Speaker 1: The People's Republic of China carried out what is believed
Speaker 1: to be the largest compromise of election data in history,
Speaker 1: resulting in China's illicit acquisition of two hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: million US voter files.
Speaker 2: In the East Room of the White House, Donald Trump
Speaker 2: makes an extraordinary accusation of election interference, claiming Beijing had
Speaker 2: illegally obtained the voter files of two hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: million Americans. He also accuses US intelligence agencies of hiding
Speaker 2: the extent of China's activity.
Speaker 1: Members of the deep state, very very famous group of people,
Speaker 1: many cases in our intelligence agency work to actively suppress
Speaker 1: and downplay information about the extent of China's sinister election medaling.
Speaker 2: Later, Trump claims a homeland security review had found around
Speaker 2: two hundred and seventy eight thousand non citizens registered to vote.
Speaker 1: Even this limited analysis found more than a quarter of
Speaker 1: a million foreigners illegally registered to vote. Put together, these
Speaker 1: disclosers reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable
Speaker 1: that no one can possibly defend it.
Speaker 2: Trump's motivation, critics say, is to so doubt ahead of
Speaker 2: the upcoming midterm elections, which he has already made several
Speaker 2: attempts to reshape, from redrawing maps to restricting voting to
Speaker 2: firing the entire Electoral Commission. I'm Ruby Jones, and you're
Speaker 2: listening to seven Am Today staff writer at The Atlantic
Speaker 2: David A. Graham on Trump's campaign to tilt the midterms
Speaker 2: and what he could still do before, during, and after
Speaker 2: election day. It's Friday, July twenty four, David, Donald Trump
Speaker 2: recently delivered a pretty unusual primetime address from the White House.
Speaker 2: He said that China had stolen voter information and that
Speaker 2: intelligence officials were covering up election interference. Take me through
Speaker 2: to begin with the claims that he was making there.
Speaker 3: So there's a mix of things.
Speaker 4: Some of them are claims that are based on real
Speaker 4: evidence that he was exaggerating. So, you know, he talked
Speaker 4: about China and other countries trying to interfere, but overstated what.
Speaker 1: They've done two hundred and twenty million US voter files.
Speaker 1: That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers.
Speaker 5: We do not know where the presidents got those numbers from,
Speaker 5: and we should point out to our viewers that US
Speaker 5: intelligence found no evidence of Chinese meddling in the twenty
Speaker 5: twenty election.
Speaker 4: You know, there's heavily redected documents that the White House provided,
Speaker 4: but they don't really clearly back up what he said.
Speaker 2: ABC News reviewed the documents and found they describe efforts
Speaker 2: to obtain, not alter, voter records.
Speaker 6: Many voter records can already be legally obtained from states.
Speaker 4: In some cases, he exaggerated other things. So he claimed
Speaker 4: a great deal of attempts to fraudulently register to vote
Speaker 4: in the state of Michigan. This is something that is true,
Speaker 4: but it's something that was found out at the time
Speaker 4: and has been referred for prosecution. Some of the things
Speaker 4: are innuendo or he didn't have the evidence to back
Speaker 4: it up. So it's a mix of vague claims and
Speaker 4: things that are simply not true.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: And so there was this one claim that two hundred
Speaker 2: and seventy eight thousand non citizens were registered to vote.
Speaker 2: Trump hasn't provided any.
Speaker 3: Evidence for that.
Speaker 2: So why is he telling this story though? What does
Speaker 2: he want Americans to believe about the upcoming election?
Speaker 4: I think there are three things going on. One is
Speaker 4: this kind of fearmongering about immigrants is part of Trump's
Speaker 4: core political appeal and has been for a decade. Part
Speaker 4: of it is Trump, I think, has never fully gotten
Speaker 4: over losing the twenty twenty election, nor has he really
Speaker 4: made peace with the idea that although he won the
Speaker 4: presidency in twenty sixteen, he did not win the popular vote.
Speaker 4: And so a lot of these things are sort of
Speaker 4: designed to make some excuse or to claim that in fact,
Speaker 4: he did win those elections and he won the popular vote.
