President Donald Trump is expected to deliver a speech Thursday night on “newly declassified intelligence on investigations into US elections” and “voting machine vulnerabilities.”
Trump’s planned primetime address is just the latest in his years-long effort to spread baseless claims of election fraud to sow doubt into the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
The speech comes as Republicans fear they’ll lose control of Congress in November, amid poor polling and dismal approval ratings for the president. Democrats and election security experts have warned that Trump and his allies intend to interfere in the elections and challenge the results if Republicans lose.
As the state with the highest voter turnout in the nation, Minnesota has already declared its voting system as “the gold standard for balancing accessibility and security.”
The Secretary of State’s Office under Steve Simon has “largely established adequate procedures for processing and maintaining voter registration records,” the Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA) found in its 2026 Voter Registration report. The report also found that Simon’s office did its part in helping counties maintain accurate lists of registered voters and provided useful guidance for local election staff.
Trump has spent years attacking Minnesota’s elections, claiming he actually won the state in 2020, when he lost to Joe Biden by 7 percentage points.
Just this week, Trump continued his attack on Minnesota’s elections system and Democrats, stating: “If the elections in Minnesota weren’t RIGGED, any Republican could win, but they were, and that is why nobody has won there since Richard Nixon.”
Trump also told Oval Office reporters last week he “won Minnesota three times,” adding he won “almost every county, but they didn’t give it to me.”
A perpetuator of these lies is GOP gubernatorial candidate Mike Lindell, who Trump endorsed this week.
Lindell was sued by Dominion Voting Systems in a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit for claiming the company rigged the 2020 election against Trump. The 2021 lawsuit was dropped last month after a “confidential settlement” was agreed upon.
During Trump’s second term, his administration has repeatedly tried to interfere with Minnesota’s elections, demanding a copy of the statewide voter registration list in August of 2025.
Simon asked how the DOJ would use that data, and what violations, if any, the DOJ alleged. His office got no response before the DOJ filed a lawsuit a month later.
As of January 2026, Minnesota’s motion to dismiss the case and the federal government’s motion to get the list are pending.
Most recently, on July 7, the Assistant Attorney General for the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, sent Simon a letter, insinuating non-citizens may be receiving ballots and threatening stiff penalties over alleged non-citizen voting.
Simon responded on July 10, stating clearly that this isn’t an issue in Minnesota.
“Minnesota’s elections are fair, accurate, honest, and secure. Our office has been exceedingly transparent with the Department of Justice, providing multiple detailed responses to questions about the processes we use to successfully maintain accurate voter lists,” Simon said in a press release last week. “At best, this latest letter is an unnecessary distraction from administering the elections that are underway across the state right now.”
According to a 2024 paper from the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota, there were only 3 state convictions of green card holders for unlawful voting or registration in Minnesota from 2015 to 2024, representing 0.00002% of total votes cast.
