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It didn't take long for President Donald Trump's latest conspiracy rant about elections, this time dressed up like a national address on July 16, to start falling apart.
Trump's claims about China meddling in American elections flopped, even as the documents he declassified inadvertently confirmed that Russia tried to influence our presidential elections in his favor. Ultimately, Trump offered zero proof that any votes had been changed in the 2016, 2020 or 2024 elections.
But what really stood out is just how much Trump showed us he doesn't know about how elections are run in America. And this, too, matters – he doesn't seem at all interested in learning the ins and outs of elections, even as he has spent a decade trying to destabilize America's confidence in how we vote.
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David Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who founded The Center for Election Innovation & Research, told me the president's allegations in his speech were "remarkably flimsy." For Becker, a big takeaway was Trump's obvious, and maybe intentional, ignorance.
"We've known for some time that the president just doesn't understand how elections are run and is resistant to learning," Becker said. "He has no clue about any of this stuff."
A key difference here, according to Becker: Trump, during his first term as president, had staffers who understood election law and administration, while the second-term staff lacks that expertise, like the president they serve.
Election data are complicated. Trump's tantrums are not.
One area that Trump focused on: "Hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files are in the hands of foreign governments."
This claim conflates different sets of data.
It is true that political candidates, campaigns and consultants can obtain information about voters. In Pennsylvania, where I live, you can get what is known as the "Public Information List" from the Department of State for $20. That includes the names of voters, their dates of birth, registration statuses, addresses, polling places and the dates last voted.
Campaigns use that data for voter outreach before elections. You can bet Trump's campaigns did the same.
That information is available in other states as well, though they all use local laws to set up what can be disclosed. And having that information doesn't impact election security, because it can't be used to change votes.
Trump's Department of Justice has sued 30 states, seeking far more detailed databases containing voter information, including private, personal details like driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, which most states don't disclose.
Federal judges in 16 states so far, including Pennsylvania, have dismissed those lawsuits, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
I wouldn't want China to have that private, personal data about American voters. Or Russia. Or Trump, for that matter. What good could come from the most inept and corrupt president in U.S. history having it?
Trump's voting machine obsession was never about security
The president also missed the mark in his national address as he tried to raise questions about the security of the machines that many Americans use on Election Day to cast their ballots. Trump claimed those machines "are exposed to hacking and manipulation and corruption," despite them not being linked to the internet.
Becker noted that "literally every single state, with the exception of Louisiana," uses election machines that create a paper ballot record of the votes cast, allowing for an audit of the results.
Trump, by the way, easily won Louisiana in 2016, 2020 and 2024.
The National Conference of State Legislatures notes that all 50 states "conduct some type of post-election audit," with 31 states requiring it before an election is certified, 10 conducting an audit after certification and the rest with no specific deadline for the audit to be completed.
But Trump has been railing about voting machines for years, even as he slashes funding for federal security infrastructure meant to keep our elections secure. Ultimately, he was reduced in his speech to fearmongering about ballot machines being used to rig an election … in Venezuela.
Becker told me all American voting machines can be vulnerable to some kind of abuse. That's why there are audit trails and plenty of organizations that study how the machines work and are used to keep them secure.
Trump ominously intoned his 25-minute speech as if he were revealing some terrible state secret. Being Trump, he cast himself as the real victim, claiming the "deep state" in America's intelligence community had kept him in the dark.
Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump's first term, debunked that the day after the president's national address, noting that Trump "was briefed on Chinese meddling as far back as 2018 and even spoke about it publicly." Taylor, now a Trump critic, wrote that he was one of the people who briefed Trump.
Becker said Trump's speech was filled with information that was already known inside his government and among election experts, and had been publicly reported by American news outlets.
Trump was clearly hoping some Americans would not know or remember that. Instead, he just showed us how little he knows about a topic he talks about incessantly.
"It was just shocking how they basically bared themselves, the president and his advisers on national TV, revealing themselves to be completely ignorant about the basic elements of how elections are run in this country," Becker told me.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on Bluesky, @bychrisbrennan.bsky.social, and on X, @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What Trump doesn't know, or want you to know, about elections | Opinion