Speaker 4: I think he is also trying to lay the ground
Speaker 4: work to contest or to cast out on the twenty
Speaker 4: twenty sixth election. So all of these are things that
Speaker 4: might convince people that the system doesn't work, or that
Speaker 4: the wrong people are voting, or that somehow something is
Speaker 4: going wrong and they can't trust the results.
Speaker 2: And tell me about the relevance of this happening before
Speaker 2: the midterms, the timing here, and what changes is Trump
Speaker 2: hoping to be able to put into place.
Speaker 3: Trump has had a kind of long standing attempt to
Speaker 3: do a bunch of things.
Speaker 6: The President signing an executive order directing his administration to
Speaker 6: create a list of confirmed US citizens eligible to vote
Speaker 6: in each state, and to ban the Postal Service from
Speaker 6: mailing voter's ballots unless they are on a state's official
Speaker 6: absentee voter list.
Speaker 4: He has issued these executive orders that tell states, you know,
Speaker 4: when they can count votes and how they can count votes,
Speaker 4: which are things that he doesn't have the power as
Speaker 4: the president to do.
Speaker 6: The order requires voters to show documents proving their citizenship
Speaker 6: in order to register to vote in federal elections, and
Speaker 6: it demands all ballots be received by election day.
Speaker 4: He has gone after some of the governmental panels that
Speaker 4: sort of assist with elections, whether that's cybersecurity or just
Speaker 4: general procedure. He has attempted to acquire voter roles from
Speaker 4: a bunch of states, suing the states to try to
Speaker 4: demand this information.
Speaker 7: I'm going of Justice file a lawsuit against Washington's Secretary
Speaker 7: of State, Steve Hobbs. The DOJ wants a federal judge
Speaker 7: to compel the state to hand over voters full names,
Speaker 7: dates of birth, residential addresses, and even their state driver's
Speaker 7: license numbers or the last.
Speaker 3: Four digits of their Social Security numbers.
Speaker 4: And he's also pressed Congress to pass a law they
Speaker 4: would overhaul some of the way voting works, and in particular,
Speaker 4: it would require voters to provide proof of citizenship in
Speaker 4: order to register to vote.
Speaker 3: And that's something that has.
Speaker 4: Passed the House but has been stuck in the Senate,
Speaker 4: and he has been very frustrated by his inability to
Speaker 4: get them to get it any further. They think that
Speaker 4: this law is too sweeping and wouldn't solve the problem
Speaker 4: if you talk about providing proof of citizenship. First of all,
Speaker 4: there is no problem. There is not widespread non citizen voting,
Speaker 4: and there have been years of efforts to try to
Speaker 4: find it and it has not produced evidence that this
Speaker 4: is a widespread problem, certainly not on the scale to
Speaker 4: change elections. And I think some of these senators are
Speaker 4: hearing from Republican election officials back home in there are
Speaker 4: states who are saying, we don't have the time or
Speaker 4: the wherewithal to do this before the November election. If
Speaker 4: we try to switch into system now, it will create
Speaker 4: really serious chaos and be a problem.
Speaker 3: And I think they're elected to do that, which is good.
Speaker 2: Okay, Can we talk a little bit more about the
Speaker 2: voter roles, Because these roles they have private information that's
Speaker 2: not normally made public. So what are the kind of
Speaker 2: fears here around the administration demanding that data.
Speaker 3: I think there are a couple of things.
Speaker 4: One is privacy as you say, this is full of
Speaker 4: identifiable information, social security numbers, addresses, all sorts of other things,
Speaker 4: and it's not clear how the federal government would store
Speaker 4: this information, what sort of information security it has. I think,
Speaker 4: you know, it's a sort of basic privacy concern in
Speaker 4: that respect. And as it related to that, some voter
Speaker 4: advocates are afraid that this will intimidate people into not
Speaker 4: wanting to vote or not wanting to register to vote.
