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** Trump's Election Security Claims

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Baseless claims ([link removed]) about Venezuela manipulating U.S. voting machines and swinging the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden have been circulating in conspiracy circles for years, with members of Trump's 2020 legal team leading the way.

In his primetime address to the nation on July 16, President Donald Trump again raised the specter of Venezuelan election tampering to demonstrate that American voting machines are similarly vulnerable.

“Today, we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela,” Trump said, referring to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “And that’s exactly what happened. Conspiring to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020. And that’s what they did. This reporting included precise details about methods to regime develop, to digitally alter vote totals in ways that could not be detected, even with an audit, no matter how deep they went.

“This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never, ever be hacked or compromised like it was in the past,” Trump said.

FactCheck.org’s deputy director, Rob Farley, looked at the documents underpinning the president’s claim and found ([link removed]) the president provided an incomplete and distorted summary of the CIA’s reporting about Venezuelan efforts to manipulate electronic voting machines.

For example, the documents the Trump administration released don’t say “that’s exactly what happened,” as Trump said. While CIA intelligence concluded Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and his successor, Maduro, “developed sustained interest and likely some capability” to manipulate voting machines, a recent CIA report stopped short of alleging Venezuela actually carried out plans to alter voting machine tallies.

Moreover, the report concluded that even if Venezuelan officials may have had the ability to manipulate voting machines in-country, they lacked the capability to alter voting machines outside Venezuela.

A declassified version of an Intelligence Community assessment on “foreign threats” to the 2020 election, released in March 2021, stated, “We have no information suggesting that the current or former Venezuelan regimes were involved in attempts to compromise US election infrastructure.”

For more on the CIA assessment and Smartmatic, the voting machine company at the center of the controversy, see our story, “Trump’s Distorted Venezuela Elections Claim ([link removed]) .”

Trump’s claims about Venezuelan voting machine manipulation were not the only misleading claims made in his primetime address. Five members of our fact-checking team examined Trump's speech and newly released intelligence documents he cited.

Although Trump promised the newly declassified material showed intelligence agencies had kept election vulnerabilities and foreign interference a secret, election experts said there was very little new information in the president’s speech.

“The White House promised a bombshell, and they delivered a dud,” David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit, said in a July 17 press conference. “There was absolutely nothing here that was news, nothing here that even calls into question past elections and certainly not the 2020 election.”

Read more in our full story: “FactChecking Trump’s Election Security Speech. ([link removed]) ”
HOW WE KNOW
To look into Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s repeated claims about alleged declines in sperm counts among teenagers and a link to an “explosion in infertility,” we researched the scientific literature and consulted experts. The studies establishing sperm counts in healthy adolescents have “never been done,” Dolores Lamb, who studies male reproductive biology and urology at Children’s Mercy Kansas City, told us. In any case, sperm declines are not likely to be a driving factor in today’s falling childbirth rates, experts said. Read more: "RFK Jr.’s Flawed Claims About Sperm Count and Fertility ([link removed]) ."
FEATURED FACT
Trump accounts are a new child savings account that a parent can open for any child before the age of 18. The federal government is seeding new accounts with $1,000 for children born between 2025 and the end of 2028. Parents, relatives, friends, employers, state governments, philanthropic organizations and individuals can contribute to these accounts until a child turns 18, up to a total $5,000 annual combined limit per account. The money can’t be withdrawn before a child reaches 18, at which point the account is treated like a traditional IRA. Read more: "The Dubious Rags to Riches Promise of Trump Accounts ([link removed]) ."
WORTHY OF NOTE
Every week, our social media manager, Josh Diehl, puts together a short video recap of our recently published stories and posts it on our Substack. This video ([link removed]) , posted July 22, covers the articles our team wrote between July 15 and July 20.

Substack (for those who may not know) is an online journalism platform that allows us to share our articles and these FactCheck.Weekly videos directly to our audience via email and the Substack app. We have more than 290,000 subscribers who receive our articles emailed to them minutes after we publish. Want to sign up? Subscribe to our Substack here ([link removed]) .


** Wrapping Up
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Y lo que publicamos en español ([link removed]) (English versions are accessible in each story):
* RFK Jr. reitera afirmaciones erróneas sobre el recuento espermático y la fertilidad ([link removed])
El secretario de Salud y Servicios Humanos, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ha vinculado infundadamente una supuesta disminución del recuento espermático entre los adolescentes con una “crisis de fertilidad” o una “explosión de infertilidad”.

* La dudosa promesa de las cuentas Trump de hacer ricos a los más pobres ([link removed])
El presidente Donald Trump ha afirmado repetidamente que las llamadas cuentas Trump, las nuevas cuentas de inversión y ahorro para niños creadas por el gobierno, “podrían alcanzar cientos de miles de dólares” para cuando los niños cumplan 18 años. Esto solo será cierto si los padres u otros donantes aportan miles de dólares al año por niño, suponiendo que la rentabilidad futura se acerque a los promedios históricos del mercado de valores.

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