well after Election Day.
He pointed to the just-completed primary voting in California, where balloting was completed on June 2, but the state didn’t certify its final results until late last week.
“There’s no third-world country that has elections like we have,” Mr. Trump said.
He accused the “deep state” of hiding much of the information he highlighted Thursday. He said U.S. spy agencies knew China was gathering voter registration files in 2020, but kept the information hidden from Congress and from himself — even as he was sitting in the White House in his first term.
Mr. Trump did not present any evidence that China tampered with ballots, altered voting systems or changed the outcome of the election.
While he discussed the 2020 election, which he lost to President Biden, he mostly used the evidence to suggest that future elections are at risk of foreign interference, particularly by China.
Some of the information he revealed has been public, though not widely covered.
DHS, for example, has regularly been reporting on its analysis identifying noncitizen names on the voter rolls of cooperating states.
The latest figure — 28,000 names — is up slightly from the 24,000 names it had identified as of April.
But the White House on Thursday said DHS has also been able to check voter rolls from four other states that hadn’t cooperated: California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada. DHS believes there are another 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in those jurisdictions.
Still, being on the rolls does not automatically mean they cast ballots in elections.
On Venezuela, the White House said the CIA has reporting on a plot by the former Maduro regime to rig that country’s 2020 election. The regime worked on methods to adjust electronic voting records in real time to alter the results of elections — and potentially avoid being detected in any subsequent audit.
“No country can be great without fair and honest elections. You have to trust your country because if there is no trust, there can be no greatness,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump has claimed the election was plagued with fraud, though the evidence he and other backers had offered to back up that claim has been rejected by courts, Congress and myriad fact-checking outlets.
Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters applauded Mr. Trump for outlining the urgent need to secure American elections.
“Americans deserve elections we can trust,” Mr. Gruters said. “The greatest nation on earth should never tolerate broken systems that leave our elections vulnerable to foreign interference and undermine voter confidence. That’s why the RNC is working in lockstep with President Trump to protect the ballot box through the largest election integrity operation in our party’s history. Now more than ever, Congress must pass the SAVE America Act.”
Democrats saw a darker motive.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, said Mr. Trump was preparing to challenge this year’s elections.
“Trump’s prime time speech tonight isn’t simply about litigating his overwhelming defeat in the 2020 election, it’s about undermining the 2026 election before a single vote has been cast,” he said.
Mr. Trump has attempted to insert his administration into the vote casting and counting, including with an executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to deliver mailed-in ballots unless states agree to check their voter rolls with the federal government to weed out ineligible voters.
Separately, Mr. Trump has been prodding Congress to approve legislation dubbed the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a ballot in federal elections.
Democrats have opposed the measure, saying that it would suppress minority votes and insisting that voting fraud is extraordinarily rare.
Since returning to office in January 2025, Mr. Trump has pushed to uncover voting fraud in the 2020 election.
In January, the FBI and Justice Department seized 2020 ballots that were preserved by a court order in Fulton County. Officials also obtained records, including ballot images from the Arizona Senate’s review of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County, and in recent months, the FBI interviewed election officials about the 2020 election in Milwaukee.
All three were critical swing states that Mr. Trump narrowly lost that year.
Mr. Trump has made a series of moves in recent months to overhaul the U.S. election system. Last week, he disbanded a bipartisan commission that helps states administer elections. He also recently signed an order aimed at limiting the use of mail ballots. Both actions ran into legal challenges.
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