Those in the know say an initiative from within the Trump White House to put the brakes on the voting machines in use in much of the country went further than has been made public. With midterms in the offing and a ruckus over who was in charge of the process, some officials were looking at a way to make a case that these systems were a national security problem and to be done with them.
A federal bid with state-level consequences
What we have is a proposal to bring Commerce Department authority to bear on the work of Dominion Voting Systems, which is in more than half the states, per our sources. It was Kurt Olsen, a White House adviser, who was making it happen in a wider move to take election power away from the states and put it in Washington’s hands.
The idea was to put in place a nationwide system of hand-counted paper ballots. It’s something the former president has been after for a while, but it doesn’t sit well with how things are usually done, where you have a machine to give you a paper record you can check.
It was a big deal. The US Election Assistance Commission put out numbers last year showing 98% of jurisdictions in the U.S. have a paper record for every vote, and for the most part, they are using machines to either print or scan one.
How the plan advanced, then failed
Come September, some in the Commerce Department were starting to see if there was any legal leg to stand on, three sources told us. There was a sit-down at the White House that month where the NSC’s cyber types and Olsen’s people put their heads together to see if they could find any Venezuelan code in Dominion’s gear, one of them said.
In the end, the whole thing fell apart because Olsen and his side couldn’t come up with the evidence for such a far-reaching step, two sources say. A Commerce office that looks into foreign threats gave it a once-over and did nothing, they add.
Davis Ingle of the White House has called the story a selective leak and pure misinformation. And Olivia Coleman from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says there have been ‘inaccuracies and false descriptions’ as to what the agency does on election security.
Dominion at the centre and what probes found
Olsen was fixated on the notion that Dominion had some code from Venezuela in their machines and used them to rig the 2020 for Trump. It’s a theory that has been put to rest by now; you can look at the lawsuits and the investigations since 2020 and you won’t find a thing to suggest the systems were compromised.
Then there was the $787 million Fox News had to write a check for in 2023 in a defamation suit over those very claims. As for 2024, at least 27 states were still using Dominion, not unlike 2020. The company out of Denver was bought up by Liberty Vote USA of Colorado last October.
But Olsen has been after it. On May 12th, for instance, you could see Trump put out an old video with the line about Dominion deleting millions of votes. More recently, in May 2025, he was part of a federal operation to take Dominion machines from the 2024 Puerto Rico gubernatorial race.
Mojave Research Inc., a cyber firm, put out an analysis in the summer of it. They may have turned up a few vulnerabilities, but as for any code from Venezuela or signs of a hack, they didn’t find any. Olsen’s people were in the middle of a similar exercise at the time, taking apart some of the Puerto Rico hardware in search of any parts with ties to hostile foreign powers.
According to two sources, they came across an Intel chip put together in China and a few more from Japan, South Korea and Malaysia. None of it is what you’d call a national security problem. In fact, in his write-up, Olsen called the chips “East Asian,” which the sources think was a way of downplaying that there was no real risk to be had.
Midterm stakes and the battle over election control
All this was happening as Trump and those around him made their case for a new approach to election oversight ahead of the November midterms. On the other side, Democrats and some in the know about election integrity were on edge, worried the whole point was to stifle turnout and have a fraud narrative ready to go if the GOP started to lose.
In one state after another – at least eight by our count – officials and investigators were after closed-door records, trying to get their hands on the voting gear and rehashing old fraud cases that had been put to rest by the courts or nonpartisan reviews. Some Republican lawmakers were also looking to redistrict early to put a lid on any advantages.
The case against Dominion hinged on US supply chain law. It’s the kind of thing that puts the power in the hands of the commerce secretary to put a stop to deals with tech firms from so-called “foreign adversaries” like China, Russia or the Maduro regime in Venezuela.
Why hand counts drew security warnings
When Olsen put forward the idea of going back to paper ballots and hand-counting them across the country, he ran into some pushback from the security crowd, who are for the most part in favour of machines with a paper trail. The way things are set up now, you have a record a voter can verify for when you do an audit or a recount.
You can make the case that hand counting takes the hacking out of the equation. But Alex Halderman, a computer-science professor at U-Mich, sees it differently. He points to the potential for human error and even ballot-box stuffing. “It would be chaotic to make that change,” he says. “And you could be opening the door to cheating.”
What comes next
There were others in the room for these internal talks, not just Olsen. A source says a senior aide and a special assistant from the Domestic Policy Council were in on it. Then again, Olsen has been in close quarters with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and some Democratic senators want to see him gone.
Howard Lutnick, the head of the Commerce Department, has put the record straight: he never had a word with a top intelligence type on election matters, let alone a meeting. “We didn’t engage in the topic at all,” the department said, though they wouldn’t say if anyone else was part of it.
But for now, two things stand out. Twenty-seven states ran on Dominion in 2024, and the case for an outright ban hasn’t held water. And as for the paper trails? Most places have those in place to keep things in order, machine or no.
If you’re following the story, here is where we’ve been:
– September: Commerce looks for a legal in
– May 2025: Seizure of Dominion units in Puerto Rico
– Summer: No sign of any Venezuelan code
– 2023: $787 million in damages to Dominion
This is a long way from being settled. With everything from the equipment to the district lines up for grabs, it will be the next round of moves from Washington and the states that tells us if this is a one-off or the new normal for how power is won.
