Do declassified files support Trump's election security claims?

Protecting America's "election infrastructure" has been a bipartisan goal for years. The US made efforts to establish standards to strengthen and streamline the mechanics of voting after the contested 2000 presidential election and again following evidence of Russian election interference in the 2016 election.

While election procedures are managed by state governments, most votes are now recorded on some form of paper ballot.

Trump may have a more partisan purpose behind his re-airing of these claims. He appears to be using these concerns to cast doubt on the 2020 presidential election he lost and to potentially question the validity of future elections.

In his speech Trump said previously classified US intelligence assessments proved that the US government had known voting machines "are extremely exposed to attack".

"As one assessment states, we judged that the United States' adversaries, including, at a minimum, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, as well as non-state groups have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure," he said.

The documents released by the Trump administration include a January 2020 declassified NIC assessment, external of vulnerabilities in the election of that year, which acknowledged that "ballot and voting machine preparation is vulnerable to cyber, supply chain, or insider threats".

It said that machines with no paper backup were "particularly vulnerable to cyber operations".

However, the NIC assessment also stated that "security and mitigation measures used in these processes, and the distribution of voting machine storage facilities countrywide, would make it difficult for an adversary to coordinate a campaign to manipulate voting results across an entire state or multiple states".

The specific assessment Trump may have been referring to is another declassified NIC report from August 2020, external, which said "foreign states or other actors may seek to compromise our election infrastructure".

It is also important to note that Trump has taken steps to cut funding and undermine the independence of some of the government programmes and agencies that have been tasked in recent years with monitoring election security.