(José Niño, Headline USA) The United States expressed its anger when Great Britain revealed two years ago that China hacked its voter registration databases. But American intelligence concealed its own secret at the time, having known since 2020 that Beijing also obtained access to American voter registration data, according to documents reviewed by Just the News and interviews with officials possessing direct knowledge.
“[Redacted] Chinese intelligence officials analyzed multiple U.S. states’ [Redacted] election voter registration data, [Redacted] to conduct public opinion analysis on the 2020 US general election,” stated a once highly classified April 2020 National Intelligence Council memo entitled “Cyber Operations Enabling Expansive Authoritarianism.”
The Biden administration heavily redacted the memo and quietly declassified it two years after it was written, where it has escaped most public notice. Six years later, the U.S. intelligence community has still not fully informed the American people or Congress about the scope of evidence it possesses regarding China’s actions, how Beijing acquired the data, and what operations it has undertaken or considered.
Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters, President Donald Trump’s point man for the 2026 midterm elections, said he had no knowledge of the intelligence. “What’s crazy is the fact that China has access to these voter rolls, but we don’t,” Gruters told the John Solomon Reports podcast.
Current and former officials told Just the News that U.S. intelligence agencies hold several raw reports dating to spring 2020 demonstrating that China accessed American voter registration data across multiple states, along with finished intelligence products referencing such breaches, including at least one presidential daily briefing.
“There’s as much evidence of China’s access to U.S. voter reg files as what eventually prompted outcry in Britain,” one intelligence official who served under Biden told Just the News.
Former NIC officer Christopher Porter, who handled the China cyber hacking portfolio under Trump and attempted to sound the alarm as a whistleblower, confirmed the evidence is solid and extensive. “We knew by April 2020 that Chinese intelligence had voter registration data from multiple states and was analyzing it with an eye toward the 2020 election,” Porter said. “But CIA blocked efforts to inform President Trump and later stopped many of these reports from being made available to Congress.”
“During the Biden administration, when I raised concern about the legal requirement to share these and other reports with Congressional oversight, they changed my job to exclude me from elections and then fired me,” he added.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s team has received briefings on China’s access to voter registration data and is working to declassify raw reports for potential public release, officials said.
Voter registration data contains sensitive personally identifying information, including driver’s license data and partial Social Security numbers. The Brennan Center has noted this data raises “serious privacy and security concerns.” A foreign power could exploit such data to create fake social personas designed to influence elections or to submit absentee ballot requests for fraudulent votes.
CIA Director of Public Affairs Liz Lyons said Director John Ratcliffe “was among the first to raise alarms about China’s efforts to influence the 2020 election” and that “the integrity of our elections is critical to our republic.”
Last June, FBI Director Kash Patel turned over to Congress a long concealed intelligence report from 2020 which raised concerns that China planned to mass produce fake U.S. driver’s licenses to swing the election to Biden through fraudulent mail in ballots. The FBI information report bore the title “Chinese Government Production and Export of Fraudulent US Driver’s Licenses to Chinese Sympathizers in the United States, in Order to Create Tens of Thousands of Fraudulent Mail-in Votes for US Presidential Candidate Joe Biden, in late August 2020.”
The report was abruptly recalled in September 2020, with spy agencies instructed to delete the information before they could properly investigate its claims.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection had stated in July 2020 that from January through June of that year, its officers “seized 1,513 shipments with fraudulent documents — a total of 19,888 counterfeit US drivers’ licenses” and that “the majority of these shipments were arriving from China and Hong Kong.”
The revelation arrives as the Senate debates the Save America Act, a top priority for Trump that would impose citizenship verification and voter ID requirements. Several senators privately told Just the News they have never been informed about any Chinese effort to access voter registration data.
José Niño is the deputy editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/JoseAlNino
