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Actor Daneka Etchells is performing in a show which reflects her experiences of "medical gaslighting".

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(Image credit: Adam Gray)

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All security issues have been migrated from the older security.drupal.org site to our GitLab instance at git.drupalcode.org. This is the latest in a series of steps to improve Drupal’s coordinated vulnerability disclosure tools. We hope this will help in a few ways:

Merge requests for security issues will get automated testing to increase the quality of the releases. (Previously, tests for core security issues had to be triggered manually, and contrib testing was not available.)
GitLab has more automation to help with advisory creation, reducing manual work.
Powerful features like labels, commenting, and thread reviews on merge requests are now possible for security issues as well.

Here are some of the key steps we took:

• We started by evaluating a few solutions. We decided to use the GitLab instance on drupalcode.org.
• We planned how to remap and improve the current features from security.drupal.org and added some labels and automation to private issues on drupalcode.org.
• We made new security issue reporting default to git.drupalcode.org for several months. This helped us could gain confidence in the system, fix bugs, and make improvements.
• While that happened, Neil Drumm worked to create the migration process.
• The migration finally ran from July 9th to July 12th.

This work is possible because of support from the Drupal Association and is very appreciated.

We suppressed most emails during the migration, but a small number of people did get extra notification emails about issues, including old issues. We apologize for any resulting confusion.

How do I use GitLab to submit and manage security issues?

As before, security reports should be submitted by clicking the “Report a security vulnerability” link on the project page. If a project has already migrated public issues to git.drupalcode.org, you may also mark an issue confidential as you open it. The Security Team triages confidential issues for all covered projects.

For more information about how Drupal.org’s GitLab instance works, read our documentation.

You can read about the Security Team’s process in general. There is also a page dedicated to managing security issues on git.drupalcode.org. Those pages likely need updates, so please report any documentation issues in the Security Team Queue..

What do you think?

Let us know your thoughts. If you have feedback about how to further improve the Security Team process, you can file them in the Security Team Queue. If you have issues to report about the GitLab tooling itself on git.drupalcode.org, you can file them in the Drupal.org queue.

The old site does a redirect to the new location for issues and members of the Security Team can get content out of it if anyone notices items missing from the migration.

Thanks to longwave, hestenet, dokumori, drumm, and xjm for help in writing this post.

In a July 16 prime-time speech that warned of “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” President Donald Trump cast doubt on the country’s ability to hold “free and fair elections” but offered no evidence that widespread fraud had occurred.

He made one reference to never watching “a stolen election again,” but otherwise suggested, rather than outright claimed, that the 2020 election, which he lost, had been “rigged,” as he has often said and has never backed up.

Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded in 2020 that the election that year “was the most secure in American history,” a line the president mocked in his speech last night.

The White House released a trove of documents that Trump said showed the intelligence agencies had kept election vulnerabilities and foreign interference a secret, but election experts said there was very little new information revealed in the president’s speech.

“The White House promised a bombshell, and they delivered a dud,” David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit, said in a July 17 press conference. “There was absolutely nothing here that was news, nothing here that even calls into question past elections and certainly not the 2020 election.”

Still, Trump distorted the facts on several issues:

• Trump said the documents he released show that China had acquired “220 million U.S. voter files” starting in the 2020 election cycle, and that this had been kept “secret” by U.S. intelligence officials. But state voter files are mostly publicly available, and an April 2020 intelligence assessment said Chinese officials were analyzing state voter rolls.

• The president said released documents revealed that U.S. election infrastructure is “vulnerable,” “easily compromised” and “people within our government knew that.” But one of the documents Trump cited said the election systems, for several reasons, “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.”

• Trump said the U.S. election system was “dangerously” exposed to “foreign interference.” It has been publicly known for years that other countries have tried to influence elections. Trump focused on China; it was a “minority view” in an intelligence assessment that China had acted to undermine Trump’s reelection in 2020.

• The president’s speech may have suggested to some listeners that a foreign country changed votes in a U.S. election, but Trump never explicitly claimed that. An adviser to the president said after the speech: “The Intelligence Community has zero evidence that someone, that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ’22 or ’24.”

• Trump claimed that a Department of Homeland Security investigation “identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.” DHS hasn’t explained its methodology, and experts warn the figure is likely highly inaccurate. Past DHS-derived lists have proven unreliable.

• He cited an alleged instance of fraud from 2020 involving fake voter-registration applications in Michigan. Authorities say no one actually voted improperly as a result of the alleged scam, which stemmed from employees of a voter-registration company trying to defraud their employer and was not a deliberate effort to alter votes.

• The president exaggerated the time it took California to count its votes in its June election and falsely suggested that the long timeline indicates something nefarious occurred.

• Trump said that Congress needed to pass the SAVE America Act, describing its voter ID requirements as “simple.” That’s a matter of opinion. The bill’s ID rules would be stricter than those in most of the 36 states that already have a form of voter ID.

