A Trump administration official tasked with proving debunked election-rigging conspiracy theories tried to ban voting machines used in more than half of U.S. states — and failed spectacularly when he couldn’t produce a shred of evidence to back it up.
Reuters reported Thursday that White House adviser Kurt Olsen asked the Commerce Department to declare components of Dominion Voting Systems machines national security risks. This move would have effectively banned them before the November midterms.
The plan advanced far enough that Commerce officials began exploring legal grounds to execute it last September. Still, it ultimately collapsed when Olsen’s team failed to provide evidence to justify the move, according to sources.
Olsen’s team had physically torn apart Dominion machines seized from Puerto Rico, hoping to find components from adversary nations. Instead, they found a chip packaged in China by U.S. company Intel — not generally considered a security threat — along with chips from Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia.
The Reuters scoop is the latest chapter in the Trump administration’s sweeping effort to wrest control of elections away from states. Trump signed a March 2025 executive order demanding proof of citizenship to register to vote and sought to block states from counting mail ballots received after Election Day, major parts of which were blocked by federal courts. The federal seizure of 2020 election records in Fulton County, Georgia, and Arizona has heightened fears that Trump may try to interfere in the 2026 midterms, including by deploying federal troops or ICE agents to polling places.
Trump’s attempt to interfere with voting systems is not novel — in his first term, he tried to direct the attorney general, the Department of Defense, and DHS to seize voting machines.
Olsen was also pushing a broader scheme for the federal government to take control of elections from states — an idea Trump has publicly aired.
“Changing to hand counting would be chaotic,” University of Michigan computer-science professor Alex Halderman told Reuters, “and it might facilitate cheating.”
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