Fact-checking Trump's lying diatribe about election security
News and commentary from Florida for all Americans
By J.C. Bruce
Donald Trump began his prime-time speech about election security last night with a statement that actually rang true:
“You have to trust your country because, if there can be no trust, there can be no greatness.”
He then proceeded to lie.
“For many years I've called for bold, swift and decisive action to protect the integrity of America's elections.”
Actually, for many years, he encouraged Russian interference in our elections, tried to overthrow an election, denied the proven results of an election that he lost, and has done everything he can to undercut the nation’s confidence in its elections.
Among his many distortions from last night:
He warned of “China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files” as if this means China has the capability to alter election results.
In fact, lists of registered voters in America are public records accessible to everyone.
Sure, China has a list of voters. So does General Motors and the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and pollsters and marketing firms and online newsletter writers like me.
I have a disk sitting on my desk right now with every single voter in Florida. The Florida Secretary of State gave it to me for free. You can have one too. Just ask. That’s what public records are about.
Having a list of voters is not the same thing as changing election results. Believe me, I can’t change anyone’s vote even if I wanted to. If I could, why would I bother to write this newsletter every morning?
Trump went on to say that the Deep State has been suppressing this frightful “meddling.”
In fact, there is no evidence of China or anyone else “meddling” with election results.
Nevertheless, Trump asserted that “Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure … including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems …They’re vulnerable and easily compromised.”
This is nonsense.
Voting machines are not hooked up to the internet. They cannot be hacked that way. Each machine records votes on a separate memory chip and stores a paper record of the votes that are cast for cross-checking purposes.
It would take an army of a million Tom Cruises dangling from the ceilings of thousands of voting locations to snatch those memory cards, and there still would be a paper record as backup.
The government’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—which works for Trump—has concluded elections are secure and has found no evidence of machine tampering.
One of the safeguards of this system is that our elections are diversified across the 50 states. A genuine vulnerability would be created if all elections were brought under centralized control, which seems to be Trump’s dream.
Trump also asserted there is nearly a quarter million “non-citizens” registered to vote.
In fact, the data he cites is a highly inflated number. The government’s own estimates are a fraction of that. Moreover, the number of non-citizens who actually may have voted is estimated at around 0.04 percent, not enough to alter any national election.
Trump says all these disclosures taken together “reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.”
In fact, experts in his own administration defend it.
And, as so many have warned, these hysterics are all part of a voter-suppression campaign Trump is launching before the midterm elections because he is terrified he is going to lose Republican control of Congress.
Funny, isn’t it, how elections are fine and dandy when Republican win? Trump has won two out of three tries to be elected president, and both houses of Congress are ruled by Republicans. All those election results were on the level, but the only time they aren’t is when Democrats win?
No fair-minded person will swallow that malarky.
As The New York Times reports this morning:
Documents Mr. Trump released to support his claims — and previous assessments from the intelligence community — do not back up his most aggressive statements about election security. In fact, some of the documents reach the opposite conclusion.
They also do not contain significant new revelations about vulnerabilities in election systems. One of the documents posted on the White House website was blunt: “We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.”
Related:
Trump’s speech claiming US election vulnerabilities, annotated
Please share this post
Our democracy as we’ve known it for 250 years is at risk, as you can see from today’s newsletter.
To save it, we will need a groundswell of support from voters in the coming midterm election.
The purpose of this newsletter—and the accompanying Tropic Press website—is to encourage that engagement.
Currently, Tropic Press is reaching more than 700,000 subscribers in Florida and elsewhere, which is great, but there are literally millions of Florida Democrats and independents we are not reaching yet.
You can help spread the word.
Please like this post. Comment if you are so inclined. But, please, also take a moment to share it with people you know.
With mid-term elections on the horizon, the more people we reach, the more effective we can be in helping turn our state and this country around. You can play a vital role in that effort.
Thanks.
J.C. Bruce
Thanks to today’s sponsor…
Check out YouTube’s newest and newsiest current events podcast, based right here in the Sunshine State. Get your day started every Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. Check it out here:
Trump is an absolute liar. If the 2020 election was so corrupt, how come they won the presidency, the house, and the senate in 2024. In 240 years, we have not had any problem with elections. Only in the last 10 years. Since Donald Trump and Maga came into existence, has all these accusations. Definitely. False accusations come out of the woodwork, they never cease in their corrupt bullshit. Time for Trump and Maga to be extinct.
Trump—believe me, not what my administration says! He's just trying to put more pressure on Congress to pass the "SAVE Act," aka the "Save the Republicans Act." I will counter that with sending letters to my Congress do-nothings.