China and Voter Registration Data

Trump said the released documents show that China, beginning during the 2020 election cycle, “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.” The obtained data included names, home addresses, phone numbers and political party preferences of U.S. voters, he said, calling it an “unprecedented election security nightmare.” But state voter registration files are mostly publicly available, with most states having no restrictions on who can buy them and some states providing them for free.

His use of the word “compromise” implies China was able to change the data, but he presented no evidence of that.

Trump addresses the nation from the East Room of the White House on July 16. Photo by Saul Loeb/Pool – Getty Images.

Trump then said the information about voter data in several states being “bought, stolen or hacked by China” had been kept “secret and hidden” by U.S. intelligence officials.

But Becker, of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said that information was not revelatory.

“It would be a shock if China didn’t have this data, and the idea that, one, they had this data and then it was somehow covered up is relatively laughable,” Becker said on a July 17 press call. 

He said it was publicly reported, and has long been known by the Intelligence Community, which has told U.S. presidents, including Trump, “that China has a policy of vacuuming up as much … data on Americans as it can.” 

Becker said an April 2020 intelligence assessment that would have been available to Trump as president at the time, had “confirmed China is collecting voter data.” The partially redacted document, which was declassified during the Biden administration in October 2022, says “Chinese intelligence officials analyzed multiple US states’ … election voter registration data … to conduct public opinion analysis on the 2020 US general election.”

It’s unclear if the heavily redacted assessment said how China obtained the voter data, but Becker said it wouldn’t be difficult, as certain voter information is publicly accessible or can be purchased. 

Indeed, one of the declassified documents that the White House released on July 16 said that, in early 2022, a Chinese actor had downloaded state voter information from 2013 to 2021 that was available on commercial U.S. websites. That data, “in theory,” could be used for “election influence operations,” the document said, adding that the actual motivation was “unknown.”

In a report updated in October 2020, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission provided data showing that 30 states plus Washington, D.C., had essentially no restrictions on who could purchase their voter registration files. Sixteen states had some restrictions on who could buy their files, and four states completed restricted access for some groups. The prices for the files ranged from $0 (in 11 states) to $37,000 in Alabama.

Becker said, “Just having the data doesn’t give you an ability to access their voter record. You need many, many more private person identifiable information points, things like driver’s license numbers, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, which aren’t in this data, to even begin to think about doing that.” 

And if that had happened, he said, the public would likely know about it because it would cause issues for people trying to vote. “Altering records on a voter registration record or deleting a voter registration record would mean voters would go to the polls and have problems, and we’d be hearing reports of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American voters having trouble,” he said. “We’ve got no reports of that whatsoever.”

Election Systems

Trump also claimed that the newly released documents show alarming vulnerabilities in U.S. election systems and equipment. But those issues had long been publicized, and a document he quoted from said it was unlikely those weaknesses could be exploited to the degree necessary to change the outcome of an election.

“For many years, Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems,” the president said. “They’re vulnerable and they’re easily compromised and people within our government knew that.”

Trump then quoted a now-declassified January 2020 memorandum from the National Intelligence Council that said at least Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, as well as other non-state groups, “have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure for the 2020 presidential election.” And voter registration databases, pollbooks and official election websites “are most vulnerable to exploitation,” the document said, adding that it could “disrupt election processes” if such systems were accessed.

However, the same memo said those systems “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.”

For example, it said, “The systems in each voting location are not connected to the Internet or to each other, and many methods for exploiting them rely on physical proximity.” While a foreign actor “could manipulate voting results across multiple jurisdictions and enough states to influence a presidential election,” officials judged that “conducting such a campaign would be difficult and that postelection audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.”

A similar assessment had been included in a classified Intelligence Community assessment on “foreign threats” to the 2020 election that was given to Trump, as well as administration and congressional leadership, on Jan. 7, 2021. The national director of intelligence at the time was John Ratcliffe, who now serves as CIA director. A declassified version was released in March 2021.

It said, “We assess that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around voting systems across the country, or in post-election audits.”

There were also “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results,” the assessment said.

Foreign Influence in Elections

The president said that the documents he was declassifying showed that the U.S. election system was “dangerously” exposed to, among other things, “foreign interference.” Later, he said: “China and other countries have been trying to meddle in our elections.” It’s been publicly known for years that other countries have tried to, or wanted to, influence U.S. elections through tactics like social media campaigns — most notably, Russia, a country Trump briefly mentioned once in his speech in a list of adversaries.

There is no evidence that a foreign influence campaign changed votes that were cast in any U.S. election. While Trump’s speech may have suggested to some listeners that this happened, he didn’t explicitly claim that it did. He made one vague reference to a “stolen” election, saying, “We will be working closely to mitigate any harm and we’re taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected so we can never be bought, we can never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again.”

John Solomon, an adviser to the president and a conservative journalist, told reporters outside the White House after Trump’s speech: “The Intelligence Community has zero evidence that someone, that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ’22 or ’24.”

MS Now White House reporter Vaughn Hillyard asked Solomon to confirm that the results of the 2020 election were valid. “I’m still researching,” Solomon responded, saying there was “not yet” any intelligence suggesting otherwise.

