Five Foreign Election Conspiracy Theories Making the Rounds Again

After the 2020 U.S. presidential election, a flurry of conspiracy theories emerged alleging that President Trump’s reelection victory was “stolen” through massive fraud. These theories were all false; the 2020 election wasn’t rigged or stolen. Over 50 court cases rejected Trump and his allies’ claims as meritless.

Nonetheless, Trump remains unable to cope with his loss. Recent news coverage suggests an executive order designed to consolidate power for the upcoming 2026 midterm elections is imminent. A possible leaked draft indicates that the order might attempt to “ban mail ballots and voting machines as vectors of foreign interference.” Based on Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s notable presence at FBI searches of election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, it appears likely that foreign interference and national security will be used as pretexts for the executive order. And on Feb. 28, at the start of the U.S.’s bombing campaign against Iran, Trump posted to Truth Social, “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump.” 

There was no meaningful foreign interference in the 2020 election; the Iranian interference was inconsequential, identified as it happened, and communicated to the public immediately. But given Gabbard’s demonstrated willingness to bulk-declassify documents and mislead the public about what records say, there’s a good chance we may hear that she has uncovered “evidence” of foreign fraud that no one else could find.

From tales of Venezuelan vote switching to Italian satellites to a shootout at a German server farm, several foreign-focused conspiracy theories cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election in extraordinarily far-fetched ways. Many were largely confined to conspiratorial or far-right media ecosystems; the average person would likely not have encountered them, nor taken their ideas seriously. But now these theories may matter again. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was arrested, and there is speculation that he may try to secure a deal. Notorious election truther Sidney Powell has recently attended meetings with Department of Justice officials. And then there’s Gabbard’s highly unusual appearance at Fulton’s election office. The Trump administration appears to be shopping for receipts—trying to find “evidence” to justify preexisting conspiracy theories. It’s worth understanding the allegations that circulated in 2020, and how thoroughly they were debunked, in the event the Trump administration attempts to dredge up similar theories to justify unprecedented consolidation of federal power over elections.

Here are the five major foreign-interference conspiracy theories of 2020, what was actually claimed, and why none of it was true.

Dominion, Smartmatic, and the Venezuelan Communist Plot

The Claim

At a Nov. 19, 2020, press conference, Sidney Powell and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani claimed that Dominion Voting Machines and Smartmatic, an election software company, were part of a communist plot involving Venezuela, China, and Cuba, and the “massive influence of communist money” in the 2020 election. They name-checked antifa and George Soros. Powell and Giuliani alleged that Dominion was founded in Venezuela at then-President Hugo Chávez’s direction, that votes were counted in Germany and Spain, and that all of this proved that both Dominion and Smartmatic’s software had interfered with the vote count. The pair also claimed that China had a “substantial presence in Venezuela” and a desire not to see Trump remain in office. Powell stated that an algorithm in the machines had switched votes from Trump to President Biden, and that when Trump’s vote totals nonetheless overwhelmed the rigged algorithm, fraudsters procured fake Biden ballots to make up the difference. “Our votes are counted in Germany and in Spain by a company owned by affiliates of Chávez and Maduro,” Giuliani told the press, “Did you ever believe that was true?”

The Facts

No actual evidence exists to support Powell’s and Giuliani’s allegations. Dominion (now acquired) was founded in Canada. Dominion machines did not use Smartmatic software; the companies are competitors. Recounts and audits in key states, including Georgia, showed that machine tallies matched hand-counted ballots. Chávez, the supposed mastermind of this plot, died in 2013. There is zero evidence that any “communist money” influenced the vote. In 2017, Smartmatic actually blew the whistle on fraud in the Venezuelan National Constituent Assembly election that benefited Maduro, one of the leaders it supposedly conspired with.

How It Spread

These meritless accusations reached a mass audience by way of Trump’s own legal team. The Powell-Giuliani press conference was covered live by major cable networks. From there, One American News Network (OANN), Newsmax, and Fox News gave substantial airtime to these claims. Dominion and Smartmatic each sued for defamation, which led major right-wing channels that ran the claims to backtrack. Some eventually paid significant settlements. 

Why It Matters Now

Maduro sits in U.S. custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York, facing charges of drug trafficking and money laundering, among others. He will likely try to negotiate a deal. Given the Trump administration’s track record, it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which some made-up method of rigging machines is offered up as a “confession”—proof that this evidence-free theory was right all along—in return for a lighter recommended prison sentence or for Maduro to go entirely free.

