By Erin Banco, Jonathan Landay and Alexandra Alper
WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s election-security czar last year sought to ban voting machines used in more than half of U.S. states by asking whether the Commerce Department could declare their components national-security risks, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
White House adviser Kurt Olsen, a lawyer Trump has tasked with proving widely debunked election-rigging conspiracy theories, pushed the plan to target Dominion Voting Systems machines. The idea emerged, the sources said, as Olsen and other officials brainstormed about how the federal government could take control over elections from U.S. states, an idea publicly aired by Trump.
Olsen wanted a national system of hand-counted paper ballots, the sources said, a frequent Trump demand some election-security experts say would be less accurate and potentially riskier than the current system of machines with auditable paper trails that almost all cities and states use.
The plan to exclude the machines, reported here first, got far enough that in September, Commerce Department officials began exploring what grounds could be invoked to execute it, three additional sources said. It eventually collapsed, however, because Olsen and other administration staffers working with him failed to provide evidence to justify such a move, two of the sources said.
The episode is part of a far-reaching Trump administration push to encroach on state and local governments’ authority to run elections – which is granted to them in the U.S. Constitution to prevent the executive branch from seizing power. Olsen is working with the nation’s top intelligence and law enforcement agencies to chase voting-rigging claims.
A Reuters investigation earlier this month found administration officials and investigators in at least eight states have sought confidential records, pressed for access to voting equipment and re-examined voter-fraud cases that courts and bipartisan reviews have rejected. Trump and Republican allies are also pursuing unprecedented plans to redraw election districts earlier than usual to secure advantages in the November midterm congressional elections.
Olsen, who Democratic senators are seeking to remove from his post, aimed to invalidate Dominion voting machines before the midterms, the two sources said.
Others involved in the deliberations included Paul McNamara, a senior aide of Trump’s spy chief Tulsi Gabbard, and Brian Sikma, a special assistant to Trump who works on his Domestic Policy Council, according to one of the two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Olsen has worked closely with Gabbard’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
Early last summer, McNamara asked officials in the Commerce Department to consider the potential designation of Dominion chips and software as a national security risk, the two sources said.
At the time, McNamara headed an ODNI task force that worked with officials across the administration to investigate vulnerabilities in the nation’s voting machines. The two sources said McNamara spoke about the issue to senior officials at the U.S. Commerce Department, which is run by Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Reuters could not determine whether Lutnick was involved in or aware of those discussions.
A Commerce Department spokesperson said Lutnick never met or discussed election-integrity issues with McNamara and did not “engage in the topic at all.” The spokesperson declined to comment on whether Lutnick’s office or other officials were involved.
Olsen, McNamara and Sikma did not respond to requests for interviews.
WORRIES ABOUT MORE ELECTION CHAOS
Democrats and election-integrity experts worry that, with Republicans expected to suffer losses in the midterms, the administration aims to suppress voting and pave the way to challenge losses with more baseless claims of election fraud.
More than 98% of U.S. election jurisdictions already produce a paper record for every vote, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission said last year. Those votes are mostly cast on machines that print a paper record, or hand-marked but counted by electronic readers. Election-security experts broadly support the current combination of technology and paper ballots, which provides a voter-verified trail for post-election audits.
Proponents of hand-marked, hand-counted ballots argue they eliminate hacking concerns. But they pose different risks, said Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer-science professor, including counting mistakes and ballot-box stuffing.
“Changing to hand counting would be chaotic,” he said, “and it might facilitate cheating.”
White House spokesman Davis Ingle characterized the reporting for this story as selectively leaked and called it misinformation.
Olivia Coleman, a spokesperson for Gabbard’s agency, said the story contained “inaccuracies and false descriptions” of the agency’s work on election security, without elaborating.
SCOURING VOTING MACHINES FOR TRACES OF ‘FOREIGN ADVERSARIES’
U.S. supply chain rules give the commerce secretary powers to restrict transactions with technology companies from nations designated “foreign adversaries,” including China, Russia, and, specifically, the government of Venezuela’s former President Nicolas Maduro, who the U.S. military unseated from power in January.
A main focus of Olsen’s efforts to find evidence of foreign hacking is the debunked theory that Dominion machines were infected with code controlled by Venezuelans to steal the 2020 election from Trump, the two sources said.
Repeated investigations and lawsuits since 2020 have produced no evidence Dominion machines were hacked. In 2023, Fox News paid Dominion $787 million in a defamation case over false election-rigging claims.
In 2024, at least 27 states used Dominion machines, similar to the number in 2020. Denver-based Dominion was purchased last October by Liberty Vote USA of Colorado.
Yet Trump continues to repeat the allegations, most recently on May 12 when he reposted a six-year-old clip of a host on the far-right One America News network making the false claim that Dominion machines deleted millions of votes.
In May, 2025, Olsen helped lead a federal mission that seized Dominion machines that Puerto Rico used in its 2024 gubernatorial election. An analysis of the machines by cyber contractor Mojave Research Inc. produced later that summer found some known-about vulnerabilities, but no Venezuelan-origin code or evidence of hacking.
Around the time McNamara’s conversation took place with Commerce Department officials, Olsen’s team took apart some of the Puerto Rico machines, believing that they would find components manufactured by countries designated as foreign adversaries, the two sources said.
The team found one chip packaged in China by U.S. company Intel. Such chips are not generally considered a threat to U.S. national security. Other chips were packaged in Japan, South Korea and Malaysia, the two sources said. Olsen’s report on the teardown, they said, described the chips as ‘East Asian,’ which they believe was intended to obscure the failure to find any security risks.
A September White House meeting convened to discuss the machines included cyber experts at the National Security Council, two of the sources said. The group, which included Olsen’s team, discussed whether Dominion’s equipment contained traces of Venezuelan code, one of the sources said.
Following the meeting, a Commerce Department political appointee asked the department’s office that assesses foreign national-security risks to tech supply chains to consider options to address any risks posed by voting machines, according to the three additional sources.
The office considered the matter but took no action, two of the sources said.
(Reporting by Erin Banco, Jonathan Landay and Alexandra Alper in Washington; Additional reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Don Durfee)
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