Trump Rehashes Election Fraud Claims, Politics Of Trump's Speech, Texas Flooding

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Let's get to the show. President Trump said he was releasing new evidence of widespread election fraud in his speech last night.

**Leila Fadel** (0:48)
But experts who reviewed the documents say there's nothing new, just a rehash of old claims about the 2020 election Trump lost.

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I'm Tony Martinez, that's Leila Fadel, and this is Up First from NPR News.
The president also used his primetime address to push his election safety bill, which would require proof of citizenship to vote. With Trump's approval numbers at their lowest and the midterms approaching, why is he choosing now to push a bill that doesn't have the numbers in Congress?

**Leila Fadel** (1:17)
And severe flooding hit Texas' Hill Country. Last year, floods there killed more than 130 people. This time, new warning sirens and hard lessons may have saved lives. Stay with us, we'll give you the news you need to start your day.
For days, President Trump and his team have teased a bombshell announcement on election integrity.

**A Martínez** (1:44)
Trump gave a primetime address on it last night, but election experts say the speech and the newly unclassified documents that came with it provided no new evidence of widespread fraud. Mostly, it was a rehash of facts and claims about America's voting system that were already known.

**Leila Fadel** (2:00)
NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks has been up all night going through those documents, and he joins me now to talk through it. Hi, Miles. Hey, good morning. OK, so the president has been making claims for almost six years now that the election he lost in 2020 was rigged. Last night, he gave a speech about voting integrity. Was it more of the same?

**Miles Parks** (2:19)
It was. I mean, he hit on a bunch of the themes that will sound really familiar to anyone who's heard the president over the last few years, the idea that voting machines can't be trusted, the idea that non-citizens are voting en masse in American elections, shadowy schemes by foreign governments to try to influence voting, that sort of thing.
But our team at NPR started looking through all of these documents that the White House published, and it's not really clear what is actually new here that impacts our understanding of the security of America's elections. I talked with Adrian Fontes after the speech. He's Arizona's top voting official. He's a Democrat. Here's how he described it.

**Adrian Fontes** (2:53)
I kind of felt a little bit cheated. I was expecting some kind of delicious bombshell that we might be able to investigate, but instead I got a rehash of the same grievance.

**Miles Parks** (3:03)
Fontes was struck by how closely all these classified documents align with what was already public about the 2020 election.

**Leila Fadel** (3:10)
Tell us a little bit more like the details here. What's actually in these documents?

**Miles Parks** (3:15)
Take the idea about America's voting systems being vulnerable to hacking, for instance. The president said Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure. They're vulnerable, referring to the machines and they're easily compromised. But the documents released really just lay out concerns with voting equipment that were already known.
So in some places, it's just really old. Election administration is known to be chronically underfunded. And for the past 10 years, American adversaries have targeted it. In some cases, that's looked like actually trying to break into registration systems. In other cases, it's trying to influence American voters online. But there's no evidence anyone has ever actually changed votes. That is a critical distinction. I was talking about that with Susan Greenhall at the advocacy group Free Speech for People. For years, she has worked to shine a light on some of the same problems that Trump is now focusing on.

**Susan Greenhall** (4:05)
Two things can be true at the same time. That we have ignored vulnerabilities in our voting systems for a long time. And there is no evidence that the election was rigged in 2020 And everything that has been put forth purporting to provide that evidence always falls apart like a cheap suit.