Speaker 4: The other question is what they will do with this
Speaker 4: in terms of non citizen voting. So we have seen
Speaker 4: in the past efforts to match voter roles against other
Speaker 4: databases to prove that there are you know, tens of
Speaker 4: thousands or hundreds of thousands, or who knows how many
Speaker 4: ineligible voters who are voting. And we've seen this happen
Speaker 4: a bunch of times. There are a lot of claims
Speaker 4: about this, and every time this happens, it ultimately turns
Speaker 4: out that claims are overstated to the point where there
Speaker 4: is almost no evidence of non citizen voting or non
Speaker 4: citizen registration. It'll be false matches and bad data. And
Speaker 4: so the big concern is that that's what will happen
Speaker 4: again once again, there'll be a claim of many non
Speaker 4: citizens voting, and actually it won't be true at all.
Speaker 2: Okay, wait and see on that. What other avenues are
Speaker 2: still open to Trump ahead of election day in terms
Speaker 2: of trying to exert influence.
Speaker 4: So he's continuing to try to get Congress to pass
Speaker 4: this Save America Act, which seems like it won't work,
Speaker 4: but you never can tell. I think he can continue
Speaker 4: this effort to so doubt and to make people think
Speaker 4: that the elections are not safe. He can continue to
Speaker 4: try to bully state authorities or demand voter roles from them.
Speaker 4: Then the question is what happens on election day and afterwards.
Speaker 4: And I've talked to a number of experts who are
Speaker 4: concerned that the government might send out armed troops or
Speaker 4: armed federal law enforcement in ways they would interfere with
Speaker 4: people voting. Whether that was sort of just like an
Speaker 4: intimidation factor or actually getting in the way of polling places,
Speaker 4: nobody really knows.
Speaker 3: It's kind of speculative, but that is a concern.
Speaker 2: Would that be legal doing that?
Speaker 3: It would not be legal.
Speaker 4: The law says you cannot send armed men to a
Speaker 4: polling place except in case of.
Speaker 3: An insurrection, So the worries. Maybe there's a workaround.
Speaker 4: Maybe Trump sends troops into the streets, as we saw
Speaker 4: in cities for immigration purposes over the last few months,
Speaker 4: and that achieved the same effect, even though it's not
Speaker 4: ostensibly to mess with polling places. The other question is,
Speaker 4: you know, we've seen Trump do things where he kind
Speaker 4: of bends the law and waits to see if somebody
Speaker 4: stops him, and it's not clear who would stop him
Speaker 4: in the circumstance, or if they could do it quickly enough.
Speaker 4: If we're talking about election day, where things move quickly.
Speaker 2: Coming up, could Trump's team smooth the way to overturn
Speaker 2: the election results? David, you mentioned the twenty twenty election result.
Speaker 2: Trump wanted to overturn that at the time, but officials
Speaker 2: in his own administration resisted those How much has changed
Speaker 2: since then in terms of the people that Trump has
Speaker 2: surrounded himself with and who is in the position to
Speaker 2: make those decisions now.
Speaker 4: I think, for one thing, he has many people around
Speaker 4: him who are not willing to tell him no, people
Speaker 4: who don't have the same sort of buy into the
Speaker 4: old system that some of those officials did, and who
Speaker 4: are sort of more on board with the Trump movement,
Speaker 4: so those people are less likely to stop Trump. He
Speaker 4: has brought many people who were election deniers twenty twenty
Speaker 4: into positions of power, including in the Department of Home
Speaker 4: and Security overseeing election integrity.
Speaker 3: There's also been changes at the state.
Speaker 4: Level that I think are important in the local level,
Speaker 4: where people who are Trump affiliated or Trump supporters have
Speaker 4: entered these local offices and these state offices, and so
Speaker 4: they have power that they didn't have six years ago.
Speaker 4: And some of the Republicans at the state level who
Speaker 4: stood up to Trump have left office or have been
Speaker 4: defeated by Trump supporting candidates. So there are a lot
Speaker 4: fewer safeguards all around than there were in that election.
Speaker 2: And what about after the election or what avenues are
Speaker 2: there for people to challenge the count or delay certification
Speaker 2: ultimately effect who is elected.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there are a bunch of things.
