Fact check: Trump revives US election fraud claims

Fact check: Trump revives US election fraud claims July 17, 2026US President Donald Trump delivered a primetime speech on Thursday assailing the country's voting system and making several unverified claims about the electoral process. He touted new declassified evidence about alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 election, dredged up an old case in Michigan about voter fraud and repeated a campaign trail favorite: that noncitizens are illegally registered to vote. Trump has long cast doubt on the integrity of US elections, falsely claiming that the 2020 election was "stolen." Every relevant investigation, including dozens of court rulings, state-level audits and recounts all came to the same conclusion that Trump lost that election, by more than 7 million in the popular vote and 306-232 in the Electoral College. "The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history," reada joint statement in 2020 from the government and industry bodies that oversee US election security. No evidence showed any voting system deleted, altered, or compromised votes, the statement added. DW Fact check dove into some of Trump's latest election-related claims and the trove of declassified documents behind them. Did China interfere in the 2020 election? Claim: "The People's Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China's illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files. That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening," Trump said in his speech. DW Fact check: Misleading This claim stretches far beyond what the declassified documents show. First, voter records are often public or available for commercial purchase. One of the declassified documents explains that "publicly available US voter registration information for six states was downloaded" by a Chinese actor on January 14, 2022, and that "the actual motivations for collecting this information is unknown." Additionally, the official view of the US intelligence community, from a reportdeclassified in 2021, is that there were "no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US election, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results." They did find proof that Russia authorized an influence campaign to support Trump's reelection and that Iran did the same to undercut him. As for China, they wrote, "We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election. We have high confidence in this judgment." The report said that China prioritized stable US ties over election interference. China did, however, take "some steps to try to undermine former President Trump's reelection." According to the documents, there was a dissenting view within the intelligence community, with one senior intelligence official writing a memo that "Beijing has taken some low-level, exploratory steps to denigrate the President and shape voter perceptions ahead of the election." But nothing in the documents amounts to Trump's claim of an "unprecedented election security nightmare." This initial review draws on more than 20 declassified documents. DW will continue to examine this claim as reporting develops. What the FBI actually found in Michigan Claim: "The documents state that some canvassers admitted to FBI agents that they signed voter registration forms and other people's names, submitted fraudulent registration for people who did not exist and received gift cards tied to the number of applications that they produced. In other words, it was pay, play, and cheat. The FBI agents working on the case believe that crimes were committed, yet the Biden Department of Justice slowwalked the investigation and killed it," Trump said. DW Fact check: Misleading In 2020, a Muskegon, Michigan clerk reportedseveral suspicious voter registration applications that all came from a woman working for GBI Strategies, a Democratic get-out-the-vote operation that works to sign up unregistered voters. The Michigan State Police, attorney general and local police investigated the suspicious applications in 2020 before turning the case over to the FBI. The FBI found that some of the canvassers' registrations were indeed fraudulent, containing non-existent addresses, invalid telephone numbers and mismatched signatures. None of the registrations actually led to people being registered to vote or casting a ballot, a spokesperson for Michigan’s top election official toldBridge Michigan, a local nonprofit news site. The Muskegon clerk "followed the law and immediately reported this situation to local law enforcement and the Bureau of Elections in the fall of 2020," the spokesperson added. That kind of voter outreach canvassing, where paid employees round up potential voters, is legal and common. There’s even a practice called "bounty-hunting" allowed in some states, where canvassers can be paid per person they sign up, the FBI explainedin a 2021 email. The FBI also concludedin 2025 that canvassers at GBI "were not instructed to falsify voter registration information." In that most recent report, the FBI determined: "No further investigation is warranted because logical investigation and/or leads have been exhausted, and the investigation to date did not identify a criminal violation or a priority threat to national security." Authorities investigated the matter between 2020 and 2025, under both Trump and Biden administrations. And the final FBI report came when the agency was under Trump's purview, not Biden's. The real scale of noncitizen voting Claim: "To reveal just how vulnerable our elections continue to be, we are releasing the results of a stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. According to the DHS review, state voter rolls, and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections," Trump said. DW Fact check: Unproven The White House released just two documents related to this claim: One is from the DHS that says that "OVER 250,000 NON-CITIZENS ARE ILLEGALLY REGISTERED TO VOTE" in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada, but contains no explanation or information about where the number comes from. Trump has long claimed that noncitizens are engaging in widespread election fraud, going back to his 2016 claimthat he "won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally." But he's presented no proof for these claims, and experts agree it’s wildly overstated. "Noncitizen registration is already rare, and noncitizen voting is even less common," writesthe Bipartisan Policy Center. At the beginning of the year, Utah performed an audit of its entire voter registration list. After reviewing more than 2 million voters, they identified just a single noncitizen registered and no instances of noncitizen voting. Trump's own citizenship verification program, the SAVE system (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements), found that just 0.04% of registered voters were non-US citizens, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union. Nonetheless, nearly half of Americans agree that noncitizens are casting a large number of fraudulent ballots, according to a Reuters/Ipsos pollconducted in April.