State and local officials and election security experts largely panned a Thursday night primetime speech by President Donald Trump, saying it was reflective of White House “desperation” to find any credible evidence to support their claims that U.S. elections have been rigged against the two-term president.

While the White House teased explosive new claims about the potential compromise of U.S. elections by China, Trump’s speech was a rehash of claims that both have no supporting evidence and have been repeatedly debunked when investigated. 

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former voting and civil rights attorney at the Department of Justice, said none of Trump’s claims or allegations were new or substantively different from previous theories he’s been espousing over the past six years.

“The White House promised a bombshell and they delivered a dud,” Becker said on a call with reporters Friday. “There was nothing that even calls into question past elections — certainly not the 2020 election.”

The administration declassified a huge tranche of documents from the intelligence agencies, and news outlets continue to sift through them, but thus far nothing has been found that remotely validates the administration’s claims about foreign interference from China costing Trump the 2020 election.

In fact, some of the most relevant documents found at this point have supported the opposite conclusion, with agencies assessing that while China engaged in influence campaigns around the election, it was not attempting to outright interfere with U.S. election infrastructure, hack voting machines or manipulate ballots.

John Solomon, a former journalist and opinion writer at The Hill brought in by the White House to lead the investigation, also told reporters Thursday that his search hasn’t turned up evidence that the 2020, 2022 or 2024 elections were affected by fraud.

The one new major claim by Trump — that the Department of Homeland Security determined hundreds of thousands of noncitizens were registered to vote across four states — is almost certainly false or overinflated, given that it contradicts post-election state audits that have routinely found single or double-digit numbers of noncitizens registered to vote within a single state across multiple elections.

Over the past six years, similar claims by GOP secretaries of state and political activists purporting to find mass numbers of noncitizens registered to vote have turned out to be grossly inflated due to shoddy data analysis, and the vast majority of cases involving “suspected noncitizens” turn out to be U.S. citizens who are legally registered to vote.

The White House has provided little to no information on the methodology used to flag and identify supposed noncitizen voters, other than alluding to the use of “commercial data” and federal databases. A federal court recently ordered DHS to dismantle the SAVE database, its primary database for verifying the citizenship status of U.S. voters, because it was unreliable and violated longstanding privacy laws. 

 Apart from DHS admitting its own data on citizenship is incomplete, Becker said using a list that relies on matching voter files with commercial data is not a reliable way of determining citizenship.

“It is impossible to take a public voter file with very little information that is uniquely identified, like a driver’s license number, and compare it to a commercial database and say for sure the Maria Rodriguez or the John Lee or the Shawn O’Hara you have on that is the same person,” he said.

Election officials also responded forcefully. Nevada Democratic Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said that Trump has spent a decade attempting to manufacture a crisis around voter fraud and the president’s speech Thursday night was an extension of that effort. 

“As Nevada’s chief elections officer, it’s my job to call balls and strikes — so when the President lies, I am obligated to call him out,” Aguilar said in a statement. “The facts have not changed: Nevada’s elections are among the safest, most secure and accessible in the nation.”

It’s not just Democrats that have objected to the administration’s efforts. GOP states have gone to court to block the Department of Justice from obtaining their voter data, and Idaho’s Republican secretary of state responded to a DOJ letter threatening prosecution of election officials as “not well met” and potentially illegal under state ethics laws. 

Trump’s speech potentially casts additional light on recent White House decisions, such as firing all three commissioners on the Election Assistance Commission. The agency helps certify voting machines for security, and all three commissioners have served across administrations and maintain close relationships with state and local election officials.  

Pamela Smith, CEO of the nonprofit Verified Voting, said that while the EAC can’t take certain actions that need commissioner approval, “critical functions like voting system testing and certification can continue under the existing framework and should not be affected.”

In 2020, Trump’s initial claims of widespread election fraud were undercut by leaders at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which said there was no evidence the election was compromised. The removal of EAC commissioners could represent an attempt to preempt any efforts to rebut or criticize White House claims that elections and voting machines have been compromised.

Some have worried that Trump could use the speech as a pretext to declare a national emergency or cancel elections.

Tom Lopach, CEO of the Voter Participation Center, said “you don’t dismantle election security infrastructure if you’re serious about protecting elections.”

“You dismantle it if you’re planning to claim, without evidence, that the system failed you,” he said. 

While Becker takes Trump’s broadsides against state election authority seriously, he also said it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that, in his view, the administration is losing the argument across the board.

More than a dozen federal courts have unanimously rejected the federal government’s attempts to forcibly obtain state voter data, while other courts have rejected core pieces of his election-related executive orders. State officials have publicly — and at times, angrily — pushed back on the administration’s demands as blatant federal overreach. 

Becker predicted that such an act would be quickly shot down by courts as well, noting that the U.S. has never canceled or postponed an election in its 250-year history, including when British troops were marauding on American soil during the War of 1812 or even at the height of the Civil War.

It’s important not to conflate the White House’s bluster and intentions with its actual authorities or capability to seize control of U.S. elections.

