Declassified evidence points to Beijing seeking personal data for espionage, not election interference.
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State officials said federal authorities never notified them of a Chinese hack affecting their voter registration systems, casting doubt on President Donald Trump’s claims of vulnerabilities in U.S. elections.
Officials in 12 of the 15 states named in intelligence reports released by the White House as having voter rolls “compromised” by China said officials never notified them of a data breach, a standard step for federal law enforcement when hacks are discovered. The other three states and Washington, D.C., did not respond. Trump alleged in a July 16 prime-time speech that the data had been “bought, stolen or hacked.”
The states’ responses and newly declassified intelligence reports suggest China obtained voter data from other sources, such as political parties or companies that compile and combine it with other information to target voters or consumers. Experts said the effort appeared aimed at collecting data on Americans for intelligence purposes, not interfering with voting.
The declassified documents do not contain evidence that China ever tampered with voter rolls or ballots, or had the ability to, consistent with U.S. spy agencies’ consensus that China did not try to tamper with election infrastructure in 2020. Voter files are public records available online or on request.
“They haven’t changed data,” Pamela Smith, chief executive of election security organization Verified Voting, said of America’s foreign adversaries. “They haven’t modified data. They haven’t deleted data. They just have some data.”
Trump used the newly released intelligence to pressure Senate Republicans for new requirements for voter ID and proof of citizenship. But his claims were met with skepticism, even from some supporters, eliciting frustration from the White House.
On Thursday, the task force reviewing spy agencies’ handling of intelligence on foreign election interference released a new statement, repeating Trump’s claim that China and its proxies “bought, stole or hacked” voter records and claiming that the cache included some data that was not publicly available.
The task force did not provide additional evidence to support those claims. Instead, it pointed to one of the documents released on July 16 saying a Chinese hacker obtained “publicly available U.S. voter registration information” from commercial websites in January 2022, too late to have any bearing on the 2020 election.
That memo, whose date was not disclosed, said a Chinese “CNE Actor” — jargon for a “computer network exploitation,” generally known as hacking — downloaded voter registration data for six states from commercial websites. The hacker also tried to access an individual Ohio voter’s registration application, the memo said.
U.S. officials did not know why the Chinese hacker took the information, the memo said, but it could “in theory” be used for future hacking or “election influence.”
The memo said officials should notify the victims of the data breach. But the six states named in this report — Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Oklahoma and Rhode Island — all said they were never informed of their voter data being hacked.
“Florida voter registration data has not been hacked,” said Gretl Plessinger, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State, led by Cord Byrd, a Republican appointee. The state’s voter file is publicly available online, which she said was how the Chinese obtained it.
Connecticut’s voter registration system is not connected to the internet, said Matthew Clyburn, a spokesman for Connecticut Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas, a Democrat. The FBI has repeatedly asked the office to review voter data found on the dark web, and each time the information matched publicly available data with no confidential information, he said.
A spokeswoman for Rhode Island’s secretary of state, a Democrat, said the White House has not provided any evidence of inappropriate data use, and the data referenced in the declassified documents was all publicly available. The spokeswoman, Faith Chybowski, suggested the Trump administration is hypocritical because it has unsuccessfully sued Rhode Island — as it has 29 other states — for its voter rolls, including confidential information.
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Federal officials informed the Ohio secretary of state’s office about 10 years ago that China might have accessed publicly available election data, the same information available to anyone with an internet connection, spokesman Ben Kindel said. The office is led by Republican Frank LaRose.
Election officials are constantly thwarting hacking attempts, and they have triggers that would quickly alert them if anyone got into their systems, according to Tammy Patrick, chief program officer at the Election Center, an association of state election officials.
“It is not a good thing that there were attempted breaches of voter registration systems, but that is a daily occurrence in the United States of America that election officials safeguard against,” she said.
The White House pointed to another undated declassified document released on July 16 that lists Chinese databases targeted as of 2019, including a nationwide set of 204.8 million voter records. Because no official state or federal database containing nationwide registered voters exists, the document suggests the data came from a party or company, not from penetrating an official election system.
Acquiring that voter data was part of wider Chinese efforts to collect bulk data on Americans, the document said, including information from medical groups, schools, business service companies, internet companies, social networks, unions, professional associations and think tanks. Chinese hackers stole federal government personnel records, Anthem medical data and United Airlines data all in 2015, Equifax credit histories in 2017, and Marriott hotel files in 2018.
“It’s just another drop in the big data bucket that allows for better targeting of intelligence targets abroad,” said Dakota Cary, a China expert at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, and SentinelOne, a cybersecurity company. “It’s helpful when the security services have to figure out who they want to talk to and to learn about somebody before going out and trying to pitch or recruit them or coerce them.”
Another heavily redacted document with no date said China planned to use voter registration data from 18 states “to conduct U.S. person matching and public opinion analysis” and to identify “important U.S. targets.”
Still, the White House identified “no altered record or changed vote, and provides no evidence a foreign actor touched any technical part of the 2020 election,” said Julia Curlee, who served as a director for intelligence programs in Trump’s White House until last year and recently resigned from the CIA after 20 years as an analyst.
Without evidence that the hackers broke into the systems that states use to operate elections, there would be no way for them to add, delete or modify voter registrations.
The White House task force’s statement on Thursday said it was approved by the heads of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security. Those officials did not put their own names to the statement. The White House statement did not mention other major intelligence agencies, such as the FBI.
For comparison, then-DNI James R. Clapper Jr. and DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson put their names on a statement in October 2016 warning of Russian interference in the next month’s presidential election.
Experts also noted that the Trump administration has not taken any action to punish China for obtaining the data, indicating the danger is not as severe as the White House was suggesting.
“It took place a long time ago. I think China is maybe a little bit different today than it was then,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on July 21. “We do things to them too, it’s not a one-way street. But we’ll be talking to them.”
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Warren Strobel and Ellen Nakashima contributed reporting.
