Trump Officials Pushed Plan to Ban Half of US Voting Machines in Unprecedented Election Meddling Bid
The voting machines ban was part of a broader effort aimed at letting the federal government "take control over elections from US states," reported Reuters.
A group of Trump administration officials last year pushed a plan to ban half of voting machines currently used in the US based on disproven conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen by former President Joe Biden.
According to a Friday report from Reuters, Trump adviser Kurt Olsen asked the US Department of Commerce to declare components of machines produced by Dominion Voting Systems to be national security risks.
Reuters' sources said that Olsen's idea came as part of a brainstorming session "about how the federal government could take control over elections from US states, an idea publicly aired by Trump."
Some officials at the Commerce Department began exploring legal justifications that could be used to ban half of all voting machines, but the effort ended because "Olsen and other administration staffers working with him failed to provide evidence to justify such a move," Reuters reported.
In place of the Dominion voting machines, Olsen pushed a scheme to force all affected states to hand count ballots, a process that some election experts say would be both more time consuming and prone to error.
Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science professor, told Reuters that "changing to hand counting would be chaotic,” adding that "it might facilitate cheating.”
Olsen, a former Trump campaign lawyer who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was hired by the White House last year to investigate that very same election, which Trump lost to Biden by 4.5 percentage points in the popular vote and by 74 votes in the US electoral college.
The report on the election machine-banning effort comes as Trump has pushed an unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering scheme, which has resulted in an electoral map that elections analyst G. Elliot Morris projects could result in Republicans maintaining control of the US House of Representatives while losing the nationwide popular vote by three points.
Democrats have accused the president of pushing to rig the 2026 midterm elections.
The president also issued an executive order that places new restrictions on mail-in voting, which the president has falsely claimed was used by Democrats to steal the 2020 election from him.
Additionally, Trump and allies such as right-wing podcaster Steve Bannin have suggested deploying federal immigration agents to polling places in November, a move that critics contend would be an unprecedented and unconstitutional federal voter intimidation campaign.
