Many allegations, little evidence: unpacking the China election-interference records

Newly declassified US intelligence records show Chinese actors collected or acquired voter information covering millions of Americans and that Beijing developed capabilities that could be used to influence political opinion, but the documents do not substantiate US President Donald Trump’s claims that China stole the records of 220 million voters or manipulated the 2020 election. In a nationally televised address on Thursday, Trump accused China of carrying out a sweeping campaign to interfere in the election he lost to Joe Biden, alleging that Beijing illicitly obtained about 220 million American voter records and sought to fabricate ballots in favour of Biden. The documents released by the White House provide new details about China’s collection and analysis of US voter information, as well as an internal dispute among American intelligence officials over whether Beijing’s broader political activities amounted to election influence. But they offer no evidence that China altered voter rolls, produced fraudulent ballots or interfered with vote counting, tabulation or certification in 2020. Several of the records describe the voter information as publicly available, commercially obtained or drawn from data sets that may previously have been leaked, complicating the White House’s assertion that the records were “compromised” by China. One intelligence report says an unidentified Chinese entity possessed a document listing data sets believed to have been leaked or compromised. Among them was an unspecified collection containing about 204.8 million US voter records from 2016, including names, ages, telephone numbers and addresses. Documented interest but no specific action The document does not establish that the records represented 204.8 million individual voters. The data set could contain duplicate, historical or aggregated entries associated with the same people across different jurisdictions or periods. Nor does the report identify who originally obtained the data, explain how it was acquired or demonstrate that a Chinese actor penetrated a government election system. The intelligence assessment says only that China had shown a “newly identified interest” in US elections. It says the information could, “in theory”, be used to support future cyber or influence operations, mine personal information about US citizens, conduct identity matching and analyse American public opinion. However, the report does not describe any specific action China took based on the information and explicitly states that the motivation for its collection was unknown. Another intelligence document says a Chinese “computer network exploitation” or Cyber Network Exploitation actor downloaded publicly available voter-registration information from commercial websites in January 2022. The data covered Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Oklahoma and Rhode Island and included information dating from 2013 to 2021. The actor also unsuccessfully attempted to download an Ohio voter registration application from a state government website. Some of the data included names, birth dates, addresses, telephone numbers, party affiliations, voting histories, polling locations and, in certain cases, military affiliations. The distinction between acquiring voter information and penetrating an election system is significant because many US states make portions of their voter files available to political parties, campaigns, researchers or commercial vendors, although access rules and the information disclosed vary. Large-scale collection of such material can nevertheless pose national security risks. Voter records can be combined with other personal information to identify government officials, military personnel and politically influential individuals, or to facilitate spear-phishing, identity matching and highly targeted influence operations. Intelligence community split over China’s intentions The documents also shed new light on a long-standing disagreement within the US intelligence community over China’s intentions during the 2020 presidential campaign. A newly released CIA note summarising sensitive reporting from 2018 to 2020 says the Communist Party sought to prevent Trump’s re-election and considered using economic and political pressure against his supporters. According to the note, Beijing studied states and economic sectors that supported Trump in 2016, and considered imposing financial costs to encourage businesses and political constituencies to lobby his administration. The reporting also described efforts to influence business executives, campaign donors, academics, former government officials and journalists. Two additional intelligence summaries assess that China sought to portray the Trump administration negatively by highlighting racial tensions, immigration, gun violence, military spending, Washington’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and US policy in the South China Sea. The summaries also allege that China had developed a social-media influence apparatus capable of distributing such themes through TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms. According to the documents, Beijing could use overt and covert influencers, as well as contributors to mainstream media, to shape public opinion, including perceptions of senior US officials. But the heavily redacted documents provide limited information about the evidence underpinning those assessments. Other contemporaneous intelligence records released by the administration reflect more cautious judgments. A CIA assessment published in July 2020 said Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors had targeted Biden campaign personnel and collected information from voter databases, polling companies and political organisations. But the agency assessed at the time that Beijing did not intend to intervene covertly to sway the election’s outcome. The document also says that spear-phishing attempts against campaign personnel, as disclosed by Google, were unsuccessful. An August 2020 National Intelligence Council assessment similarly said China preferred Trump’s defeat but believed a concerted attempt to influence the presidential election could backfire. The assessment concluded that Beijing was collecting political intelligence and evaluating the consequences of either candidate’s victory, while leaving open the possibility that it could take more direct action if Chinese leaders believed existing tools were insufficient. The disagreement was ultimately reflected in the intelligence community’s public assessment of foreign threats to the election, released in March 2021. Most agencies concluded with high confidence that China had considered but not deployed influence operations intended to change the outcome. The National Intelligence Officer for Cyber dissented, assessing with moderate confidence that Beijing had taken some steps to undermine Trump’s re-election prospects. Both positions agreed, however, that there was no evidence China interfered with the technical conduct of the election. The declassified files add evidence supporting the minority view that at least some Chinese activities could be classified as election influence. They do not overturn the broader finding that China did not manipulate voting processes. Questionable claims of FBI cover-up Trump also accused FBI and intelligence officials of suppressing information about an alleged Chinese operation to produce fraudulent votes for Biden. That allegation centres on a raw FBI report from September 2020 claiming the Chinese government planned to manufacture fraudulent US driver’s licences and use them to create tens of thousands of mail-in votes. The newly released internal correspondence shows that FBI personnel recalled the report and debated whether to reissue it. One employee expressed concern that the report contradicted congressional testimony by FBI director Christopher Wray and worried that political considerations could influence its handling. But the same records document substantial concerns about the intelligence itself. The allegation had passed from an unidentified purported Chinese government contact, via a sub-source, before reaching an FBI confidential source. An FBI employee described its veracity as questionable, while other officials said portions of the source’s reporting veered into conspiracy theories and did not appear authoritative. An inquiry involving US Customs and Border Protection also found that the overwhelming majority of counterfeit licences intercepted at the time appeared to have been ordered by people aged between 18 and 20 seeking to evade alcohol restrictions, not to register fraudulent voters. After further discussions, FBI Albany personnel agreed with the bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force that the report should not be reissued. The documents therefore reveal internal concerns about how politically sensitive intelligence was handled, but do not verify the alleged Chinese ballot operation or establish that evidence of such a scheme was deliberately concealed. China rejected Trump’s accusations on Friday, with foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian describing them as fabricated and urging Washington to stop using election-related allegations to vilify Beijing. Targeting Trump specifically makes little strategic sense Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on China, said Trump’s remarks suggested he was not fully confident in his own claims. Scissors said Beijing could have an interest in sowing instability in the US, but targeting Trump specifically would make little strategic sense, given the president’s relatively dovish approach towards China. “China trying to get him out of office would make it as big a political enemy as there could be. And yet the president didn’t mention a single action in retaliation,” Scissors said. “[Trump’s] actions and inactions make it clear that he doesn’t believe what he just said.” Trump’s claims come as his administration presses Congress to adopt stricter voter-identification and proof-of-citizenship requirements ahead of November’s midterm elections. The declassified material could strengthen arguments that the United States needs to protect voter information from foreign collection and establish clearer security standards for data held by commercial vendors. It does not, however, show that Chinese activity changed the result of the 2020 presidential election.