After the FBI seized elections materials from Fulton county last month, Donald Trump returned once again to his false claim that he beat Joe Biden in Georgia in the 2020 election.
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump said to Dan Bongino on the former FBI staffer’s podcast earlier this month . “We should take over the voting in at least – many – 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Later that week, it was revealed that the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who was present at the Fulton county raid, led an investigation into Puerto Rico’s voting machines – taking some machines to examine – last May to identify what her office said were potential vulnerabilities in the island’s electronic voting systems. Taken together, Trump’s comments and actions are pointing toward a possibility Democratic voters have until now only contemplated: the federal government seizing voting machines across the country in a way that disrupts voting in the 2026 midterms.
If the federal government declared some digital voting machines off-limits at the last minute, it would set off a chain of emergency court hearings, leaving elections directors scrambling to find another way to print and count ballots before those cases resolved. Early voting could crater. Election Day voting could be curtailed. And results might not be ready for weeks.
Historically, midterm elections tend to go against the party of a newly-elected president, as Trump has acknowledged, and the president’s efforts to thwart that eventuality are clear across the administration. Last year, he directed Republican-controlled states to gerrymander congressional districts to try to limit opportunities for Democrats to win seats. The civil rights division of the department of justice has backed challenges to voting rights laws, which advocates say are an attempt to hold on to other seats. A disruption of election apparatuses could be seen as one more mechanism for authoritarian control of the government.
All of these moves are connected, said Bruce Spiva, senior vice-president of the voting rights group Campaign Legal Center. “[T]he FBI is seizing ballots from the 2020 election, President Trump is calling for our elections to be ‘nationalized,’ and the US Department of Justice is suing more than 20 states to get access to voters’ private data. This is not a coincidence,” he said.
State election leaders have been raising concerns about the intent behind Trump’s moves on elections, particularly after the publication of an executive order in March which would have forced the Election Assistance Commission to decertify voting machines, and allow DHS to access voter registration information and require citizens to produce a passport or similar document to register to vote. A federal judge permanently blocked the executive order in October, noting that the constitution vests control over voting to the states.
But other moves continue apace. Despite the court order, justice department and homeland security officials have pressed for voter data. Legislation to enact the provisions of Trump’s order has been advanced in Congress.
The investigation of Puerto Rico – a US territory which elects a non-voting representative to Congress but doesn’t have a vote in presidential races – also appears to be an early, important step in a wide-ranging investigation by Gabbard into election security and foreign interference.
In 2020, Puerto Rico began implementing electronic voting machines, purchased from Dominion Voting Systems on a 2016 contract, to replace outdated paper ballots used in previous elections. The 2020 primary elections were plagued with delays and technical issues.
A software issue caused machines supplied by Dominion to incorrectly calculate vote totals, state commission on elections leaders said. In some cases, machine-reported vote counts were lower than paper counts. Some machines reversed certain totals, or reported zero votes for some candidates. The territory ended its contract with Dominion in 2024 and has moved to a paper ballot system.
Gabbard has a history of peddling conspiracy theories, and at one point was hewing so close to the party lines of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and Russian president Vladimir Putin that her fellow Democrats in Congress were in 2018 openly questioning whether it was safe to have confidential witnesses in front of her. The TSA put her on a watch list because of her travel patterns.
Nonetheless, Gabbard was confirmed as director of national intelligence in February, and appears to have almost immediately began investigating elections interference claims. The office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI) denies it was looking for evidence of a hack by Venezuela’s government, a claim that has circulated in rightwing circles. Federal investigators asked Puerto Rico to turn over some voting machines and software images voluntarily for analysis as part of a joint investigation with the FBI and ODNI. ODNI says it “found extremely concerning cyber security and operational deployment practices that pose a significant risk to US elections”.
Months later, Gabbard was spotted in Fulton county, where the FBI used an affidavit relying on widely debunked claims about the 2020 election to justify their election office raid.
