DEMOCRACY WATCHLaundering Federal Election Interference in the Midterms
The administration has turned an unfixable fact—Chinese parts in nearly every U.S. voting machine—into a license to contest any election it loses.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posts a statement to its website at 9:15 pm—while polls in the Upper Peninsula are still open. DHS announces it has “identified Chinese-manufactured components” in tabulation equipment in four Michigan counties, and the department “cannot verify the accuracy of the results those machines produce.” The department cites no intrusion, exploit, or altered vote. Nearly all voting machines in the U.S. contain Chinese-made parts.
Press reports have dripped out all day. A federal citizenship database has flagged thousands of allegedly incorrect registrations. New envelope rules were issued for mail-in ballots after the ballots had been printed and were blocked by a court after they were mailed—but clerks are still rejecting envelopes under the invalidated rules. Republican House and Senate candidates lead narrowly in the in-person count, with 100,000 mail-in ballots still uncounted.
At 11:40 pm, President Trump demands that counting stop “until every machine is audited.” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer receives a letter from the administration warning that certifying results from “compromised” equipment could draw a Justice Department investigation.
An election over who controls Congress is thrown into chaos, its legitimacy permanently marred.
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None of this has happened (yet). But the scenario is based on actions the federal government has taken over the past six weeks, laying the groundwork for potential federal interference in the upcoming midterm elections.
In July, after the president’s speech alleging foreign interference in the 2020 election, several of my Lawfare colleagues and I warned that the administration’s selective declassifications could “lay the groundwork for alleging foreign interference or fraud” before or after Election Day 2026.
Then, on Aug. 24, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent a letter to the White House Transparency Task Force warning that voting machines containing Chinese-manufactured components pose “significant security risks.” The letter concedes that no evidence exists of any vote being compromised. But it places conditions on more than $1 billion in grants—requiring post-election audits, for example—that give DHS leverage over how states run their midterm elections.
DHS’s Warning Has a Kernel of Truth
The claim at the center of the DHS memo is true: Voting machines in the U.S. contain Chinese-made components. A 2019 supply-chain study documented that fact, and all the major election equipment vendors acknowledged their use before Congress in January 2020. What’s new is the way that fact is being deployed:
Any unwelcome result can be attributed to Beijing.
