Trump voting machine claims clash with audits and intelligence reports
Trump cited newly released intelligence to attack voting machines, but experts and past assessments say broad manipulation would be hard to pull off.
By Deshawn Carter · Sports Writer
3 min read
President Trump used a primetime speech Thursday to claim U.S. voting machines and ballot-counting systems are open to attack, citing intelligence declassified and released by the White House, CBS News reported.
His claim ran into a wall of caveats. Some of the material he pointed to involved Smartmatic, a voting technology company whose systems are largely absent from U.S. elections, and election experts told CBS News that American voting equipment is tightly controlled, kept offline and backed by auditable paper records in almost every state.
“They’re vulnerable and they’re easily compromised, and people within our government knew that,” Trump said in the speech, according to CBS News.
Trump also referred to CIA intelligence about an alleged effort involving voting machines to help Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. CBS News reported that the Venezuela-related intelligence released by the White House centers on Smartmatic systems.
Smartmatic says its technology is not used in the United States except in Los Angeles County. The company has also said it has no current operations in Venezuela. According to Smartmatic, it worked there for about 13 years beginning in 2004, then stopped doing business in the country in 2017 after saying its technology helped show that the government had reported false turnout figures.
Experts point to locks, tests and paper trails
Election specialists cited by CBS News said U.S. voting machines are hard to compromise at scale because they are under strict physical controls, are not connected to the internet and are checked against paper ballots or receipts in most states.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told CBS News that machines are secured until public testing is performed to check for tampering. “And then they are used and we still don’t trust them. We have those paper ballots,” Becker said.
Georgia’s 2020 general election became one of the clearest tests of that system. CBS News reported that every ballot in the state was counted three times: first by machines, then during a statewide hand audit in every county, and then in a machine recount requested by Trump’s campaign. Each count showed Joe Biden defeated Trump in Georgia.
What the intelligence said
Trump also cited newly declassified intelligence saying U.S. adversaries including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea can compromise election infrastructure, according to CBS News.
The document he appeared to reference, a January 2020 National Intelligence Council memo, did say adversaries have the “capability” to target election infrastructure, CBS News reported. The memo identified voter registration databases as one possible weak point.
That same memo also said systems used to count votes or show results would be “difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.” It said systems at voting locations are not connected to the internet or to one another, and that many attacks would require physical access. The memo added that post-election audits and paper trails would likely expose such an effort.
A separate National Intelligence Council assessment released in March 2021 found that no foreign actor tried to “alter any technical aspect of the voting process” in the 2020 election.
In that assessment, the intelligence community said it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes on a broad scale without being detected through intelligence collection, security monitoring around voting systems or post-election audits.
This story draws on original reporting from CBS News.