As for foreign influence campaigns, the Intelligence Community assessment on “foreign threats” to the 2020 election, which, as we noted, was given to Trump before he left office in January 2021, explained how Russia, Iran and other countries likely sought to influence the election.

“We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US. Unlike in 2016, we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure. We have high confidence in our assessment,” the Intelligence Community report said. Russia’s actions including using online influence actors to “amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud.”

Iran, meanwhile, “carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former President Trump’s reelection prospects—though without directly promoting his rivals—undermine public confidence in the electoral process and US institutions, and sow division and exacerbate societal tensions in the US. We have high confidence in this assessment,” the report said.

China, the focus of Trump’s speech, “did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election. We have high confidence in this judgment,” the assessment said, noting that China “did not view either election outcome,” meaning Trump or Biden, “as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling.”

There was, however, a “minority view,” held by the national intelligence officer for cyber issues, who assessed that “China took at least some steps to undermine former President Trump’s reelection chances, primarily through social media and official public statements and media,” the report said. It’s this view that Trump emphasized in his speech.

The report said that the national intelligence officer for cyber issues “agrees that we have no information suggesting China tried to interfere with election processes” and had “moderate confidence in these judgments.” This assessment “gives more weight to indications that Beijing preferred former President Trump’s defeat and the election of a more predictable member of the establishment instead.”

Russia’s interference efforts in the 2016 election — involving an online propaganda campaign and a hacking operation targeting Democratic Party committees and Hillary Clinton’s campaign — were documented in the lengthy report by special counsel Robert Mueller, as we’ve explained.

DHS Claims of Noncitizens Registered to Vote

Trump continued to claim without evidence that there are large numbers of noncitizens on voter registration rolls.

“Finally, to reveal just how vulnerable our elections continue to be, we are releasing the results of a stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security,” Trump said. “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.”

As part of its data dump, the White House linked to a DHS document claiming that a “review” of “public data files” in four states — California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada — found over 250,000 noncitizens illegally registered to vote. The document provided no information about how that estimate was derived, or the methodology used. A DHS press release issued on July 17 said that “preliminary reviews of the four states’ records” revealed there “may be as many as” 190,832 noncitizens registered to vote in California; 35,152 in New Jersey; 15,903 in Nevada; and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. The release also shed no light on how DHS arrived at those figures, and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin did not elaborate in a press conference on July 17.

In his July 17 press call, Becker of CEIR said he attended a background White House press briefing the afternoon before Trump’s prime-time speech and “they were not transparent about the methodology whatsoever.”

He said a White House official said only that the comparisons were done with commercial data.

“Commercial data does not allow a comparison to the public voter file in any conceivable way because of common names, because you lack … unique identifiers, like driver’s license numbers or Social Security,” Becker said. “You don’t even have dates of birth in some cases that are accurate to compare between the two because in many cases those are not included, and you’re going to create a lot of false matches because of that. Anyone who works with this data knows that.”

Becker called the 250,000 claim “an irresponsible number to share, given the opaque methodology that they claimed here.” Inevitably, he said, “I predict almost all of them are actually citizens.”

“I know about as much about voter data nationwide as almost anybody,” Becker said. “It is impossible to take a public voter file with very little information that is uniquely identified, like a driver’s license number, and compare it to a commercial database and say for sure the Maria Rodriguez or the John Lee or the Sean O’Hara you have on that is the same person. You just get a huge amount of false positives, and so I suspect that 250,000 number is just their wild highest possible number.”

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar provided us a statement, saying, “We can affirm that on its face, we refute these claims. These numbers are wildly speculative at best and the Department of Homeland Security hasn’t shared anything that backs it up.”

“There are numerous safeguards in place to prevent noncitizens, or anyone ineligible to vote, from casting a ballot,” Aguilar said. “The Administration lacks a fundamental understanding of how elections work. They just want to cause chaos and doubt ahead of the midterms.”

Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of the commonwealth in Pennsylvania, also pushed back on DHS’ claim.

“Pennsylvania follows all state and federal laws when it comes to our elections, and our voter rolls are properly maintained and updated,” Schmidt said in a statement to us via email. “In Pennsylvania, every voter must take steps to verify their identity before they cast a ballot, including providing proper identification every time they register to vote, vote by mail, or vote at a new polling place. All evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.”

All four of the states in the DHS review declined to share their voting lists to participate in the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program, which the Trump administration has made available to states to help them identify potential noncitizens on state voter rolls.

According to the DHS document, as of June 22, 25 states that have used the SAVE tool have identified potentially 28,000 noncitizens on voter rolls — out of 68 million registration records. Even if that were accurate, that would be about 0.04% of voters. (The 250,000 discussed earlier plus the 28,000 identified through the SAVE program is how Trump arrived at his figure of 278,000.)

