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President Donald Trump delivered a speech to the nation on Thursday night, sowing doubts in the U.S. election system and claiming that drastic changes were needed, despite presenting no new or substantiated evidence that any past election was affected by fraud.

Trump was expected to deliver a missive rehashing the results of the 2020 presidential race, in which he legitimately lost to former President Joe Biden. Instead, Trump downplayed those beliefs, but still maintained that supposed vulnerabilities in election systems made it necessary to pass the SAVE AMERICA Act, legislation that could disenfranchise tens of millions of U.S. voters.

“No country can be great without fair and honest elections,” the president stated during his speech. “You have to trust your country because, if there can be no trust, there can be no greatness.”

Trump is himself notorious for lying in his statements to the American people. If the president was seeking to deliver on trust, he failed spectacularly, as his speech was full of deep misrepresentations.

In the Wake of Supreme Court Rulings, Trump Purges Federal Election Agency

Claiming that “shocking vulnerabilities [exist] in our election infrastructure,” Trump said he was declassifying documents that demonstrated Chinese interference, as well as claims that “deep state” actors within the federal government were working to “suppress and downplay” the extent of meddling in our elections. Trump also maintained that voter registration irregularities amounted to fraudulent behavior, despite the fact that such irregularities are not equivalent to election fraud. He also alleged that a “cyber threat” from foreign powers was “aimed at the very heart of our democracy” — notably omitting Russian influence in U.S. elections during his election victory in 2016.

Such efforts by China to gather intelligence about voters in the U.S. are not unknown or new information. And........

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