“ODNI’s role was to understand the vulnerability of these systems in an operational environment and assess risk to this critical infrastructure, given similar infrastructure is used throughout the United States,” a spokesperson said, replying to questions from the Guardian about Gabbard’s presence in Fulton county and the testing of voting equipment in Puerto Rico. “In this role, ODNI found extremely concerning cyber security and operational deployment practices that pose a significant risk to US elections.”
ODNI wanted a closer look at how modems on the machines that could connect to the cellular network might compromise the integrity of the vote.
In Puerto Rico, the FBI and ODNI took both the physical machines along with exact hashed images of the machines “which is a standard practice in forensics analysis”, the spokesperson said. “Work is generally done on the hashed images rather than the actual machine to ensure preservation of the original condition.”
The office cited vulnerabilities exposed by the Def Con Voting Machine Hacking Village, an event at an annual hacker conference in Las Vegas, “which found that many widely used voting machines can be easily attacked through insecure hardware, exposed ports, weak or disabled protections, and the ability to run unauthorized code”, ODNI said.
Among the vulnerabilities, researchers found that a hacker could potentially use a USB device called a “Bash Bunny” to infect a voting machine and scramble its tallying capabilities. An attack like this wouldn’t scale, since voting machines are not connected to the internet, but would sow doubt about larger outcomes.
Still, experts worry that Gabbard’s investigation is part of a broader, disruptive effort to curtail the use of digital voting machines, as Trump attempted with an executive order last year that was swiftly blocked by federal judges, an effort that might have more impact than scattershot tampering itself. Under current law, Gabbard is permitted to look at foreign interference if she takes action within 45 days, but Puerto Rico had already switched to paper ballots for 2024, rectifying whatever vulnerability Gabbard had been looking for.
In a letter to members of Congress responding to questions about her presence in Fulton county, she cited a litany of statutes and executive orders – section 6508 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2020, section 102A and 119C of the National Security Act of 1947, the Counterintelligence Enhancement Act of 2002, and others.
But one reference leapt out at observers: executive order 13848, “Imposing Certain Sanctions in the Event of Foreign Interference in a United States Election” and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which among other things has allowed Trump broad latitude to impose sanctions and freeze assets in response to an “unusual or extraordinary” foreign threat to national security or the economy. It requires an emergency declaration, which Trump made in his March elections order.
“We wrote the thing basically to create a mechanism for sanctions, not to empower the director of national intelligence to fiddle with elections,” said Miles Taylor, former chief of staff of the department of homeland security. Taylor and others drafted the executive order in 2018 in response to the investigation of election interference by Russia.
The law sets up Trump to declare voting machines off limits, using the presence of foreign parts or malware as a justification, said Joohn Choe, a disinformation researcher, consultant and former contractor for Facebook’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals Group. Amendments to the law allow property to be blocked from use without proof while an investigation is ongoing, he added.
“It basically means you’re denied access to your property,” he said. “The evidence would then be classified, and states would not be able to certify what they would not be able to access.”
Gabbard and Trump could start seizing machines across the country while claiming to look for evidence of interference, while stating in court that they don’t have to disclose what they’re looking for or how long they’ll be looking because doing so would violate national security and the sanctity of the investigation, Choe said.
But experts say it would likely be unsuccessful.
“If the Trump administration is aiming to use the executive order as the basis for blocking the use of voting machines, undermining state law mailing voting laws, or building ‘nationalized’ voter rolls to falsely allege widespread fraud, it will meet with immediate legal challenges, and those challenges will be successful,” said former White House counsel Bob Bauer.
Taylor said he believes Trump is using it as pretext to revisit his false claims about the 2020 election.
“I don’t even for a second believe the administration’s justification that what they’re doing in Puerto Rico and what they’re doing in Fulton county, Georgia, has anything to do whatsoever with active foreign interference in our elections or some previously unknown foreign interference in our elections,” he said.
The Guardian
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