The Social Critic

Legacy media has done to President Trump’s July 16, 2026 speech on election integrity what they did to the Hunter Biden laptop story: It didn’t merit airing because it is an unfounded conspiracy theory.

It’s an argument that didn’t age well, with legacy media belatedly admitting that there was no evidence that Hunter’s laptop was “hacked material” after all — well after the 2020 election had passed. Rather than learn from self harm, media gatekeepers are back to cherry picking what the rest of us see and hear. However, it would be remiss to suggest that only liberal media choked on Trump’s address. Conservative commentators, too, expressed shock that 230 million Americans’ voter registration data has in some form or fashion been obtained by the People’s Republic of China, even as more than a quarter million noncitizens are reportedly registered to vote across just four states.

The White House released what it describes as evidence of the President’s claims of election interference to its own website, while Beijing has denied the allegations. Still, it’s hardly the case that these revelations are entirely new. The following summarizes what many undoubtedly missed, thanks to media coverage that so often lacks context:

Public Information: Voter rolls are subject to public records laws. If they are not out of reach of Americans — or Americans share personally-identifiable information with Chinese-owned social media companies such as Tiktok — it should not come as surprise that foreign adversaries might be able to assemble enough information to create actionable harm.
So Easy a Kid Can Do It: In 2018, an 11-year-old Florida girl hacked the State’s election website in under 10 minutes.
Experts Have Been Consistent: Computer scientists at universities and hactivist groups, alike, have tested electronic voting systems and identified vulnerabilities stretching back more than two decades. They continue to report vulnerabilities. Derision and dismissal of former DNI Director Tulsi Gabbard does not track with the historical record.
Privatizing Democracy: The Guardian published an investigative series in 2019: “America’s new voting machines bring new fears of election tampering” and “‘They think they are above the law’: the firms that own America’s voting system”. They were not the only ones to blow the whistle.
Foreign Ties: The Carter Center for Democracy — for whom the late President Jimmy Carter once lavished praise on Venezuela’s pioneering role in electronic voting — came full circle in 2024 upon condemning the fraudulent election of Nicolas Maduro. While any election can be compromised to some extent, e-voting is particularly risky because of the sheer scale and technical opacity to the average poll worker. That technologies originally developed for use in foreign countries has been adapted to U.S. election needs with hardware manufacturing ties to China and computer programming links to the likes of Venezuela isn’t new information. These ties caused controversy in the early days of e-voting. However, until e-voting technology was tied to the Venezuela elections scandal, it was possible to deny that abuses at scale could exist on such platforms — although in reality a 2003 Diebold scandal set the precedent — or that the reach of such fraud may extend beyond Venezuela’s borders. A federal grand jury indicted Smartmatic executives in 2024 for alleged “bribery and money laundering.” Another took place nearly a year later, with a federal grand jury indictment in Miami for allegedly bribing a Philippine official in 2016. The wakeup call that too much is at stake is no longer possible to deny.
Double Standards: In Colorado, the passwords to voting systems went live on the elections website prior to the 2020 election. Tina Peters, a county clerk in the same state, went to prison for sharing data with a private party without permission. Secretary of State Jenna Griswold “spoke” to the entire world via her office website yet sidestepped accountability. (After winning a primary election, she may soon become attorney general — with the power to decide if future “accidents” tied to her former office are prosecuted vs. dropped.)
The Accidental Voter: The Associated Press, among others, have reported for more than a decade on “glitches” in which automatic voter registration associated with obtaining a driver’s license has resulted in noncitizens registered to vote — meaning ineligible individuals need not make an explicit attempt to commit fraud. Motor voter laws have led to such situations in Oregon, California, Colorado and Pennsylvania. But because there is no independent/outside voter roll auditing mechanism what has been publicly acknowledged is likely only the tip of the iceberg.
Expanding Access: Sates are pushing to expand voter rolls via automatic registration beyond the Department of Motor Vehicles: “Since 2019, states including Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Minnesota, Oregon and Michigan, plus Washington, D.C., have passed laws calling for their Medicaid offices to transfer information about Medicaid applicants who are eligible to vote so that election officials can automatically register them,” NPR reported in 2024.
Yesterday’s Conspiracy, Tomorrow’s Reality: A number of states are openly working to extend voting rights to noncitizens in municipal and state elections, while federal elections continue to prohibit the practice. This introduces new challenges: Separating eligibility to vote in local elections vs. national elections is virtually impossible without adopting citizenship verification measures.
Federalism vs. Modernity: When the Founding Fathers called upon States to determine the manner and means of elections, they could not have imagined modern-day realities such as birth tourism or same-day voter registration against a backdrop of transnational travel in which months-long journeys crossing vast oceans by ship have been reduced to a matter of hours by aircraft.
Busted for Voting Illegally: Every election cycle, there are stories of foreign nationals (e.g. Chinese students at American universities) voting in our elections — and every time this, too, is dismissed as a fluke. While officially the incidents of such fraud are low, it is impossible to quantify a negative. For every noncitizen voter that is identified and arrested, how many more are never caught?

