US government wanted to hack voting machine and hide gaps
Is this still democracy? US Department of Homeland Security officials wanted to direct cybersecurity experts to secretly obtain and hack voting machines. You should not report vulnerabilities to the manufacturer, but only to the White House.
Secret order to security authorities
It is a revelation with a lot of political explosives: US Department of Homeland Security officials are said to have asked the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to secretly obtain and hack a voting machine. The vulnerabilities discovered should only be reported to the White House and kept secret from the manufacturer. This happened a few months after the start of Donald Trump’s second term in office and represents a break with usual procedures.
CISA normally informs manufacturers about security gaps. After all, the CISA employees refused and repeatedly pointed out that implementation was impossible. But apparently ethical and legal concerns were not the real reason, but rather a banal lack of staff. Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative had recently fired the experts who could have carried out such an operation.
A former government official suspected that the government wanted to keep the findings on the back burner in order to invalidate unpleasant election results. Says ProPublica Reportedly, officials later abandoned the plan. Democratic lawmakers are now calling for an investigation into whether CISA can still fulfill its tasks. CISA has lost more than 1,000 employees through layoffs and departures and has shrunk by about a third.
For the 2027 financial year, a draft envisages further cuts of $700 million (around €623 million). This could result in 900 additional layoffs. During Trump’s second term in office, the authority largely discontinued its cooperation with states and manufacturers of election technology to secure the infrastructure, which had existed since 2018.
Loss of trust before the elections
Between 2025 and mid-September 2026, CISA provided virtually no assistance in preparing for the elections. In addition, the US government released previously confidential documents from the states, including communication logs from Election Day 2020. This damaged the already strained relationship between CISA and the state election authorities. Some agencies are now wary of sharing sensitive information with CISA.
States rely on their own resources to finance sensor technology to monitor their networks. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes stated that the government has left states to fend for themselves when it comes to election security. The White House declined to comment on the events. Spokeswoman Lauren Bis said in writing that the president had done more than anyone else to promote free and fair elections. This can and must be left as it is.
Amit Gohar is Technical writer at ResearchSnipers.com, he is well versed Technology News writer, he has completed is MS computer Science in 2020. He can be reached at amit.g@researchsnipers.com