The Frankfurt Server Raid and the Scytl Shootout

The Claim

In mid-November 2020, a story went viral alleging that the U.S. Army had raided a server facility in Frankfurt, Germany. The supposed target was the office of Scytl, a Spanish election software company. The theory claimed that Scytl’s servers hosted the “real” 2020 vote tallies, which had Trump winning in a 410 electoral vote landslide. An electoral map circulated as part of the theory showed Trump winning California by a wide margin. Some versions of the story included accounts of a literal shootout, with fatalities, between U.S. Army soldiers and rogue CIA operatives who were guarding the servers to protect the fraud—a dramatic secret battle between different wings of the U.S. government on foreign soil.

The Facts

Scytl, a Spanish company, is headquartered in Barcelona, Spain. The company issued a statement responding to the absurd story: “We do not have servers or offices in Frankfurt. The US army has not seized anything from Scytl in Barcelona, Frankfurt or anywhere else. We are not owned by George Soros and have never been connected to him.” The U.S. Army and the CIA issued formal denials about the supposed operation; a CIA spokesperson confirmed that CIA Director Gina Haspel had not been killed in the nonexistent fighting.

How It Spread

Influencers and political elites saw an anonymous tweet and boosted it. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) reiterated the theory on Newsmax, saying he had been told about “a tweet in German” that indicated Scytl was raided. Sidney Powell, Lara Logan, Lin Wood, and others promoted it, along with Charlie Kirk. 

Why It Matters Now

It seems far too far-fetched to be picked back up, but the Scytl theory established the idea that “real” voting data exists on secret computers somewhere overseas.

“Italygate”: Italian Satellites and the Rome Embassy Coup Plot

The Claim

“Italygate” alleged that operatives in Italy used military satellites to remotely switch Trump votes to Biden. On Jan. 6, 2021—the same day Congress certified Biden’s win—a fringe group called Nations in Action issued a press release claiming an Italian defense contractor employee, Arturo D’Elia, had confessed to an election-hacking scheme in which satellites built by Leonardo, an Italian aerospace company, were used to flip votes. “Americans and elected officials now have proof that the election was indeed stolen,” the release declared. Rogue U.S. Embassy employees in Rome were purportedly behind the hack, in cahoots with Pope Francis. 

The Facts

The purported whistleblower himself said that he had no involvement in any such operation. The Italian government and the Leonardo satellite company issued denials. More basically, there is no election infrastructure in the U.S. that is connected to any Italian satellites. Votes are counted locally on paper or on machines that are not networked to satellite systems. 

How It Spread

While #Italygate (#ItalyDidIt) originated within QAnon communities, it followed the familiar pattern of laundering from fringe to legitimacy. Trump’s then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows attempted to move it beyond the internet by pressuring the Department of Justice to look into the claims. A senior Justice Department official called the theory “pure insanity” and Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen refused to meet with the theory’s proponents. (Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller did, however, make an inquiry with an Italian military contact.) 

Why It Matters Now

In late 2020, when Trump appeared almost certain to leave office given his repeated losses in court, senior officials dismissed this theory out of hand and largely refused to act on it. That institutional resistance no longer exists. The Justice Department, intelligence community, and Defense Department are now led by loyalists who have shown little inclination to push back on Trump’s preferences. Theories that were once absurd for even Trump’s own appointees may now find a more receptive audience. And Trump himself raised this theory again in January 2026.

The Bamboo Ballots: 40,000 Votes Flown in From Asia

The Claim

During the Arizona State Senate’s “audit” of Maricopa County ballots, a theory circulated that 40,000 fraudulent ballots had been shipped secretly into the state from somewhere in Asia—South Korea in some versions, and China in others. These counterfeit ballots could be detected ostensibly by the presence of bamboo fibers in the paper. Auditors working for Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based firm with no election audit experience led by conspiracy theorist Doug Logan, attempted to use high-definition cameras and ultraviolet lights to inspect individual ballots for traces of bamboo.

The Facts

The CEO of Runbeck Election Services, the company that manufactured the Maricopa County ballots, told CNN he had no idea what the auditors were looking for. Audit observers reported that Cyber Ninjas counters initially used blue pens—which can be read by voting machines and could be used to alter ballots—until a reporter caught the error. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes later released documents from the investigation, stating that the results of the “exhaustive and extensive investigation show what we have suspected for over two years—the 2020 election in Arizona was conducted fairly and accurately.” The Cyber Ninjas’s own final report found that Biden did, in fact, win Arizona.

How It Spread

The bamboo theory was one of several bizarre elements of the Cyber Ninjas audit, which was itself a content-generation machine. Audit workers told journalists they would only speak to OANN. The audit spawned copycat efforts in other swing states, extending the conspiracy’s reach far beyond Arizona.