“This is what panic and desperation look like,” Becker said. “They’ve had 18 months in total control of the federal government and they have found nothing that would support President Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and so they’re just trying to grab as much garbage as they can and throw it up against the wall, and it’s not sticking.”

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Former Mesa County, Colorado election clerk Tina Peters remained unapologetic in her first public interview since her prison sentence was commuted, reiterating many of the same conspiratorial beliefs about elections while vowing to recover her health and fight on in court to have her criminal record expunged.

In an interview with former Trump campaign manager and White House official Steve Bannon, Peters called it a “miracle” that Democratic Governor Polis commuted her sentence and defended him from “the horrible media and haters” who were critical of the move.

Peters said those critics “don’t go after murderers and people like that [Polis] chose to pardon but they go after me, so there is a concern there for my well-being and my safety.”

Although Polis has said that Peters expressed contrition for her crimes prior to the commutation, she complained in her interview with Bannon that the Colorado governor had refused to issue her a full pardon that would remove the conviction from her criminal record, vowing to continue to “fight” the matter in court using leftover legal funds.

“Even though Governor Polis reduced my sentence from nine years to four and a half years, I still have a fight to clear my name and bring the truth of why they came after me the way they did,” Peters said.

Peters was convicted of seven felonies and sentenced to nine years in prison for stealing another person’s identity and using it to break into Mesa County election facilities, turn off the cameras and take voting system data.

Polis’ commutation of Peters sentence, which came after two years of relentless pressure from Trump, was met with cheers from conservative allies and bitter criticism from members of his own party.

The Colorado Democratic Party censured Polis and banned him from participating in future state party events. Incumbent Senator Michael Bennet, D-Colo., is running to succeed Polis as the Democratic candidate for governor this year, potentially putting him in position to appoint his own successor in the Senate. 

In an interview with CNN, Bennet called the commutation a “terrible decision” and that after announcing it Polis called him to say he would not be interested in the job.

Bennet wasn’t surprised.

“I viewed the decision that he made with respect to Tina Peters as disqualifying, and I think he knows that,” Bennet said.

Following the commutation, Polis has defended his decision, claiming Peters was being punished holding incorrect but constitutionally protected beliefs about election fraud that were unrelated to her actual crimes. He recently showed up to a virtual gathering of Colorado Democrats wearing a piece of tape over his mouth and has predicted the commutation will be looked upon “fondly” in the future.

Reached for comment, Polis’ press office referred CyberScoop to a previous May 15 Facebook post by the governor announcing Peters’ commutation and a follow up Substack blog he posted on Sunday defending the decision.

In his Substack, Polis said he believes Peters committed “real crimes” and deserved her conviction, but also argued that her sentence had become disconnected from her crimes. He pointed to a Colorado Court of Appeals hearing last month that upheld her conviction but ordered her to be resentenced in court as evidence that her sentence was lengthened for her First Amendment protected beliefs.

“Tina Peters should be punished for what she did,” Polis wrote. “She should not receive additional punishment for what she believed or said.” Still trying to figure out what that would look

But many election officials have also publicly stated that Peters committed serious felonies, remains unrepentant for her actions, and that her conspiratorial beliefs played a direct role in motivating her crimes.

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Colorado Governor Jared Polis has commuted the prison sentence of Tina Peters, the former Mesa County election clerk who was sentenced last year to serve nine years in state prison for carrying out one of the most serious election-related data breaches in U.S. history.

Peters was arrested in 2021, accused of abusing her position as clerk to break into Mesa County election facilities under false pretenses, steal election and voting machine data and share them with allies of President Donald Trump in a quixotic quest to prove he won the 2020 presidential election.

Peters has served less than a year and a half of a nine-year prison sentence handed down last year by a judge after she was convicted of using another Mesa County resident’s identity to enter county election facilities, where she stole voting data from the 2020 election and shared it with Trump allies online.

Peters hoped the data would show that Trump actually won the state in 2020. It did not. Election and cybersecurity experts have said Peters’ actions were a serious breach of election data, while Mesa County officials say it has cost them millions of dollars to deal with the legal fallout while Peters ran for higher office in 2022.

In handing down her nine-year prison sentence, Judge Matthew Barrett called Peters a “charlatan” and deserved a longer punishment because “I’m convinced you’d do it all over again.”

But for months, Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis has hinted at pardoning or commuting her sentence,  claiming that it was overly harsh for her crimes.

Trump has attempted to pressure state officials to pardon or commute Peters’ sentence. Because Peters was convicted of state crimes, she could be freed by a federal pardon alone, though Trump tried that as well.

In the past, Polis has claimed that he would only grant clemency to Peters if she showed remorse for her crimes. However, Peters’ own community and neighbors in Mesa County testified at her sentencing hearing last year that she has been largely unrepentant even after she was arrested and charged.

A review of dozens of Polis pardons and commutations as Colorado Governor by Denver news affiliate KUSA shows that Polis has never previously pardoned or commuted the sentence of a prisoner who did not openly express remorse for their crimes. Polis claimed in an interview with the outlet that Peters expressed regret.

Polis’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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