Speaker 4: You know, we always get some level of lawsuits challenging results,
Speaker 4: and this is what we saw in twenty twenty. And
Speaker 4: for the most I mean that worked. We saw a
Speaker 4: bunch of lawsuits they didn't have evidence, they lost in court,
Speaker 4: so that we saw that process or function the way
Speaker 4: it's supposed to. Even if many of these lawsuits were spurious.
Speaker 4: One of the things that we heard talk about in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty. Later there was a discussion inside the administration
Speaker 4: about potentially seizing voting machines, and that's something we've heard
Speaker 4: more about. I think that would be a real danger.
Speaker 4: It would make it hard for people to know to
Speaker 4: trust the count. We wouldn't be able, we would have
Speaker 4: sort of a chain of custody for ballots, and so
Speaker 4: we wouldn't know really who won or whether we could
Speaker 4: believe the results.
Speaker 3: I think that is a danger.
Speaker 4: We could also see Trump, you know, trying to prosecute
Speaker 4: election officials for not doing what he wanted, and I
Speaker 4: think we're likely to see him pressuring officials in the
Speaker 4: way he did in twenty twenty, you know, calling up
Speaker 4: officials and saying they needed to find votes for him.
Speaker 3: He did that in twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: He didn't really face any consequences for it, and so
Speaker 4: I would expect he would try something like that again
Speaker 4: if you thought it would be helpful for him.
Speaker 2: Okay, And I suppose that goes to this bigger idea here,
Speaker 2: which is that sure, some of these measures might work,
Speaker 2: some might not, some might get blocked, but ultimately, the
Speaker 2: idea that a president can or or should be able
Speaker 2: to influence election outcomes. I mean, that wasn't something that
Speaker 2: existed before twenty.
Speaker 3: Twenty, right exactly.
Speaker 4: I mean it's meant to be that a president can politic,
Speaker 4: but they shouldn't be.
Speaker 3: Interfering with the results.
Speaker 4: And here we have him threatening to or in the past,
Speaker 4: you know, going into parts of the government where he
Speaker 4: has no statutory authority, trying to get officials to do
Speaker 4: things that are illegal and that don't match up to
Speaker 4: the evidence, and you know, undermining general faith. And I
Speaker 4: think that the twenty twenty six elections are a difficult
Speaker 4: one for Trump to influence in a serious way. A
Speaker 4: presidential election is, you know, it's kind of fifty separate elections,
Speaker 4: but there's kind of one big event. But a congressional
Speaker 4: election is we have four hundred and thirty five House seats.
Speaker 4: It's very hard to interfere with a lot of those
Speaker 4: and switch the result unless it's really close, unless it's
Speaker 4: a margin of you know, two and three and five
Speaker 4: votes her seats. So I think that makes it hard
Speaker 4: for Trump to materially impact the result. But I think
Speaker 4: there's a lot of ways for him to create mischief
Speaker 4: and to do things that are improper and possibly illegal.
Speaker 2: Well, David, thank you so much for your type my pleasure.
Speaker 2: Also in the news, Pauline Hanson says her comments on
Speaker 2: domestic violence have been deliberately taken out of context by
Speaker 2: the media. The One Nation leader has been widely condemned,
Speaker 2: accused of victim blaming for saying women who were subject
Speaker 2: to abuse shouldn't put up with it and that it's
Speaker 2: a two way street.
Speaker 8: Well, it is wrong, but it's also a two way street.
Speaker 8: But I'm not saying that some just men and women
Speaker 8: can lose their cruel as well.
Speaker 2: Hanson insists people should listen to the full interview and
Speaker 2: Australian workers will be able to escalate workplace disputes like
Speaker 2: underpayment claims to a new Fair Work Court. The Prime
Speaker 2: Minister has announced the reinstatement of the Specialist Workers' Court
Speaker 2: for the first time since John Howard abolished the last
Speaker 2: one almost thirty years ago. He says the court will
Speaker 2: be headed by expert judges in consultation with the Fair
Speaker 2: Work Commission. Its aim is to resolve workplace disputes faster
Speaker 2: and at lower costs. I'm ruby Jones. This is seven AM.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening.