Explainer: How Trump could use his speech to target voting machines and promote election chaos

President Donald Trump is expected to allege in his primetime address Thursday night that foreign governments — likely China — meddled with election systems in the 2020 presidential race, citing newly declassified intelligence information, multiple media outlets reported.

In reality, U.S. intelligence has concluded that no foreign actor altered any aspect of the voting or vote-counting process, or even tried to.

But election experts warn that Trump may try to use his false and misleading claims to crack down on the use of electronic voting machines — a longstanding prong of Trump’s anti-voting crusade — perhaps by ordering the decertification of machines over alleged vulnerabilities.

It wouldn’t be simple. Trump likely would not be able to unilaterally decertify the machines — let alone prevent states from using them. The decertification process is governed by rules and procedures that the president has little formal role in.

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Still, that might not stop Trump from trying. After all, decertification could leave some states scrambling to re-jigger their voting procedures, potentially spurring election chaos.

And it would serve Trump’s broader goal of undermining faith in America’s elections in the run-up to the 2026 midterms.

Adding to concerns is that Trump last week fired the members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the federal agency in charge of certification, potentially allowing him to control the panel himself. He could even try to sidestep the EAC through an emergency order asserting control over elections — something some of his supporters have lately urged him to issue.

Last week, Trump decapitated the EAC, a four-member, bipartisan commission designed to help states administer elections and set standards to certify the voting systems used in all U.S. elections.

The dismissals weren’t Trump’s first interactions with the agency. In fact, in his first anti-voting order last year, Trump ordered the commission to decertify all EAC-certified voting systems currently in use and recertify them under new guidelines he demanded.

Courts quickly blocked Trump’s order to the EAC, finding that the president has no authority over federal election administration.

But with the EAC now without commissioners, its staff — specifically its executive director — likely still have the authority to certify or decertify voting machines under existing standards.

Trump and officials around him may now be wagering that they have a better shot at curtailing voting machines if they focus their pressure on one official instead of dealing with commissioners, some of whom were Democrats deeply opposed to Trump’s anti-voting agenda.

Such an effort might well be blocked in court. District courts have established that neither federal law nor the Constitution gives the president the authority to dictate the certification process.