Documents posted by the White House on Thursday night featured an analysis by the C.I.A. last month that assessed intelligence collected over nearly two decades about the Venezuelan government’s ability to rig elections through voting machine technology.
It found that officials there had “some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems” to influence the outcomes of races in Venezuela. But it cautioned that there was no definitive evidence that such technology — chiefly created by a company called Smartmatic — had been used to commit “large-scale electronic fraud” in Venezuela, and determined that the Venezuelan government did not have the ability to rig elections outside its own country.
“Neither Smartmatic nor the Venezuelan government had the capability to manipulate the outcome of an election outside Venezuela,” the analysis said.
In his speech Thursday night, President Trump distorted the findings of the C.I.A. analysis. “Today we are releasing documents that show the C.I.A. obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela,” he said. “And that’s exactly what happened. Conspiring to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020, and that’s what they did. This reporting included precise details about methods to regime develop — to digitally alter vote totals in ways that could not be detected.”
Smartmatic has long figured prominently in conspiracy theories about the 2020 election in the United States, which President Trump lost to Joseph R. Biden Jr. But the company’s role in that race was exceedingly small, restricted to a single county: Los Angeles County in California. The limited part the company played in the election made it virtually impossible for its products to have affected the outcome of the entire presidential race that year.
“It is mathematically impossible” for Smartmatic’s ballot marking devices “to have changed the results of the 2020 election,” Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan wrote in an order in September 2025 supporting Smartmatic’s defamation claims against the prominent election denier Mike Lindell.
“The only evidence in the record before the court concerning Smartmatic’s involvement in elections in other countries shows that Smartmatic has never stolen any election, and its technology has never been used to manipulate ballots,” Judge Bryan added.
The C.I.A. analysis said that even though Smartmatic had often been blamed for rigging elections, it actually has a history of fighting against voting fraud. For example, the company ceased operations in Venezuela in 2018 after publicly accusing the government of Nicolás Maduro, the president at the time, of “inflating voter turnout by over one million votes” during a 2017 legislative election, according to the C.I.A. analysis.
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