That Was Something

A Quick, Election-Data Take on President Trump’s Speech

Disclaimer: The title of this Substack is “Playing with Election Day,” signaling that this is a space to discuss elections using the mountain of data they throw off. Today, I’m hijacking this Substack to address some points the President made last night because they’re important. However, there will be evidence, even if there’s not so much data.

Anticipation of President Trump’s address had much of the election-administration community on tenterhooks. My own list of possibilities, ranging from likely to outlandish, ran to forty items. In the end, the speech did not reveal a deeper truth about the integrity of the 2020 election or the administration of the upcoming 2026 election. A few new details appeared, especially in the documents released by the White House. But, as I discuss below, they are concerning in ways different from those the President emphasized.

That does not mean the speech was inconsequential. Its importance lies less in what it proved than in what it legitimized. Trump used a presidential address to elevate the election-skepticism movement and to frame the next 110 days before Election Day and the post-election period that follows as a test of whether the system can be trusted.

Trump spent roughly 25 minutes arguing that the American electoral system is fundamentally unsafe and vulnerable to manipulation. He focused on four subjects: alleged vulnerabilities in voting machines, alleged noncitizens on the voter rolls, a 2020 voter-registration fraud case in Michigan, and China’s acquisition of voter-roll information. It ended with a “Come to Jesus Moment” where he urged listeners to call their representatives and demand they pass the SAVE America Act.¹

Two Data Claims Worth Considering

Because this is a blog about election data, I want to focus on two data-focused claims in the speech: China’s acquisition of voter information and DHS’s alleged matches of noncitizens to state voter rolls.

China Had Voter Files, But That Didn’t Interfere with the Conduct of the Election

First, about the China data. A major part of Trump’s discussion of China and the 2020 election concerned China’s alleged acquisition of voter-registration information. The genuinely new claim was that China had obtained a voter file containing information on more than 200 million American voters; the White House put the figure at roughly 220 million. The supporting materials, however, appear to mix public voter-file data, commercial voter-file data, and possibly compromised datasets, which is not the same as showing a breach of live election systems.

Two points here. First, it was already known that foreign actors, including China, had targeted election-related information and that state and local government networks could be vulnerable. The new White House materials add more detail about PRC acquisition or possession of large voter-data files, but they do not show that China altered voter-registration records, cast ballots, changed vote totals, or affected election results. Second, much of the information in voter files is not secret. States make redacted voter-registration data publicly available, and commercial databases that aggregate all state files are accessible to campaigns, parties, and even researchers.

It is bad that China has been hoovering up voter information. What remains unclear is whether this was specifically about elections or part of China’s broader effort to gather information about Americans. Either way, the election-administration concern would become much more serious if there were evidence that voter-registration records had been changed, or that the information had been used to defraud the election system. So far, that evidence has not been produced. The missing link is evidence that Chinese actors changed voter-registration records, used the data to cast fraudulent ballots, altered vote tabulation, or affected reported results. None of the public record, including the new White House materials, proves that.

Noncitizen Matches Are Not Noncitizen Voters

The second data-related claim concerns noncitizens on the voter rolls. Trump cited a DHS document claiming that roughly 250,000 noncitizens were found on voter rolls in four states. This, too, was new information, but it is important to note that the report is not of independently validated counts of confirmed noncitizens on the rolls.

Anyone with experience in these data-matching exercises should expect those numbers to melt as quickly as ice cream in a Phoenix August. The reason is straightforward. The released DHS summary says the four-state figure was generated from public voter files from states that had not used the enhanced SAVE system, DHS’s citizenship-verification service. That is important because public voter files generally lack the sensitive identifiers needed for reliable first-round citizenship matching. As a result, DHS likely lacked the identifiers needed for high-quality matching. SAVE checks generally require name, date of birth, and a unique immigration or Social Security identifier, and public voter files ordinarily do not contain the most sensitive identifiers.

Stephen Richer recently posted a useful catalog of state efforts to match voter files against citizenship data. The pattern is by now familiar. Initial database matches can produce large lists for investigation, but those lists often shrink sharply after election officials account for false positives, stale records, naturalizations, duplicate records, and data-entry errors. Confirmed cases are usually tiny relative to the size of the voter rolls, and many appear to involve mistakes rather than organized fraud. In that sense, the 278,000 figure is likely a red herring unless and until DHS releases the match methodology, confidence scores, naturalization checks, duplicate handling, state adjudication results, and voting-history information. Its most immediate consequence may be that four states now have to spend valuable time chasing down false positives when they should be preparing to run a high-quality election.

The same DHS document is more revealing in another respect. It reports citizenship matches using the enhanced SAVE system for ten states that provided more complete personally identifiable information. In those states, the number of possible noncitizens on the rolls falls sharply: 10,716 possible matches across ten states with 50.8 million registered voters. That is about 0.02 percent of registered voters. And these are still suspected noncitizens, not confirmed noncitizens. Each state would need to investigate those cases, and, as Richer’s catalog suggests, the number would likely shrink further.

Why Give the Speech Now?

So what was the speech about? It did not reveal anything earth-shattering, especially to people who have followed election-administration controversies over the past decade from the left, right, or center. Why give it, and why give it now?

I am not inside the President’s head, nor am I privy to the inner deliberations of his administration or its political supporters. But I am a political scientist who has studied these issues for a long time, and I think the speech was consequential for two reasons.

First, the speech will fire up the small but highly active core of election activists who have pursued a post-2020 agenda of questioning election results and challenging mainstream election-administration practices. Second, it lays a predicate for challenging the results of the 2026 election, especially if those results do not go according to Trump’s wishes. It is easy to imagine the claims made last night and the documents released to support them becoming the backbone of challenges that begin the morning after Election Day and continue into the convening of the next Congress.

The Lost Opportunity

I will close with the lost opportunity. Maintaining clean voter rolls is important. Even if the best evidence indicates that noncitizens on the rolls are rare, some people acting in good faith continue to worry about the issue. And when noncitizens are inadvertently added to the rolls, the consequences for them can be serious. There are people across the election-administration world who know how to address this problem responsibly, or at least are ready to roll up their sleeves and work through it. Unfortunately, the current political environment has made that kind of consensus harder to sustain. But that is a post for another day.

1. The speech is backed up by a White House website and supporting documents.