Given the above, why is the country divided? Enter Brennan Center for Justice, the go-to source for journalists reporting on all things election related. Brennan Center is often portrayed as “nonpartisan”. In reality, activists and attorneys have opposed elections integrity efforts across all 50 states for more than 30 years — often successfully. They are the originators of widespread understanding that noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare. Their members have long argued that voter ID is a civil rights violation. This overlooks that it’s also a civil right to secure and trusted elections — which arguably means meeting the standards the State Department and its partners recommend to the rest of the world: paper ballots, voter ID and biometrics!

While lesser appreciated, there is a federalist argument against a national citizenship verification standard in voting. States’ rights advocates argue that a national Voter ID requirement is tantamount to the federal government administering elections (violation of Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution). But this argument cuts both ways: Establishing a unified baseline is not about stripping states of any and all responsibility to administer elections, any more than it supports the Brennan Center notion that a photo ID is more disenfranchising than protective of one’s long-term civil rights interests in the voting booth. Election integrity is about making sure every lawful vote counts — arguably the civil rights issue of our time in light of globalization realities.

Until mainstream media arrived at the post-2020 election consensus that it was better to portray Donald Trump as a “Big Lie” conspiracy theorist, stories shedding light on the security of electronic voting systems were practically routine. Prominent Democrats such as Sen. Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren led the charge on greater security and transparency for voting technologies. Now media would have us believe the revisionist narrative that any and all such concerns are maladaptive reshashes of 2020 “election denialism”. It doesn’t help that voting system owners have imposed a chilling effect on public debate in recent years by way of high-profile defamation lawsuits aimed at Fox News, Newsmax and others.

The cumulative impacts of such behavior — to silence and intimidate — threatens the public interest and national security alike.

To be clear: In 2016, Russia did attempt to hack election systems in 2016 but reportedly failed. In 2020, China did attempt to influence the election outcome in the midst of a pandemic that was simultaneously leveraged to discredit the president’s fitness for reelection, long before the events of January 6. So while media may wish us to believe that Trump is doing little more than to air old grievances, he in fact sounded an alarm that voters of all political stripe are in harm’s way.

In 2025, Dominion Voting Systems was acquired by a wealthy GOP-aligned elections official, after which the last remaining defamation lawsuit with My Pillow creator, Mike Lindell was settled. It is only a matter of time before Democrats pin the blame on future election losses on Republicans, further perpetuating the erosion of public confidence as the cycle of election irregularity accusations — real or imagined! — rinses and repeats. However, Democrats aren’t the only ones to blame. Members of the President’s own party are inexplicably and inexcusably stonewalling the Save America Act in the Senate.

If the private ownership of our election technologies doesn’t raise conflicts of interest in light of the GOP-linked acquisition of the country’s largest e-voting system provider, what will drive the point home?

The good news? Polls show that the public is not nearly so divided over voter verification as mainstream media would have us believe. Perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, it is not possible to do much of anything in modern life — try receiving medical care without divulging a social security number or use a public email account without agreeing to privacy-invading Terms Of Service issued by the likes of Google and Microsoft!

So why is it that the same media that was more than happy to belabor Russian interference can no longer care less?

