New evidence further undermines claim that 2020 election was ‘most secure’ in history

After several batches of documents were recently declassified and released by the White House, the American people now have more evidence than ever that while officials claimed 2020 was a historically secure election, the government had plenty of evidence of security vulnerabilities, hacks and foreign interference. 

Shortly after the election, senior government officials insisted that it was the “most secure” in American history, deflecting concerns about security, including about voting systems and mail-in-ballots. 

One of the lead government officials responsible for election security, Chris Krebs, the then-director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, testified to the Senate after the election that he had approved an assessment that said “the 2020 election was the most secure in U.S. history.”

However, after the new batches of documents were declassified and released this summer by the White House, Americans have more evidence than ever that those same officials knew about significant breaches of election data and internally raised concerns about how foreign actors could influence the election and the vulnerability of electronic voting machines. 

President Donald Trump has used this evidence to argue for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would, among other provisions, require proof of citizenship for individuals to vote in federal elections. 

None of the evidence released so far by the White House suggests that votes were manipulated or provides proof of widespread fraud, but it does raise concerns about the ability of actors, domestic or foreign, to exploit voter data or interfere in the election process.   

Maricopa exfiltration of voter registration data

The latest evidence released by the White House this week shows that the FBI investigated a breach of voter registration data in Arizona’s largest county in the days before the 2020 election. In that incident, a self-described hacker foiled security and obtained 633,000 voter registration files, but the Biden Justice Department and local prosecutors declined to bring charges even after the FBI got the suspect to confess, Just the News reported on Thursday. 

The scraping of Maricopa County's voter registration files was the most flagged security incident in a cyberintrusion log kept by U.S. spy agencies in the days surrounding the Nov. 3, 2020, election, showing that intelligence officials were monitoring the breach while voting was ongoing. 

A tip from local officials prompted the FBI to investigate. The man the FBI confronted admitted he wrote a computer script to exploit the county voter-security systems and scraped the files, which included 930 with "sensitive voter information such as domestic violence victims, judges and law enforcement officers," according to the FBI case files. 

China obtained 220 million voter files in likely ‘election interference’

Starting in 2020, the Intelligence Community also began to detect efforts by China to obtain voter registration information from millions of Americans, according to documents released by the White House last month. 

By 2023, U.S. intelligence determined that China had obtained 220 million individual voter files containing names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences and other sensitive information.

Months before the 2020 election, in which Democratic nominee Joe Biden defeated incumbent GOP President Donald Trump, the U.S. Intelligence Community issued a secret but stark warning that foreign adversaries had the capability to “compromise" America's voting infrastructure and raised specific concerns about the vulnerability of voter registration databases that later would be penetrated by China, according to a declassified memo obtained by Just the News in April.

In the subsequent years, Beijing was successful in obtaining information from those voter registration databases through buying, stealing or hacking, intelligence officials later said. This month, in a joint statement, U.S. spy agency chiefs clarified that China’s targeting of Americans' voter registration files that began during the 2020 election likely meets the intelligence community's definition of "election interference." 

Venezuelan plots raise questions about security of electronic voting machines

The declassified documents released by the White House also show that from 2004 to 2020, U.S. intelligence agencies monitored plans by the Venezuelan leadership to electronically manipulate their country’s own voting machines, including the use of substituting false votes, to secure victory for the ruling socialists. 

The plans raised alarm as early as 2006 among U.S. officials as a potential avenue for the Venezuelans to attempt to “undermine confidence in, or manipulate the electoral process in, the United States,” according to a June 2026 CIA summary of prior intelligence reporting on Caracas’ capabilities.  

By 2020, the CIA had obtained reporting on Venezuelan plans to swing the country’s election that year by manipulating electronic voting machines in a way that would make false votes appear legitimate and leave no trace of the changes. The intelligence raised questions about whether some U.S. voting machines could be vulnerable to similar types of manipulation, though agencies assessed that Venezuela did not have the capability to do so in the U.S.

Non-citizens on voter rolls

Additionally, an assessment by the Homeland Security Department found that hundreds-of-thousands of illegal aliens were on the voter rolls in four states – and estimated the total across the whole country to be higher. A review conducted earlier this year using publicly available voter data in California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania found over 250,000 illegal voters on the rolls, Just the News reported. 

In July, New Jersey Democrat Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced that a software glitch resulted in the state’s motor vehicle system accidentally registering 6,600 non-citizens to vote. She also acknowledged that as many as 400 of those individuals had, in fact, voted in recent elections. 

Before the release of the declassified documents, Just the News reported extensively on the Intelligence Community’s internal concerns about the vulnerability of election systems and the alleged Chinese and Iranian efforts to obtain sensitive voter data.