Former Vice President Kamala Harris pushed back Thursday ahead of President Donald Trump’s evening remarks on election integrity, defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election while urging Americans to make a plan to vote and verify their voter registration before November.
“Before the president gets on television tonight to peddle lies and conspiracy theories, here is what you need to know: The 2020 election was not stolen. We won, and he lost,” Harris wrote shortly before Trump addressed the country from the White House.
In a series of follow-up posts, Harris also sharply criticized the SAVE Act, calling it “voter suppression” and arguing that it fits into “a larger agenda of conservatives trying to steal power from the people.”
She added that Trump was using the issue to shift attention away from problems facing American families:
Donald Trump and his administration have done nothing to bring down the cost of housing, health care, child care, food, or gas. Donald Trump and his administration got America into a war the people do not want.
He is attempting to distract you from that reality.
Harris continued by framing the fight over voting rights as a test of political power heading into the election:
The president is scared of your power, and he wants you to believe your vote does not matter.
He wants you to lose confidence in our electoral system so you stay home this November. He knows how discontent the American people are, and he wants to make sure that you do not vote.
Because if the people vote in their numbers, Republicans will lose.
Harris concluded by saying:
I know things are heavy right now, and we have a lot of work to do.
Voting is one important step we can take to make our voices heard, prove that we are still in this fight, and put a real check on this corrupt and cruel administration.
Visit IWillVote.com to check your voter registration and your voting location right now.
During his primetime address, Trump said a Department of Homeland Security review comparing state voter-registration lists with public records identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens on voter rolls, adding that the total was likely higher because several Democrat-led states did not provide their voter files.
“Since Democrat states refused to share their voter files, the real number is actually much higher than that. Yet, even this limited analysis found more than a quarter of a million foreigners illegally registered to vote,” Trump said. He also claimed foreign governments have access to large amounts of U.S. voter data, warned that voting machines and ballot-tabulation systems are vulnerable to hacking and manipulation, and alleged that voter rolls include hundreds of thousands of noncitizens and deceased people. Trump further said the United States still has elections with no voter-identification or proof-of-citizenship requirements.
Harris, who said in April that she “might” run for president again in 2028, said in 2020 that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election and that she believed foreign interference would occur again in 2020, with Russia “at the front of the line.”
When CNN host Dana Bash asked whether such interference could cost Joe Biden the White House, Harris replied, “Theoretically, of course, yes.” Harris also pointed to what she called “classic voter suppression” and accused Trump of trying to convince Americans not to trust the integrity of the election system or believe that their votes would count, describing those issues as obstacles that people were intentionally placing in front of Americans’ ability to vote.
