On July 16, President Trump announced the declassification of four sets of intelligence and law-enforcement records on the security of American elections. The Government Transparency Task Force he created in May released the documents through the Counsel to the President over the prior two weeks. They run to hundreds of pages, and the picture they draw is not a comforting one.
One set concerns the People’s Republic of China. According to the declassified records, a Chinese-held data trove contained more than 200 million U.S. voter records, one holding logged at exactly 204,822,241, and Chinese collection reached voter data tied to at least 18 states. The records themselves note that much of that data was publicly available or purchased rather than stolen from a secure system, a distinction the President did not address. A separate report from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, dated July 13, found that the software and county networks that run elections carry real vulnerabilities, that CISA’s own assessors gained full control of election networks “within hours or days” in multiple tests, and that the fix is human-readable paper ballots and post-election manual audits.
A third set documents a 2020 fraudulent-registration operation in Muskegon, Michigan, run by a paid canvassing vendor. FBI database checks found that 91 of 107 sampled registration applications listed people who could not be located. The Department of Justice declined to prosecute, and the case was closed in September 2025. A fourth set, from the Department of Homeland Security, reports roughly 278,000 noncitizens identified on state voter rolls after Washington finally granted states access to a federal citizenship database it had withheld for years.
The President described the disclosures as proof that elections had been rigged and stolen. The documents are more careful than his description. The intelligence assessments in the file judge that altering vote totals at scale “would be difficult” and hard to accomplish “without detection,” that “audits and paper trails most likely would uncover such efforts,” and that the 2020 intelligence “does not make assessments about the impact” of foreign activity on any result. On that point the record and the President part company.
What the record does establish is harder to wave away, and it is the argument the Texas Nationalist Movement has made for years. Every lever behind these failures runs through Washington. The machines are certified under federal standards. The registration systems China collected against are built to satisfy a federal mandate, the Help America Vote Act. The citizenship data Texas needed to clean its own rolls was held by the federal government and refused until 2025. The prosecutors who let the Michigan case die answer to no Texan.
Texas has tried to fix this from inside. The Legislature passed Senate Bill 1 in 2021 to tighten election security. A federal judge, Xavier Rodriguez, struck down key provisions in 2024. When the state asked Washington for the data to verify its own voter rolls, it waited years for a reply.
The Movement’s position predates this week’s headlines. In 2019, it published a report titled “Your Vote Is Not Safe,” built on the DEFCON Voting Village, where researchers compromised every electronic voting machine they were handed. Its remedy then was the remedy the CISA report reaches now, paper ballots and audits, the same reforms State Representative Steve Toth and State Senator Bob Hall carried in 2023 and could not move through the Legislature. Paper ballots and audits are the fix Washington’s own agencies now recommend. Texas cannot adopt them on its own terms while its voting systems run under federal certification and a Legislature that would not act.
Washington spent the week conceding that the machinery counting American votes cannot be trusted. It left out the one fact that matters most in Texas. The people who could change the lock have never lived here, and Texans have never been allowed to hold the key.
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