But as we have written, when those lists of potential noncitizens identified by the SAVE program were shared with states, county officials found U.S. citizens were among those identified. Some were recently naturalized citizens. In other cases, election officials determined some noncitizens were inadvertently added by county officials to voter lists, and still others were noncitizens who mistakenly checked a box for voter registration even after acknowledging on the same forms that they were noncitizens.

Neither Trump nor DHS claimed that any of those noncitizens who may be on state voter registration rolls have actually voted illegally. Noncitizens convicted of voting in federal elections face fines, jail time and deportation.

According to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database, just under 100 noncitizens have been convicted of illegally voting or registering to vote since 1982.

“If his government had actual evidence of noncitizen voting, there would be indictments; Trump has been hounding US attorneys to bring such cases, and the fact that he hasn’t shows that these claims likely have no legs,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote for the Election Law Blog. “Claims of noncitizen registration often evaporate upon closer inspection (such as the systems’ failure to catch newly naturalized citizens). And he’s made no claims about noncitizens actually voting.”

Michigan Voter Registration Incident

Trump seized on an incident in which a city clerk in Muskegon, Michigan, received a number of fake voter-registration applications ahead of the 2020 election.

But the applications did not actually result in anyone voting or registering to vote improperly, state officials have said: The clerk’s office quickly flagged the discrepancies and alerted the authorities.

Moreover, investigators concluded that the fraudulent applications were an attempt by low-level employees of a voter-registration organization to get paid for work they hadn’t done — not a deliberate effort to influence the election.

Here’s how Trump described the case in his speech Thursday night:

Trump: Among the disclosures tonight are FBI files detailing evidence of alleged fraud by a large-scale voter registration operation in Michigan. In 2020, Michigan State Police raided a Democrat get-out-the-vote organization, corrupt group, in Muskegon, and were so concerned by what they found … that they contacted the FBI in Detroit. The documents state that some canvassers admitted to FBI agents that they signed voter registration forms in other people’s names, submitted fraudulent registration for people who did not exist, and received gift cards tied to their number of applications that they produced. 

This case has been widely reported on by local media in Michigan for years. 

In late October 2020, days before the election, local news outlets reported that the Muskegon city clerk’s office had flagged “irregularities” in hundreds of voter registration applications, among several thousand that had been mailed or dropped off as part of an organized registration drive. 

City Clerk Ann Meisch told local station WZZM that the vast majority of those forms were valid, but “several hundred” had birthdays, addresses, signatures or other voter information that didn’t match what the state had on file. 

She said any such applications were invalidated, and no one was issued a ballot based on one.

State police later determined that around 8,000 to 10,000 applications had been dropped off by someone working for GBI Strategies, as local news outlet Bridge Michigan reported in 2023. Campaign finance records indicate GBI Strategies did work for Democratic campaigns in 2020.

Danny Wimmer, a spokesperson for Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, told Bridge Michigan that investigators determined the fraud had “occurred at the lowest levels of the company,” apparently by workers attempting to defraud their employer by claiming to have done work they hadn’t. The evidence did not suggest any intent to affect the election’s outcome. 

Wimmer reiterated that there is no evidence anyone voted as a result of the fraudulent applications.

“This attempted fraud was detected because the system worked,” he said.

State officials told Bridge Michigan that they turned their investigation over to the FBI because it was pursuing a national investigation related to GBI Strategies.

Trump, in his speech, accused the Biden administration of a coverup.

“The FBI agents working on the case believe that crimes were committed, yet the Biden Department of Justice slow walked the investigation and killed it,” he said. 

Documents released by the White House on Thursday include partially redacted exchanges between federal law enforcement officials about how to proceed with the case at various times, including a November 2021 email from an unidentified FBI agent pushing back on the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section’s decision not to prosecute.

But the records also show that DOJ officials subsequently allowed the investigation to continue, and in 2023 approved a “full field investigation” that included interviews with canvassers. 

An FBI document dated September 2025, which was among the records released after Trump’s speech, states that the case was closed “because logical investigation and/or leads have been exhausted, and the investigation to date did not identify a criminal violation or a priority threat to national security.” But it was unclear from the released documents when that decision was made.

California

As he has repeatedly done before, Trump pointed to California’s recent primary election as an example of a problem in the nation’s voting systems.

“As one example of the insanity, California’s recent election for mayor of L.A. and governor was held on June 2 – long time ago. But it was just completed a few days ago on July 10,” he said. “Think of that – much more than one month. Took a month to count the votes. I wonder what they were doing.”

“This is worse than any third world country,” he falsely added. “There’s no third world country that has elections like we have.”

California does take a long time to count its votes, but July 10 is not when the state completed its counting, but rather when it certified its election.

Election certification, as the U.S. Election Assistance Commission explains, is “the process of election officials attesting that the election results are a true and accurate accounting of all votes cast in a particular election.” Beyond just counting, certification involves various audits and tests to ensure that the vote is accurate.

By state law, California county election officials have 30 days to report their results to the secretary of state, who then must certify the results within another eight days. But county officials count and report on the vast majority of ballots within just 13 days, and news organizations are able to confidently call races well before that.

