A senior Trump Trump voting machine administration official last year sought to ban voting machines used in more than half of all US states by pushing the Commerce Department to declare their components a national security risk, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the matter. The official at the centre of the effort was Kurt Olsen, a lawyer appointed by President Donald Trump as his election security adviser and tasked with substantiating widely debunked theories about election rigging. His target was Dominion Voting Systems, one of the largest providers of election technology in the country, whose machines have been the subject of baseless conspiracy theories since the 2020 presidential election.

The plan, reported here for the first time, advanced far enough that Commerce Department officials began exploring in September what legal grounds could be used to execute it. It ultimately collapsed because Olsen and the administration staffers working with him were unable to produce any evidence to justify the move. No Venezuelan code, no foreign hacking, no national security basis. The effort failed not because anyone stopped it on principle, but because the evidence to support it simply did not exist, and those asked to carry it out required some before proceeding.

The episode sits within a broader pattern of Trump administration actions aimed at shifting control over elections away from state and local governments and toward the federal executive branch, a move that constitutional scholars note directly conflicts with the authority the US Constitution explicitly grants to the states. Olsen has been coordinating with the nation's top intelligence and law enforcement agencies to pursue voting rigging claims that courts and bipartisan reviews have repeatedly rejected. Democratic Senator Alex Padilla responded to the reporting by calling for Olsen's immediate dismissal, describing him as a direct threat to American democracy.

How the Plot to Ban Dominion Machines Took Shape Inside the Trump Administration

The origins of the plan trace back to the early summer of last year, when Paul McNamara, a senior aide to then-intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard, approached officials at the Commerce Department with a specific request. McNamara, who at the time led an Office of the Director of National Intelligence task force examining vulnerabilities in US voting machines, asked Commerce officials to consider whether Dominion's chips and software could be designated a national security risk. US supply chain rules give the Commerce Secretary the power to restrict transactions with technology companies from designated foreign adversary nations including China, Russia, and Venezuela, and that authority was the legal hook the group was trying to use.

The underlying theory driving the effort was the long-debunked claim that Dominion machines had been infected with code controlled by Venezuelans to steal the 2020 election from Trump. Repeated investigations and multiple lawsuits in the years since have produced no evidence that Dominion machines were hacked or manipulated in any way. In 2023, Fox News paid Dominion $787 million to settle a defamation case arising from its on-air promotion of those false claims. Despite this, Olsen's team continued to treat the Venezuelan code theory as a live investigative lead worth pursuing with the resources of the federal government behind it.

To build the case, Olsen's team physically dismantled Dominion machines that had been seized from Puerto Rico's 2024 gubernatorial election. What they found did not support the narrative they were searching for. One chip had been packaged in China by US company Intel, which security experts do not consider a national security threat. Other chips came from Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia. Olsen's subsequent report described the chips collectively as "East Asian," a framing that two sources familiar with the document said appeared designed to obscure the fact that the teardown had produced no evidence of any security risk whatsoever.

What This Means for US Elections, Voting Machine Security, and Democratic Integrity

As of now, the plan to ban Dominion machines has collapsed, but the broader campaign it was part of continues. A Reuters investigation published earlier this month found that administration officials and investigators in at least eight states have sought confidential election records, pushed for access to voting equipment, and re-examined voter fraud cases that courts and independent bipartisan reviews had already settled. Trump and his Republican allies are simultaneously pursuing unprecedented plans to redraw congressional districts earlier than usual ahead of the November midterm elections, a move Democrats and redistricting experts say is designed to lock in structural advantages before votes are cast.

Election security experts have pushed back firmly on the administration's preferred alternative to Dominion machines: a national system of hand-counted paper ballots. More than 98 percent of US election jurisdictions already produce a paper record for every vote cast, according to the US Election Assistance Commission, using machines that print paper records or hand-marked ballots counted by electronic readers. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan and one of the country's leading election security researchers, said moving to hand counting would be "chaotic" and could actually make the system more vulnerable to counting mistakes and ballot-box stuffing, not less.

Democrats and election integrity advocates warn that the administration's escalating involvement in election infrastructure is not a good-faith effort to improve security but a deliberate strategy to suppress votes and create the conditions for challenging unfavourable results in the midterms. With Republicans widely expected to face losses in November, the concern is that a playbook built on manufactured doubt about voting machines, combined with active efforts to gain federal control over election administration, is being assembled in advance. Dominion, now owned by Liberty Vote USA of Colorado following a sale last October, said its focus remains on partnering with election officials across the country to deliver secure and transparent elections, declining to engage directly with the administration's claims.