GEOFF BENNETT: Welcome to the "News Hour."

The Trump administration is escalating its efforts to exert greater federal control over the nation's elections.

Today, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials with jail time if they refused to cooperate with administration requests for voter data.

It follows President Trump using a prime-time address to revive debunked claims about the integrity of American elections and to call for more restrictive voting laws ahead of the November midterms.

For a closer look at what the president said and what the facts show, we turn to our White House correspondent, Liz Landers.

DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States: No trust, no greatness.

LIZ LANDERS: New claims about old grievances with little evidence to back it up.

In a prime-time address, President Donald Trump tried to influence the conversation around election security just months before the midterms.

DONALD TRUMP: Tonight, I'm announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.

LIZ LANDERS: Armed with newly declassified files, his central target was a familiar foreign adversary, China.

DONALD TRUMP: The People's Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China's illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S.

voter files.

LIZ LANDERS: The president painted a dark picture of U.S.

election security, but a close look at the White House's own released documents reveal a different reality.

Throughout hundreds of pages of heavily redacted files, the intelligence community discusses China's attempts to potentially influence the 2020 election, though it's often presented as potential dangers, with no evidence that the attempts were successful.

In fact, one declassified document explicitly states that -- quote -- "Publicly available U.S.

voter registration information for six states was downloaded by the People's Republic of China 'redacted' in 2022, well past the 2020 election."

David Becker, a former Department of Justice attorney who runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said Trump's claims are false.

DAVID BECKER, Executive Director, Center for Election Innovation and Research: The reality is, it wasn't a hack.

As much as we might not like the fact that China is trying to acquire as much data as it can on Americans, the voter lists in the United States are public.

There's a public voter list in every state.

It's available for purchase.

Sometimes, it's free.

LIZ LANDERS: Mr.

Trump also alleged a coordinated campaign by Beijing to target his political standing... DONALD TRUMP: They fought like hell not to have a Donald Trump to win, and for good reason.

LIZ LANDERS: ... and turned his focus to the hardware of democracy itself.

DONALD TRUMP: They're vulnerable and they're easily compromised.

LIZ LANDERS: Becker said unfounded conspiracies regarding foreign tampering do not match American safeguards.

DAVID BECKER: So we have had all paper ballots in the United States since at least 2020.

The only state that doesn't have paper ballots currently is Louisiana.

LIZ LANDERS: Becker added, these ballots leave a verifiable physical trail reviewed by the voter.

DAVID BECKER: The voter has reviewed the ballot every time, and that's why we know that our vote counts are correct.

It's not that we trust the machines.

Any machine could malfunction.

Our machines are under very strict chain of custody.

They're not connected to the Internet.

LIZ LANDERS: The president did not stop at China.

He also pointed to electronic voting machines, using a foreign example to warn of domestic vulnerabilities.

DONALD TRUMP: The CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela.

And that's exactly what happened, conspiring to digitally rig their own country's elections in 2020, and that's what they did.

LIZ LANDERS: But those efforts would only be possible if every step of the election process was under Venezuelan government control, which is why the documents released conclude such efforts to manipulate vote totals would not work in the U.S.

Mr.

Trump also took aim at immigration, linking border crossings directly to the ballot box.

DONALD TRUMP: According to the DHS review, state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.

LIZ LANDERS: The report did not say how that number was reached.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was unable to say in a press conference today how many, if any, of those people actually were able to vote.

The president used the speech to pressure Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a sweeping voter I.D.

and proof of citizenship bill.

But federal databases and screening tools used to identify noncitizens have been repeatedly shown to erroneously flag United States citizens.

Inaccuracies frequently surface when the systems rely on outdated records or attempt to verify the citizenship status of naturalized Americans.

It accumulates false positives so often that a federal judge just last month blocked the Trump administration from using it, adding it has haphazardly combined and repurposed - - quote -- "the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable."

The president's repeated false claims do serve one political goal, preemptively sowing doubts ahead of the November midterms.

Becker says, despite all that, elections will run smoothly.

DAVID BECKER: I have every confidence the election is going to be secure.

It's also going to be convenient for voters to participate in.

And whoever the voters choose to serve, those people are going to take office.

LIZ LANDERS: For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Liz Landers.