In the case of the June election, the Associated Press called the L.A. mayoral race on June 8 and the gubernatorial race on June 9. Both of those timelines are considered protracted, compared with other states, but Californians have known who will be on their ballots in November for more than a month.

“California wasn’t counting ballots up until last week. California finished counting weeks ago,” Becker of CEIR said. “It was just doing all of that work of auditing and reconciling and checking and double-checking, allowing for legal challenges if there were going to be any, before certifying.”

Becker said California has “one of the longer” certification periods, but that other states, such as Wisconsin, also have them. “Every state takes weeks to certify,” he said. “That’s normal because you need time to check and double-check and audit and recount and reconcile and do all of the things to make sure transparently that the count was the count that you’re reporting out is correct. You want states to take time with this.”

California’s slow vote-counting does not inherently mean there is an election integrity issue. In fact, some of the time is spent on tasks that increase confidence in the election. 

For instance, officials are “required to conduct a public 1% manual tally of the ballots tabulated by the county’s voting system in order to verify the accuracy of the automated count,” California’s secretary of state webpage says. The state also requires signature verification for mail-in ballots.

As we’ve explained before, the main reason why California is so slow is because the state sends mail-in ballots to all of its more than 23 million registered voters and 80% or more of votes are typically cast via mail.

Dealing with mail ballots is more time-consuming, as the ballots, which must be postmarked by the election day, are counted as long as they are received within a week and because the state allows voters to resolve any signature verification issues up to eight days before counties certify their results.

“The California primary went off very well. Fairly high turnout. The results stood,” Becker said, despite what he called Trump and his administration’s “slander of California election officials.”

“There are no notable legal challenges that I’m aware of with regard to the results of the primary. The people who got the most votes are advancing to the general election,” he said. “Everything actually went well. It’s just the bluster and the rhetoric that creates an image of chaos.”

SAVE America Act

Trump pushed Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, saying that the bill “requires that all voters must show photo voter ID. How simple is that?” The bill requires proof of citizenship when registering to vote, he added. But it may not be that simple for some voters. Election experts say the bill would make it difficult for some to register and cast a vote.

As we’ve explained before, 36 states already have some form of voter ID requirements, but most accept a wider range of IDs than the SAVE America Act would. The National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state legislation, has said that the bill’s voter ID requirements “are stricter than those most states use.”

Acceptable IDs in those 36 states “often” include student IDs, or hunting and fishing licenses, NCSL said. Some states accept non-photo identification, such as a bank statement. The SAVE America Act limits acceptable identification for voting to: a state-issued driver’s license or ID card issued by the motor vehicle agency that includes a photo and expiration date, a U.S. passport, a military ID, or a photo ID issued by a tribal government that includes an expiration date. Those voting by mail would need to submit a copy of a photo ID, or the last four digits of their Social Security number and an affidavit saying that they couldn’t obtain a copy of their ID.

Under the bill, Americans would need to prove citizenship when registering to vote or changing their registration. For most people, that would mean presenting, in person to an election official, either only a U.S. passport, or a certified birth certificate along with a driver’s license or other government-issued photo ID. Election experts have raised concerns about millions of Americans not having a passport or ready access to their birth certificates, and the bill creating too many hurdles to cast a vote.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, told us earlier this year that the legislation wouldn’t meet the dictionary definition of “disenfranchise,” which is to “deprive a person of the right to vote.” But it would make registering and voting harder. “That extra hassle and expense would mean that some citizens eligible to register and vote will in practice not complete the needed process even though the bill does not take away their legal right to register or to vote.”

Trump also referred to an amendment to the bill that would eliminate universal voting by mail. “You would have no mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military deployment, or travel,” he said.

That’s more restrictive than the practice in the majority of states. Eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct their elections mostly by mail, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another 29 states allow “no-excuse” mail-in voting, which means that voters don’t need to provide a reason when requesting a mail-in ballot.

As he often does, Trump made the unfounded claim that mail-in ballots are “inherently corrupt.” Election experts have told us that while fraud is slightly more prevalent with mail-in voting than in-person voting, it is still relatively rare, and there is no evidence to support claims of widespread fraud. Trump himself has voted several times by mail, including once earlier this year.

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The list of people taking on Nigel Farage contains 20 independents and a number of joke candidates.

There is belief in the party that the new leader could put Labour back in the political match, political editor Chris Mason writes.

Bryson DeChambeau says the decision to give him a two-shot penalty for "inadvertently improving his lie", "fires me up" for the final two rounds of the championship this weekend.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has baselessly tied alleged declines in sperm counts among teenagers to a “fertility crisis” or an “explosion in infertility.”

There is very little data on sperm counts in teenagers, and there’s mixed evidence on whether they have changed over time in adults. Regardless, experts told us there isn’t reason to believe declining sperm counts are causing the falling rate of childbirths in the U.S., which has more plausible social and behavioral explanations.

On at least a dozen occasions since becoming HHS secretary, Kennedy has claimed there has been a dramatic drop in sperm counts, saying it’s evidence of a health crisis. His interest in this topic goes back nearly a decade.

