Trump revives theories about electoral fraud and points to China for his 2020 defeat

WashingtonOne of the few certainties from Donald Trump's address to the nation early this morning is that the midterm elections will not be normal. Four months before the legislative elections, with his approval rating at historic lows and the war in Iran entrenched, the commander-in-chief has declassified a series of government documents with which he intends to demonstrate that the country's electoral system has vulnerabilities that need to be corrected. The American president has argued that the purpose is "not to undermine confidence in elections" but to "correct" vulnerabilities in order to "restore it".

"This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never, under any circumstances, be hacked or compromised as it was in the past," the Republican stated in an address to the nation from the East Room of the White House.

In a half-hour appearance, Trump resurrected the specters of electoral fraud from the elections he lost in 2020 and conjured new ones for the November elections. The leader insisted that the "deep state" had been hiding information from citizens about the electoral system's vulnerabilities and hinted that China interfered to ensure Joe Biden won in 2020, instead of him.

"The Chinese government wanted the President of the United States to lose the next election, and the reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I had discovered them, I charged them billions and billions of dollars in tariffs, and I built the strongest military in the world," he stated, citing a supposed report from the batch of documents the White House plans to make public.

The shadow of interference

Trump, who was criminally indicted for alleged interference in the 2020 Georgia election recount and for attempting to block Biden's certification by instigating the Capitol attack, claims that China wanted to influence the election. Among the evidence presented for the criminal indictment is the call the Republican made in January 2021 to Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, attempting to pressure him to overturn the election result. Among other things, Trump asked Raffensperger to "find" 11,780 votes to thus change the state result in his favor.

The US president has pointed the finger at Beijing with the planned September 24 visit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping fast approaching. "As indicated in an assessment, we believe that U.S. adversaries, including at least Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, as well as non-state actors, have the capacity to compromise U.S. election infrastructure," he stated.

But beyond being another obsessive rant about the 2020 election defeat, this morning's appearance is the latest attempt to force Congress to pass his electoral law, the Save Act. The bill proposes profound changes in the way citizens vote. Among other measures, it would require voters to prove citizenship and eliminate absentee voter registrations. A series of modifications that, in a country without widespread identification, threaten to leave certain population groups without access to voting. The Brennan Center for Justice has already warned that millions of married women could be among the main victims, as their current first and last name would no longer match the one they had when they were born. In the US, women usually lose their maiden name and adopt their husband's, hence the problem.

New Electoral Law

The bill, however, has been stalled for days after four Republican senators joined Democrats on June 5 to reject the proposal. Since then, Trump has been pressuring his party in every possible way to try to get the bill passed. In a last-minute fury, last week the US president refused to sign a bipartisan bill that Congress had approved to address the housing crisis suffered by Americans. The magnate agreed to the document being automatically approved without his signature after ten days.

Trump has also attacked the vote counting system, which in some states can take days. One of the Republican's other electoral traumas in 2020 was that the victory was not awarded to Joe Biden until four days later. But in this morning's speech, the US president has taken a much more recent example: the counting of the California gubernatorial elections, which has taken days. "This is worse than any third-world country," the magnate stated.

The example is not gratuitous: several electoral analysts fear that Trump will try to slow down the legislative vote count before a Democratic victory is drawn. Normally, in election night projections, what is known as the "red mirage" occurs: the country's map turns red, the color of the Republican party. The cause of this phenomenon is that the vote count in small districts and rural areas, which tend to be Republican, ends much earlier than in large cities, where the majority of the progressive vote is concentrated. In addition, the majority of mail-in votes tend to be Democratic and are the ones that take the longest to count. If the window of time in which it is possible to count votes, or at least consider them valid, is shortened, there are many options to freeze the electoral map at the time of the red mirage.

Election polls already predict that Democrats will very likely regain the House of Representatives, and they also have options to break the Republican majority in the Senate. Beyond trying to pass the Save Act, Trump's party has already taken steps to modify the playing field to their advantage. On the one hand, Republicans have secured a considerable margin of air with the redesign of electoral maps in North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Missouri, Florida, Tennessee, and Louisiana.

In the case of Louisiana, the only black-majority district in the southern state was annulled thanks to a Supreme Court ruling that erased decades of struggle by the Civil Rights movement. The conservative majority of the high court deactivated section two of the Voting Rights Act in May, which protected minorities. Thanks to this ruling in Tennessee, Republicans were able to divide the only black-majority district into two.

The speech has not been broadcast by all television channels. ABC News and NBC did not want to broadcast it. The magnate lashed out at both channels and said their licenses should be revoked: "They want to protect the radical left.[...] A fraud like this should mean the revocation of their licenses." Last year the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) already threatened to revoke the licenses of those televisions that were critical when speaking about the US president.