{"id":155687,"date":"2026-07-17T12:59:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T12:59:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/155687\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T12:59:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T12:59:18","slug":"did-china-steal-2020-us-election-data-as-trump-claims-us-elections-2020-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/155687\/","title":{"rendered":"Did China steal 2020 US election data, as Trump claims? | US Elections 2020 News"},"content":{"rendered":"

United States President Donald Trump has renewed a campaign to cast doubts on the 2020 elections that saw him lose to Joe Biden \u2013 this time painting China as a major adversary that helped \u201cmanipulate\u201d the vote.<\/p>\n

Speaking in a primetime address on Thursday, Trump claimed that newly declassified intelligence material exposed foreign interference in the elections, despite intelligence assessments from the US government that stated the opposite.<\/p>\n

Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list<\/p>\n

The US president\u2019s insistence on debunked stolen election theories led to one of the country\u2019s most serious political crises when his supporters led a violent attack on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, in the final days of his first term.<\/p>\n

Trump repeated in recent months that the 2020 election results were manipulated at the same time that he sought to push Congress to pass a restrictive voter identification law, which its proponents have called the SAVE America Act.<\/p>\n

The law would impose strict ID requirements on US voters and would allow greater federal intervention in elections.\u00a0While it has passed in the lower house, Democratic opposition in the Senate has stalled its progress.<\/p>\n

The claims come as Trump is set to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in September following a turbulent trade war in the past year that severely strained diplomatic relations.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what we know:<\/p>\n

\"USUS President Donald Trump poses for a picture with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a visit to the Zhongnanhai garden in Beijing, China, on May 15, 2026 [Evan Vucci\/Reuters]What did Trump say against China?<\/p>\n

Trump accused Beijing of stealing compromising data on US voters. He also accused China of influencing the US midterms in 2018 to harm his fellow Republicans and damage his re-election bid in 2020.<\/p>\n

Beijing illicitly gathered 220 million voter files \u201cover a period of years\u201d and executed \u201cthe largest compromise of election data in history\u201d in 2020, Trump claimed. The files contained voter registration data such as names and addresses.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey wanted to just make you sound like your president was not so hot. When actually your president has done a great job,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration on Thursday also published hundreds of previously classified documents to back the president\u2019s claims.<\/p>\n

However, a US intelligence report in 2021 concluded that China had considered, but ultimately had not deployed \u201cinfluence efforts\u201d to affect the 2020 election.<\/p>\n

The assessment, which was conducted under John Ratcliffe, Trump\u2019s then-director of national intelligence and his present CIA director, found that China attempted to collect information on US voters, public opinion and political parties going as far back as 2008. Typically, such data is publicly available and cannot be used to alter votes. It could, however, be used to predict election results.<\/p>\n

US media reported in 2021 that within the intelligence committee at the time, a minority view from two officials theorised that China had tried to undermine Trump\u2019s chances by using online influence campaigns and other measures because of worries about how Trump\u2019s volatile policies would affect China\u2019s semiconductor industry.<\/p>\n

The partially redacted documents released on Thursday further showed that the two officials assessed China probably used \u201covert messaging, nascent online covert influence capabilities, diplomatic measures and the use of economic leverage\u201d. The officials admitted that these were not China\u2019s \u201cmost aggressive options\u201d and that they had low to medium confidence in their own suspicions.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"FILELaw enforcement officers clash with pro-Trump protesters who stormed the US Capitol Building during a rally to contest the certification of the 2020 presidential election results by the US Congress, in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021 [Ahmed Gaber\/Reuters]How has China responded?<\/p>\n

Responding to US media ahead of Trump\u2019s speech on Thursday, Liu Chang, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in the US, refuted the claims.<\/p>\n

\u201cChina has all along adhered to the principle of non-interference in others\u2019 internal affairs,\u201d he said. \u201cThe US election is an internal matter of the US. Its outcome is determined by the votes of the American people. China has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the US.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several Democratic Party leaders have also reacted to the claims. Democrat Senator Mark Warner, in a series of posts on X, accused Trump of sharing misleading information in a bid to interfere with the coming November midterms.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump\u2019s shocking \u201cbombshells\u201d about China are totally bogus,\u201d Warner wrote. \u201cThe fact is our intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that China did not even try to change a single vote in the 2020 election. A single concurring opinion suggested China may have tried to sway voters\u2019 opinions \u2026 but that\u2019s been public knowledge since 2021.\u201d<\/p>\n

What else did Trump say about election fraud?<\/p>\n

Trump, as in recent months, cast doubts on mail-in balloting ahead of the midterms, saying that absentee voting was \u201cinherently corrupt\u201d.<\/p>\n

Analysis by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation inadvertently found there were only 300 cases of fraudulent absentee votes between 1982 and 2025. The Brookings Institution calculates that fraud in mail-in ballots accounts for four out of 10 million votes.<\/p>\n

The president on Thursday also pointed to CIA findings on Venezuela to suggest that US voting machines are susceptible to digital manipulation.<\/p>\n

The intelligence document from last month, which summarises reporting between 2004 and 2020, found that Venezuela\u2019s government was capable of digitally manipulating electronic voting systems \u2013 in Venezuela, not the US. Trump\u2019s supporters have long spread theories that the government of abducted former President Nicolas Maduro hacked US voter machines in 2020.<\/p>\n

The president also claimed that about 278,000 non-citizens were illegally registered to vote in federal elections, and cited a review by the Department of Homeland Security.<\/p>\n

The claim comes as his administration has sought to compel states, largely Democrat-led ones, to hand over private voter data for review. A study from the Bipartisan Policy Center found that past state reviews found 0.04 percent of voters were non-citizens.<\/p>\n

Separately, Trump said the FBI would reopen an election fraud case in Michigan, a Democratic stronghold. The 2020 case involved a voter-registration company that had collected some fraudulent or error-filled data, which was discovered before the election. Authorities at the time said the registrations were voided.<\/p>\n

Which countries actually interfered in the US elections?<\/p>\n

Extensive investigations by US intelligence agencies in 2021 found that Russia\u2019s President Vladimir Putin authorised several Russian government agencies to conduct influence operations that sought to undermine the Biden campaign and pull support for Trump\u2019s. The campaigns also aimed to puncture public confidence in the electoral process and further heighten political divisions.<\/p>\n

The intelligence report determined that Iran attempted to covertly undercut Trump\u2019s prospects, while Cuba, Venezuela and Hezbollah in Lebanon conducted \u201csmaller-scale\u201d efforts to influence the elections.<\/p>\n

Although Brazil, under former President Jair Bolsonaro, was not flagged by US intelligence, analysis by the investigative journalist organisation Agencia Publica found thousands of tweets trending in the country around the 2020 elections that spread conspiracy theories about election fraud and shared online hashtags supporting Trump, such as #GoTrumpReeleito or \u201clet\u2019s go, Trump re-elected\u201d.<\/p>\n

The agency found that bots and supporters of Bolsonaro, a strong Trump ally, largely drove the campaign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"United States President Donald Trump has renewed a campaign to cast doubts on the 2020 elections that saw…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155688,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[250,6211,12,1065,4220,34,50,51,329,74,17,6508,1643],"class_list":["post-155687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-donald-trump","tag-china","tag-cybersecurity","tag-donald-trump","tag-elections","tag-explainer","tag-iran","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-russia","tag-trump","tag-united-states","tag-us-elections-2020","tag-venezuela"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116935443755047724","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155687\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}