Donald’s Election Security Scheme

Secret hacks, quiet layoffs, and a threat to jail election officials.

[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

Welcome to this week’s episode of Under the Radar, where we take a look at what the Trump regime is doing behind everybody’s backs while most of us are focused on all of the chaos and distractions they continue to create. Here’s the thing, though. While we are being distracted, and while they are intentionally distracting us, they are continuing to make decisions in the background that are changing our lives in ways we are going to be dealing with for a very long time.

Tomorrow, November 3, 2026, Americans will vote in the midterm elections, at least those who have not voted already. As of my last check, 50 million Americans have already voted. But something is happening inside the federal government that deserves our attention before we get the results of these critically important midterm elections.

On October 19, ProPublica published an investigation revealing that political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security had asked federal cybersecurity officials to acquire a voting machine secretly, attempt to hack it, and then send their findings to the White House. The agency they approached was the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, whose responsibilities include helping states protect the very election systems the appointees wanted to examine.

According to two former administration officials interviewed by ProPublica, the political appointees also instructed CISA not to notify the voting machine manufacturer if vulnerabilities were discovered, which is entirely contrary to the agency’s established practices. Career officials objected, and the request was ultimately abandoned.

But do we really think this is an isolated incident? One of the modus operandi of the Trump regime is to try to get away with something and then, when they fail, back off and find people who are willing to try again. In other words, do we seriously think the career officials who objected are going to keep their jobs for much longer? And do we seriously think they will not be replaced by political hacks who will do the bidding of the Trump regime?

One former official told ProPublica they feared vulnerabilities might be kept available to challenge election results later. The request reportedly originated in the first months of Donald’s second term. CISA was created in November 2018 during Donald’s first term to help defend the nation’s critical infrastructure. That infrastructure includes energy systems, communications networks, water supplies, and election infrastructure. Its election security work was built around cooperation with state and local governments, which actually administer American elections.

It is very worth mentioning here again that the federal government has practically no role in elections at all. CISA helped states identify vulnerabilities and modern cyber threats, conduct security exercises, and receive intelligence about potential foreign interference. In November 2020, CISA and its election partners described that year’s presidential election as the most secure in American history. Its director, Chris Krebs, publicly challenged unsupported claims about voting machine manipulation, and Donald fired him on November 17, 2020.

This is what Donald said when he introduced the documents his team had gathered:

This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes, and really exposes, levels of hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference never thought possible. Just as disturbingly, this vital information has for many years been covered up and hidden from you. The American people are beautiful, great American people, but that all changes right now. The documents we will release starting tonight have been gathered by the White House Government Transparency Task Force, a great group of people.

That is the kind of thing Donald started saying in 2020, even before the presidential election, but it certainly ramped up after Joe Biden beat him by almost eight million votes that November. What is unlike anything we have seen before is the lengths to which Donald continues to go to undermine the American people’s faith in free and fair elections, especially if he and the Republicans lose. Donald has continued to tell the American people that their elections are somehow vulnerable while his administration has substantially reduced the federal agencies established to help defend the security of our elections.

The White House has defended Donald’s record by telling ProPublica that he had done more than any other president to ensure free and fair elections, which is absolutely false and contrary to the reality. According to ProPublica’s October 19 investigation, more than 1,000 CISA employees have been laid off or pushed out during Donald’s second term, reducing the agency’s workforce by approximately one third.

The administration’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget would cut another $700 million from the agency, potentially requiring approximately 900 additional layoffs. The losses have affected people who work directly with state election officials, as well as the technology used to detect suspicious activity on election networks. Some states have had to purchase replacement monitoring services themselves. In July, CBS News reported that nearly 1,000 CISA personnel had left or been removed from active service by the middle of 2025. And remember, it was political appointees at Homeland Security who reportedly wanted CISA to acquire the voting machines secretly and hack them without notifying the manufacturer or reporting any vulnerabilities discovered. One former administration official told ProPublica what they feared the purpose might be:

My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any election results they don’t like. This goes against everything CISA represents.

