Campaigns/Elections

Election Vulnerability

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Liz Wolfe | 7.17.2026 9:30 AM

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Trump's stolen-election claims: "Great damage has been done to our country," said President Donald Trump last night in a special address to the country, addressing election vulnerabilities he believes exist. "Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue."

China, in his words, carried out "the largest compromise of election data in history" starting with the 2020 election, allegedly gathering 220 million voter files "over a period of years." If true—which is a big if—this is a huge indictment of government data-security practices (not much else).

"U.S. intelligence and congressional officials have long known that China obtained voter data," counters The New York Times, which was "publicly available information often purchased by political campaigns. What's more, former intelligence officials have said, China gathered the data not to manipulate voting results, but instead to better craft influence campaigns to shape voters' perceptions." Influence campaigns are different than straight-up election tampering—and seemingly much harder to prevent.

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