Why It Matters Now

The bamboo ballots theory planted the seed among people inclined to doubt the election results that foreign countries might physically manufacture and ship ballots into the United States. Because the Trump administration is unlikely to scapegoat Russia (given its actual interference in the 2016 election), theories about China and Venezuela are the most likely to be dredged back up. The Cyber Ninjas CEO tweeted in December 2020 that “the parallels between the statistical analysis of Venezuela and this year’s election are astonishing”—connecting the bamboo theory back to the narrative that Venezuela manipulated Dominion’s voting machines. 

Mike Lindell, the China Hack, and the Packet Captures That Weren’t

The Claim

In a two-hour online “documentary” titled “Absolute Proof” released in early 2021, My Pillow founder and Trump campaign donor Mike Lindell claimed that voting machines had been hacked by China. He said he possessed technical data—internet traffic “packet captures”—proving that the Chinese Communist Party had remotely switched votes to Biden. He ran a cyber symposium that promised to reveal conclusive evidence of this foreign hacking, alongside a $5 million prize to anyone who could “Prove Mike Wrong” by refuting his data.

The Facts

Robert Zeidman, a Trump voter, did just that. The software forensics expert wrote a comprehensive report that concluded Lindell’s files contained no legitimate election data at all. He found that some of Lindell’s files were random nonsense, including several that were simply numbers typed in a text file. None of the files were the promised packet captures that revealed the conclusive evidence of election fraud. Lindell refused to pay Zeidman. In April 2023, an arbitration panel ruled that Zeidman was entitled to the $5 million prize, but the ruling was later overturned by an appeals court.

How It Spread

OANN ran Lindell’s “Absolute Proof” documentary along with a disclaimer noting it was “opinions only and not intended to be taken as facts.” The cyber symposium generated significant coverage, though much of it was skeptical. Lindell’s promotion was relentless and self-funded, giving the theory a persistence that outlasted the news cycle. 

Why It Matters Now

Trump has spent the intervening years since his 2020 loss undermining the reputation of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), one of the agencies that debunked the claims. In April 2025, he issued a presidential memorandum targeting Chris Krebs, who ran the agency in 2020, saying Krebs was a security risk because he’d “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.”

More broadly, FBI Director Kash Patel has recently declassified other baseless allegations suggesting that China might have fabricated ballots or fake IDs to swing the election. The institutional credibility of the agencies that would normally debunk these claims has been systematically degraded, making it easier to assert that the debunkers were wrong all along.

There Was Real Foreign Interference in 2020

It’s important to emphasize that there was real foreign interference in 2020—and in 2016, 2018, 2022, and 2024. Foreign actors linked to Russia, Iran, and China run social media influence operations regularly now. Trump didn’t fabricate the 2020 or 2024 Iranian interference; it happened. In one of their more brazen operations, Iranian hackers posed as the Proud Boys in 2020 and sent threatening emails to tens of thousands of registered Democrats. (Two of the hackers were later prosecuted by the Department of Justice.) Lawfare covered Iran’s escalation to hack-and-leak efforts—a tactic Russia had used in 2016 to great effect—in 2024, as it happened. Both of these efforts were discovered and attributed long prior to Election Day in their relevant years. No votes were altered. These were not sustained influence efforts.

Indeed, because of diligent detection efforts and partnerships between social media platforms, nongovernmental organizations, government agencies, and academics, fake foreign networks were caught early and disrupted while they were still small and inconsequential. The 2020 and 2024 efforts generated a minute fraction of the engagement that Russia’s Internet Research Agency pulled in 2016.

However, the groups that had worked on those detection efforts—groups that had long emphasized the nonpartisan nature of the threat and importance of investigating interference efforts—experienced significant partisan retaliation when MAGA Republicans decided that the investigations had also been part of a plot to steal the election. Trump went after CISA and the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force.

Gabbard participated actively in that effort. She dismantled the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC), claiming that it was involved in the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story—utter nonsense, as FMIC wasn’t even active at the time. But Gabbard has proved herself willing to distort the truth if it serves her boss’s interests.

Shopping for receipts is the opposite of working from evidence to a conclusion. Here, the administration is starting with something they want people to believe—that the 2020 election was stolen due to foreign meddling—and working backward to find receipts to justify that belief. If they plan to push this reported executive order to consolidate power over elections, they’ll need a national security pretext to justify it––a claim about a foreign nexus, maybe in the form of a supposedly secret server, secret documents, secret collaborators, or a secret means of transmission. The administration will likely use a known “villain”—one the American public has already heard of—Dominion, perhaps, or Maduro. And so, the reanimated corpse of one of these nonsensical theories may shamble back into the national discourse, backed by some “declassified documents” that Gabbard just happened to find.