“Male sperm counts, I think, in this country are down 50% for teenage males,” he said on a May 28 episode of his recently launched podcast, after introducing concerns about a “stunning” drop in the rate of childbirths. “I read the other day that teenage males today have less sperm than the average 65-year-old American man.” At a May 11 event at the White House, he discussed statistics on childbirths, while also claiming a “fertility crisis” involving falling sperm counts in teens. “This is an existential crisis for our country,” he said.

Contrary to Kennedy’s statements, there is very little data about sperm counts in teenagers in the scientific literature at all. The studies establishing sperm counts in healthy adolescents have “never been done,” Dolores Lamb, who studies male reproductive biology and urology at Children’s Mercy Kansas City, told us.

There are some studies that have found about a 50% drop in sperm counts in men over the past half century or so. Kennedy has linked to this research or coverage of it multiple times on X. HHS has previously cited these 2017 and 2023 studies to support Kennedy’s claims, although the agency did not respond to our request for comment.

But other studies have not found such declines, and comparisons to the past are complicated by inconsistencies in how sperm is counted. “I would argue that we don’t yet have consensus,” Allan Pacey, a professor of andrology at the University of Manchester, told us.

In any case, sperm declines are not likely to be a driving factor in today’s falling childbirth rates, experts said.

“Declining sperm count are expected to impact population birth rates significantly only at very advanced stage, as men have multiple opportunities to [conceive],” Dr. Hagai Levine, an epidemiologist and public health physician at Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health who co-authored the studies HHS cited, told us in an email, even as he said that in his view, the “strong decline does indicate that there is a problem.”

Alison Gemmill, a reproductive epidemiologist and demographer at the University of California, Los Angeles, told us that Kennedy is erroneously conflating the falling fertility rate with a decline in people’s biological ability to conceive. The rate of childbirths has indeed fallen, she said, but it has been driven by a drop in birth among teenagers and women in their 20s.

“What’s going on with people in their teens and 20s is they’re just waiting longer to have kids, and they’re using more effective contraception, and they’re having fewer unintended or unwanted births,” she said. “So, I think the overwhelming majority of evidence points to social and behavioral changes rather than biological changes.”

Nor has there been a recent “explosion,” as Kennedy said, in infertility by its medical definition, Katherine Tierney, an assistant professor in the department of sociology at Western Michigan University, told us in an email. While the fertility rate reflects the rate of childbirths in the population, infertility refers to difficulty becoming pregnant.

“[T]he prevalence of medically-defined infertility in the U.S. has remained fairly stable over time, despite the decline in fertility, which calls into question the proposal that rising infertility is a major driver of the fertility decline,” Tierney said, based on survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Uncertainty About Sperm Count Over Time

There has been controversy for decades about whether sperm counts in the population are falling.

In 1992, Danish researchers pulled together the available data and did a meta-analysis, a type of study that combines data from multiple past studies on a topic. The researchers concluded that sperm concentration had dropped by more than 40% between 1940 and 1990. (The term sperm count encompasses two related measures: sperm concentration, or the amount of sperm per milliliter of semen, and total sperm count, or the number of sperm per ejaculate.)

Shanna Swan, an environmental reproductive epidemiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told us in an email that the 1992 study was “very strong,” adding that it was “further strengthened” by a reanalysis of the data she published five years later. She and her co-authors found an “even steeper” decline in sperm counts in the U.S. and Europe, according to the study. (Swan went on to co-author the more recent studies with Levine that showed a decline in sperm count.)

But Lamb criticized the 1992 study for including relatively little data from the early years of the covered period, among other issues, and said that the authors “assume that the data that’s published in these papers is accurate and precise.” 

In fact, sperm is quite challenging to count, Lamb and Pacey told us.

Photo by Andriy Bezuglov / stock.adobe.com.

During much of this study period there was little standardization of sperm counting, Pacey explained in an editorial in 2013. The World Health Organization came out with guidelines in 1980, followed by multiple revisions. But even after this, studies showed that many labs did not follow the guidelines and that there was substantial variation between labs in counts even when they all looked at the same sample.

Ejaculate is a mixture of fluids from different glands, Pacey said. “It’s a viscous fluid, so it’s very difficult to pipette,” he explained, and there are multiple steps in sperm analysis that can introduce errors.

Lamb said that people are supposed to count sperm in specialized glass chambers with a grid after diluting semen and preventing sperm from moving. But labs may instead use disposable chambers to avoid cleaning or fail to properly immobilize the sperm.

Pacey said that he chairs a U.K. advisory committee to a national sperm counting quality assurance program, and there’s still “huge variation” among labs counting the same sample. “That makes me concerned about how accurate we are when we report [sperm count] in papers.” 

Pacey added that sperm counts can also vary within even the same person depending on a variety of factors, such as length of time since last ejaculation and level of sexual stimulation, complicating analyses. And Lamb said that sperm count is a genetic trait and varies geographically. “It’s just biology,” and it’s not that areas with lower sperm counts necessarily have more infertility, she said.

