President Trump delivered a primetime Oval Office address Wednesday announcing the declassification of 340 pages of intelligence on American election vulnerabilities, which he called “the biggest scandal in the history of our country, possibly in the history of the world, definitely bigger than Watergate, probably bigger than the Civil War.”
The documents identify three categories of threat. The first requires an attacker to have physical access to a voting machine, administrative credentials, several hours alone in a locked room, and a motivation that the documents describe as “theoretically present in someone who is very angry and also has a screwdriver.” The documents note this scenario has occurred in zero actual elections.
The second requires someone to intercept the mail, forge a signature, match a barcode, and submit the ballot before the voter, a sequence the documents describe as “possible but less efficient than simply voting, which is easier and also legal.”
The third, and the one the President spent thirty-one minutes on, concerns a polling place in Maricopa County where a printer produced ballots too faint for tabulators to read in November 2022. The ballots were hand-counted, the toner was replaced by midday, and no outcome was affected. The President described this as “proof the entire system is rigged.” When a reporter noted the toner was fixed and nothing changed, the White House responded: “But it could have. That's the point. The vulnerability was there. The toner was low. That's a fact.”
The Director of National Intelligence, who reportedly opposed the declassification, was not present. A spokesperson said he was “travelling,” then “unavailable,” then “not the right person to ask,” then referred questions to the website, electiontruth.gov, which crashed within four minutes of the speech and was replaced by a page reading “THIS SITE IS UNDER ATTACK,” which was, the White House confirmed, a reference to low toner.
The speech was the President's sixth primetime address this month. The previous five concerned the World Cup, a military parade, the World Cup again, a golf course he said he was not building but is building, and the World Cup a third time.
The declassified documents contain no evidence of a single altered vote in any American election. The White House described this absence as “the most damning finding of all.”