As I mentioned, the request was never carried out because of pushback from career civil servants. But the same agency asked to undertake the secret operation had already lost so many of its technical specialists that, according to ProPublica, career employees told the political appointees they no longer had the personnel capable of doing it. All of this is intentional.

The Trump regime is perfectly comfortable actively trying to interfere in elections by potentially altering results, interfering with the equipment that tabulates ballots, and, again, creating circumstances that make Americans feel less secure that their votes are being counted, that their votes will be received at all, or even that they can vote.

Why? Well, I think it is pretty simple. In the immediate term, Donald and the Republicans know they face a potential landslide loss to the Democrats. That would be unsustainable, because with Democratic majorities, Donald faces the very real possibility of being tied up in investigations and litigation for years to come. In the grander scheme, this is all because Donald is incapable of accepting loss. He thinks he should win. He knows he needs to win. He has no problem, and no compunction whatsoever, about rigging things in advance so that he wins.

On July 17, 2026, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced that states refusing to comply with the Trump regime’s election security directives could lose federal funding. He also warned that election officials who failed to act on information provided by his department could face fines, criminal penalties, and even prison time. This is what Secretary Mullin said about those officials:

If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections, chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and, depending on how far it goes, prison time.

That is the kind of incursion into the running of elections that the federal government is not supposed to engage in. It is gobsmacking, and it amounts to attempts at election interference. On August 10, CISA held one of its first major conference calls of the year with state election officials, just 85 days before the midterms.

The meeting quickly became confrontational, exposing the growing distrust between the officials responsible for administering elections and the federal agency that is supposed to help protect them. Helping states make sure their elections are secure is the role of CISA, and it is pretty much the only role the federal government plays here. PBS NewsHour’s Liz Landers reported on what happened in that meeting. Here is how that reporting described the call:

I’m told that several secretaries of state asked questions on this call, and one of the more pointed questions and heated exchanges was about comments from the DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin. That is the agency that oversees CISA, of course. He made comments just a few weeks ago threatening to prosecute election officials if they didn’t cooperate with the Trump administration. One of these election officials asked why they should trust working with the agency when its boss says he wants to jail them. Another secretary apparently said the briefing felt more like security theater than actual help. Some officials felt the response to a request for tabletop exercises, penetration testing, and intelligence briefings was noncommittal, and it wasn’t clear whether those would arrive in time for the November elections. The most concise description I heard from a separate source on the call was that the agency was sort of covering its butts.

It’s all pretty much out in the open. ProPublica reported on October 19 that CISA had previously completed most of its election preparations with states by Labor Day. But in 2026, the agency did not publish its election security plan until September 24, long after much of that preparation would ordinarily have taken place. Ryan Messias, an election technology and cybersecurity expert who previously consulted for CISA, described the agency’s absence during 2025 and much of 2026 this way:

There is a difference between deprioritizing and being nonexistent.

Some election officials told ProPublica they no longer trusted CISA with confidential information. Others were developing contingency plans in case federal authorities attempted to seize voting equipment or declared it unusable. This is something that would have been utterly unthinkable even five years ago. With the midterms just days away, CISA has lost approximately a third of its workforce. State election officials have reported losing critical federal assistance, and some say they no longer trust the agency with sensitive information.

And again, this is all intentional. On October 27, Donald was asked a straightforward question about whether he would respect the results, whatever happened. He answered this way:

I will if they’re honest elections, yeah.

Well, creep, define honest for me. What is an honest election? The answer for Donald is that an honest election is one he wins. An honest election is one that goes the way he wants it to. An honest election is one he has rigged in his favor and in his party’s favor so he can continue to evade all accountability and get away with the kind of treasonous, grifting corruption he has been getting away with for 10 years now. That is what an honest election is according to that guy.

So we need to be prepared for all contingencies. This is part of the Trump regime’s project of destroying the American people’s faith, not just in our elections, but in all of our institutions. So be vigilant, and vote.