The 2017 and 2023 studies on sperm count from Swan and Levine looked at more recent data than the 1992 study, excluded studies reporting nonstandard methods, excluded men known to be infertile or with exposures implicated in infertility, and otherwise attempted to address prior criticisms.

Sperm counts have “declined by 50-60% between 1973 to 2018, globally, including in North America (mainly US),” Levine said.

Lamb said that the 2017 study’s rigor had improved “a little” but said it still had issues, such as those related to counting sperm.

Despite even further improvements to the 2023 study, which added new data and analyses, “poor data is still poor data,” Lamb said. She added that the authors do not take into account “methodological issues and lack of standardization for semen analysis performance and change in methods over the years.”

Another 2023 meta-analysis by different researchers looking at studies on sperm count in the U.S. and Western Europe between 1993 and 2018 did not find a significant change over this period, including when looking specifically at the U.S.

A 2025 meta-analysis by yet another group also reviewed the U.S. sperm count literature, finding what the authors called “remarkably stable” sperm counts from 1970 to 2018. The researchers generally found no change or increases in various measures of sperm count, with the exception of a decline in sperm concentration, after adjusting for region and fertility status, that was “less than half the annual decline that has been observed in previous global meta-analyses,” the authors wrote.

Pacey said that results from different meta-analyses can vary due to differences in methods and the time period and populations covered. Lamb said the 2025 paper was particularly well done, explaining that it excluded many studies that did not meet its “criteria for rigor, strong experimental design, original data, sample number, etc.”

When three different large meta-analyses are “telling you different things, I would argue we don’t have consensus,” Pacey said, adding that people like Kennedy “kind of cherry-pick the data to suit the argument that they’re making at the time.” 

Regardless, Pacey said, one wouldn’t expect the level of sperm decline that studies have reported to make a major contribution to falling birth rates. “It’s still a decline from normal to normal on average,” he said. 

“When we look at studies that are more well done, there is potentially evidence of a decline, especially a long-term decline,” Gemmill said of the sperm count literature. “But the main takeaway is that when we think of this measure of sperm count, it’s still at levels that we don’t think it’s going to really make an impact on people’s ability to conceive.”

A Lack of Evidence for Teen Comparisons

Kennedy has repeatedly compared today’s teenagers to older men, claiming that “the fertility of our kids is down” and that teens have half the sperm count of a 68-year-old, 65-year-old or 60-year-old man.

“We’re seeing an explosion in infertility,” he said at an event in West Virginia in March 2025, for example. “Teenagers today have 50% of the sperm count” of 68-year-old men, he added.

Despite this rhetoric, there simply aren’t data on sperm counts comparing teens from the general population to men in their 60s.

“The studies on that directly have not been done,” Lamb said, because the panels that review studies with human subjects for institutions are not going to “have parents consent for their boys to masturbate to collect semen samples” in a clinic.

Measures such as total sperm count and volume decline as men age.

There are limited data looking at sperm counts in adolescents with health problems who have given semen samples. Lamb was involved in one study that compared sperm counts in adolescents and adults who were storing sperm samples prior to cancer treatment that might damage their fertility. The study found slightly lower sperm counts in the younger age group than in the adults.

But Lamb said that this study was not meant to establish normal sperm counts for adolescents, but rather to better understand what very young patients undergoing fertility preservation might expect. “The important thing to realize is these boys were seriously ill,” she said, and their sperm counts cannot be taken as representative.

There have also been comparisons of data on sperm counts in young men being considered for military service, some of them technically teenagers, and those of somewhat older men. Researchers in Denmark — some of whom had co-authored the 1992 paper showing falling sperm counts — tracked sperm counts from young men presenting for medical examination with a median age of 19 between 1996 and 2010. They found these young adults’ sperm counts were lower than those of two groups: sperm counts collected between 1996 and 1998 from men whose partners were pregnant, and sperm counts from 1939 to 1943 in men who were part of infertile couples.

The men in the comparison groups were largely in their 20s and 30s, and not in their 60s. But the authors of the study did raise concerns about a generational decline, writing that “there is reason to be concerned about future fertility of young Danish men.” However, the study showed that sperm counts in successive groups of young men presenting for examination rose over the 15 years of the study.

“If you want to do the best study possible, you would do a prospective study where you would actively go out and recruit new cohorts of men every year of a similar age and a similar lifestyle and a similar demographic, and you would follow them over time to see whether sperm counts were declining,” Pacey said. That is what the Danish study did in looking at potential military recruits. And this didn’t show falling sperm counts, he said.

Meanwhile, he said he thought the researchers “overinterpreted” their data on young potential recruits in going back and comparing it to data collected on different groups of men. “If retrospective data is showing one thing and prospective data is showing another, that suggests we have a data problem rather than a biology problem,” he said, adding that he doesn’t think “the study is a sign of a reduction in sperm quality in young men.”

Why Are People Having Fewer Children?