Perhaps it’s not a case of knowing too little — but too much. Consider other times the establishment has saved face for China, while driving home a singular and obsessive focus on Trump:

Lab Leak Denial: In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci colluded with stakeholders in government to quash the “lab leak theory”. Even after this apparent damage control effort surfaced, journalists continued to put the longtime head of the National Allergy and Infectious Diseases agency on a pedestal. Historians in a post-Trump world will no doubt cite this as one of the greatest American media failings since the perpetuation of faulty Iraq-9/11 “weapons of mass destruction” claims during the Bush-Cheney era.
Don’t Call it the “China virus”: Noting an association between China and the COVID-19 outbreak was rapidly branded as xenophobic. Speaker Nancy Pelosi took to the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown in response to emerging concerns over the origins of the pandemic. Prior to 2020, it was not the least bit uncommon for infectious diseases to carry the name of where they were thought to originate — leaving little reason to pivot except as a public relations gift to China.
Rhetoric vs. Reality: Hillary Clinton “joked” in an interview with MS Now host Rachel Maddow that China should help Democrats win elections because Russians were helping Donald Trump. When Trump made a sarcastic quip about Hillary’s missing emails in 2016, it was taken at face value — maximizing public outrage and optimizing social media clickbait.
The California Connection: The late California Sen. Dianne Feinstein employed a Chinese spy for 20 years during which time she became one of the wealthiest women in elected office thanks, in large part, to Chinese investments on the part of her husband. She also sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Honeypot Trap: A Chinese national by the name of Fang Fang became a future Rep. Eric Swalwell’s mistress — before moving on to other politically-connected targets. For years, the California congressman was permitted to remain on the House Intelligence Committee, yet enjoyed sympathetic media coverage upon his belated removal at the hands of a Republican in 2023 — resigning from Congress in 2026 not because of his romantic entanglements with a spy but in the aftermath of sexual assault allegations.
Democrat Enabled?: Was it little more than an ill-conceived oversight when President Biden moved to protect pro-China Confucius Institutes on college campuses in 2021? Or when it was revealed a portion of his illegally-obtained classified documents landed in Chinatown? When he issued pardons to PRC-connected spies as part of a prisoner swap? When the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) released a video and bank records memorandum that appeared to show Chinese efforts to buy influence with the Biden family? How can one explain “Russia real/China fake” media duplicity without considering that Chinese influence may have been even more successful shaping our narrative environment than buying off the Bidens?
America in the Dark: Whether the story involves Chinese underwriting of “No Kings” protests, refusing to call attention to the historic ~1.5 million strong Chinese birth tourism industry or a Chinese national caught operating an illegal biological laboratory in California — after which he apparently launched another in a Nevada neighborhood! — the only thing consistent about mainstream media’s response to China is their silence.

With the benefit of hindsight, the coincidental isn’t looking so accidental anymore. Of course, passing the Save America Act won’t eliminate foreign influence operations altogether. Malign actors, for example, can still leverage social media to spread divisive narratives. Similarly, e-voting is bound to carry risks because complex technology will never be as straightforward as scrutinizing a “hanging chad” on a paper ballot. Still, a national voter ID standard should go a long way towards putting a lid on the domestic hysteria of “rigged” and “stolen” elections, which has scarcely let up since George Bush faced off with Al Gore in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election.

Lord knows, there isn’t an American alive who ought to disagree with this much: The one-time hassle of citizenship verification for newly-registered voters is more than worth the savings in election denialism drama.

And that goes for both sides of the aisle.

###

SOURCES

President Trump’s July 16, 2026 Speech on Election Integrity | White House

More than a quarter-million noncitizens may be registered to vote in 4 key states, DHS alleges | Fox News

Read the Save America Act Bill | Congress

Is China funding the democratic socialist wave in US politics? | New York Post (Opinion)

Laws permitting noncitizens to vote in the United States | Ballotpedia

Why American Elections Are Flawed (and How to Fix Them) | Harvard Kennedy School

How Open Source Voting Machines Could Boost Trust in U.S. Elections | MIT Technology Review

Going from Bad to Worse: Internet to Blockchain Voting | Journal of Cybersecurity (PDF)

Chinese Government Poses ‘Broad and Unrelenting’ Threat to U.S. Critical Infrastructure, FBI Director Says | FBI (2024)