Fincher: Trump’s claims about SAVE America Act do not add up

By Editor | July 21, 2026 |

“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how, but what is extraordinarily important is this – who will count the votes, and how.” – attributed to Joseph Stalin from the memoirs of Stalin’s former secretary Boris Bazhanov

If you caught President Donald Trump’s primetime address last Thursday on the American election system, there was a lot of information to process, and most of it sounded scary.

It mentioned Chinese hackers, a deep state American government, nearly 300,000 noncitizens on the voting rolls and something about President Barack Obama attempting to burn bags full of information. None of this rolls off the tongue like, “Lions, tigers and bears, oh my!” but it still gives off scary vibes.

Trump used his speech to make one last push to convince the country that his SAVE America Act must be passed before the November elections.

The problem is the SAVE America Act does not really address most of the vulnerabilities Trump discussed. First, Trump lectured about the possibility of foreign countries, particularly China, hacking our election infrastructure.

Yet his speech’s rhetoric does not match his actions. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is in charge of defending the country against cyberattacks, including in elections.

CBS News reported that around 1,000 CISA employees – approximately a third of its workforce – had lost or left their jobs in 2025, and its budget was cut by several hundred million dollars.

CISA does not even have a director a year and a half into Trump’s term because the U.S. Senate refused to approve Trump’s appointment, Sean Plankey. Democrats cannot filibuster to block votes on presidential appointments, so Republicans must have had serious reservations about Plankey.

Furthermore, previously declassified national intelligence showed Russia likely attempted to interfere in the electoral process at a greater level than China did in 2020, though a report from the government’s National Intelligence Council found neither country took any action that would alter any vote totals.

Trump mentioned China or the Chinese government 20 times in his remarks while only once mentioning Russia.

Second, Trump complained about a deep state – meaning a group or groups of government employees secretly undermining his policies – hiding information from him. Again, the SAVE America Act does not address this.

Trump is in charge of the federal government and appoints the leadership of these government agencies. If his appointees are unable to ferret out these bad actors, then either they do not really exist or Trump is appointing leaders who are too incompetent to find and remove them.

Neither scenario is a good look for the president.

Third, the one part of Trump’s grievances where the SAVE America Act might actually have an effect is on voter rolls, but it is unlikely to make a difference in the manner he suggested. His claim of more than a quarter million noncitizens on voter rolls is a gross exaggeration.

Most of the names found by software programs used to connect noncitizens to voter lists are usually false positives consisting of former legal foreign residents who have since gained citizenship but whose names are matched based on outdated information from when they were not yet citizens. Their statuses are generally rectified after a little digging.

For example, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen made a similar stunning announcement in August 2024, claiming 3,251 noncitizens were on Alabama’s voter rolls. A court order later disclosed Allen admitted that the number cited in his press release actually included thousands of U.S. citizens.

He later revised that number down to only 186 noncitizens on the voter rolls. Of that number, he believes 25 have cast a vote in an Alabama election. In January, Allen said he has turned those 25 names over to law enforcement, but since then his office has reported only two of those people are facing charges for illegally voting.

Noncitizens should not be voting in federal elections at all, but Allen has only shown is how rare it is for noncitizens to slip through the cracks and be able to cast to vote. He unintentionally proved the system already works without adding additional federal mandates for voting.

The Democratic Party used to be the only party that demanded greater national control over the election process. The Republican Party believed in states’ rights to run their own elections to the greatest extent possible as is implied in the U.S. Constitution.

The real scariest part of Trump’s national address is the belief that state and local governments should be empowered to run their own elections is no longer supported by either party.

Brandon Fincher is an academic journal editor at Auburn University. He lives in Opelika with his wife, daughter and two Labrador retrievers. You can find his writing at brandonfincher.com.