Regardless of the trends in sperm counts, demographers said there are other factors that are likely leading people to have fewer children, despite Kennedy repeatedly connecting it to falling sperm count or infertility.

“We have fertility rates that are just spiraling,” he told Jesse Watters during a Fox News interview in April 2025, going on to reference a 50% drop in sperm counts. “The fertility rate is plummeting,” he said at a June 2025 press conference, again mentioning a halving of sperm counts.

“There’s no particular reason to think that physiological factors would be a big cause of [falling birth rates], when we know there’s lots of social factors that could be contributing,” Sarah Hayford, director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University, told us.

She said that broadly speaking, birth rates have been falling for 150 years in high-income countries. In the U.S., there was a decline in the 1970s after the Baby Boom, followed by “pretty stable” birth rates through the early 2000s, supported by a relatively high teen birth rate compared with other high-income countries. Birth rates again declined during the Great Recession in 2007 to 2009 and, unexpectedly to demographers, continued to fall, primarily driven by declines in births to teens and young adults in their early 20s, particularly among unmarried people.

Fertility rates are measured in various ways, but one way is to estimate how many babies a woman on average would have over her lifetime using the current birth rates for various age groups of women, or what’s called the total fertility rate. By this measure, the fertility rate in 2024 fell to a low of 1.6 per woman, according to CDC data. Provisional CDC data on birth rates from 2025 indicate they continued to fall.

Kennedy has appeared to refer to these CDC statistics, as well as to Social Security Administration estimates of total fertility rates, when referring to the falling fertility rate.

“When my uncle was president, the fertility rate in this country was 3.5%,” he said at an October 2025 White House event on fertility treatment. “Today it is 1.6%.” He then claimed the average U.S. teenager has half the sperm count of a 65-year-old man.

Hayford said that there are likely multiple social and behavioral changes working together to impact birth rates since the Great Recession. For teens, she said, “it seems pretty clear that that’s about increased contraceptive use,” particularly long-acting methods such as IUDs and implants.

Meanwhile, economic and other factors have affected people’s choices around childbearing.

One possible factor is a sense of economic insecurity that never fully dissipated after the Great Recession, despite macroeconomic recovery, Hayford said. There has also been a decline in the rates at which people get married, she added.

“Global uncertainty has increased, and just general uncertainty about the future,” UCLA’s Gemmill said. ”We’ve seen study after study show that that is also tied to decisions and ambivalence about having children.” 

Gemmill added that studies have shown a rise in “intensive parenting,” or the idea that people feel “they need to give a lot more or … have more resources to support raising children in the United States.” At the same time, people are experiencing economic challenges in the housing market, the price of childcare and the availability of paid family leave, she said.

There’s also a trend toward people staying in school longer and getting more education, Hayford said.

In periods where people are shifting when they have children to later in life, the total fertility rate will likely underestimate the number of children women will have by the end of their childbearing years, Hayford said, as some people might “catch up.”

At the same time, delaying childbearing does tend to lead to a lower total number of children, as people are “more likely to run into problems” with their fertility, Hayford said. People also tend to “reduce their fertility intentions as they get older” based on the other things going on in their lives, she explained.

But apart from age-related declines in the biological ability to bear children, experts pushed back against the idea that there’s been a major rise in infertility, or the rate at which people have trouble becoming pregnant.

For one thing, Hayford said, the fact that declines in the fertility rate are concentrated in unmarried people “is an indicator that it’s probably not physiological processes going on.” If there were some chemical exposure “that was reducing fertility, you would expect to see that among married people as well as among unmarried people,” she said.  

Furthermore, the data that are available on infertility in the U.S. do not indicate any major rise.

It is “very hard” to measure the biological capacity for childbearing over time, Gemmill said. However, when researchers have attempted to track the rate of Americans meeting the medical definition of infertility, “there’s not really much change,” she said, referring to the CDC’s National Survey of Family Growth.

Several studies using these data have looked at the rate of infertility — defined as no pregnancy following 12 months of regular, unprotected intercourse — among married and cohabiting women. The studies found no significant change between 1995 and 2019 or, in one case, a small rise between the first and second half of the 2010s.

Another study using this dataset looked at how long women reported trying to become pregnant, finding no significant change overall between 2002 and 2017. The time to pregnancy slightly increased over time for women who had prior children and women over 30.

The fact that both measures of infertility used in these papers “show no or little change in medically-defined infertility offers strong evidence against the idea of an infertility ‘explosion,’” Tierney said, despite increases in the rate at which people seek treatment for infertility and a small increase in people’s perceptions that they are infertile.

None of this is to dismiss the importance of better understanding infertility and reproductive health, Gemmill said.

“I fully think that we need more research on environmental contaminants and sperm and reproductive health conditions,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s at the level — at least based on the human studies that I’ve seen — where it’s going to impact birth rates at a population level. What is happening in the U.S. right now is because of social change.”

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The post RFK Jr.’s Flawed Claims About Sperm Count and Fertility appeared first on FactCheck.org.

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