Overview
Last year, a senior presidential adviser initiated conversations about using federal supply-chain authorities to bar use of voting machines deployed in more than half of U.S. states, according to people with direct knowledge of the deliberations. The adviser, Kurt Olsen, who has been charged by the president with probing allegations that have been widely discredited, proposed that the Commerce Department declare certain voting-machine components a national-security risk. The machinery at issue was made by Dominion Voting Systems, the sources said.
What was proposed
The proposal under discussion would have leveraged the commerce secretary’s power to restrict transactions involving technology from nations designated as "foreign adversaries." The idea, as pursued by Olsen and other officials, was to provide a federal path to remove Dominion equipment from U.S. election use by identifying their chips or software as posing a supply-chain risk. Officials involved framed this as a means to prevent foreign interference in elections.
That line of thinking dovetailed with more ambitious suggestions within the administration about increasing federal involvement in how elections are run - a responsibility that, under the Constitution, primarily rests with state and local governments. The advisers entertaining these ideas discussed converting to a national system of hand-counted paper ballots, a change the sources said Olsen favored and which the president has publicly advocated at times.
How far it advanced
By September of last year, Commerce Department personnel had begun exploring legal grounds that might be invoked to implement the plan, according to multiple people briefed on the discussions. The inquiry reached the level of the office within Commerce that evaluates foreign national-security risks to technology supply chains. However, the effort did not progress to policy action. Several sources said Olsen and other administration staff could not provide the necessary evidence to justify designating the components as national-security threats, and the Commerce office ultimately took no action.
Participants and roles
Alongside Olsen, others named by sources as involved in the deliberations included Paul McNamara, identified as a senior aide to the director of national intelligence, and Brian Sikma, a special assistant to the president on the Domestic Policy Council. McNamara had overseen a task force within the intelligence office that coordinated with administration officials to examine vulnerabilities in voting machines.
According to sources, McNamara raised the possibility of a Commerce Department designation with officials in that agency. A Commerce Department spokesperson later said the commerce secretary did not meet with McNamara or discuss election-integrity issues directly, and declined to comment on whether other officials or offices in the department were involved in the conversations.
Requests for comment to Olsen, McNamara and Sikma were not answered, according to the people familiar with the matter.
Motivation and evidentiary record
The push to identify Dominion components as risky grew out of an effort by Olsen and others to find signs of foreign tampering in voting equipment - specifically, the now-debunked theory that machines ran code controlled by agents in Venezuela that altered vote totals in the 2020 election. Multiple investigations and legal cases since 2020 have not produced evidence supporting that claim.
Within the administration’s campaign to re-examine disputed fraud claims, officials in a number of states sought confidential records and access to voting equipment, and re-opened voter-fraud allegations that courts and bipartisan reviews had previously rejected. One objective attributed to Olsen was to render Dominion machines unusable before the midterm elections.
Technical inspection of Puerto Rico machines
Operationally, Olsen’s team and allied investigators had already undertaken a hands-on look at some of the equipment. In May, 2025, the team participated in a federal operation that seized Dominion machines used in Puerto Rico’s 2024 gubernatorial election. A subsequent technical analysis by a private cyber contractor reported that the machines exhibited known vulnerabilities but contained no evidence of Venezuelan-origin code or of remote compromise.
During an earlier teardown of those machines, Olsen’s group anticipated finding components manufactured in countries the administration regards as foreign adversaries. The parts they discovered were packaged in several East Asian economies: a chip packaged in China by a U.S. company, and other chips packaged in Japan, South Korea and Malaysia. The sources said a report drafted by Olsen’s team described the parts as "East Asian," which those sources interpreted as a way to downplay the absence of any clear security risk tied to hostile foreign control.
Policy tools considered
Under existing U.S. supply-chain rules, the commerce secretary has the authority to restrict transactions with firms from nations designated as foreign adversaries, a category that includes China, Russia and, by explicit reference in policy text, the government of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. The internal Commerce office that assesses risks to technology supply chains examined the matter after a political appointee sought options for addressing any hypothetical risks posed by voting machines. That office considered possibilities but, according to sources, declined to take action.
Public claims, lawsuits and ownership
Dominion Voting Systems has been at the center of repeated accusations alleging election manipulation. Those claims have been litigated and investigated without substantiation. In 2023, a major broadcast network settled a defamation suit brought by the company for $787 million over false allegations of rigging the 2020 election. The company’s equipment remained in widespread use: in 2024, at least 27 states used Dominion machines, according to the reporting referenced by sources. The company was purchased in October by an entity called Liberty Vote USA in Colorado, a fact noted by sources involved in the deliberations.
Despite the lack of corroborating evidence, the president has continued to repeat the allegations in public forums; as one example cited by the people familiar with these events, the president reposted in mid-May a six-year-old broadcast clip that alleged Dominion machines deleted millions of votes.
Reactions and expert perspectives
Election-security specialists and Democrats voiced alarm that efforts to sideline voting technology could be part of a broader plan to suppress turnout or lay the groundwork to contest unfavorable outcomes in upcoming elections. Supporters of the existing mixed system of electronic machines with voter-verified paper trails point to its ability to enable post-election audits. More than 98% of U.S. election jurisdictions already create a paper record for each vote, with the record produced either by printers attached to electronic machines or by hand-marked ballots later read by electronic tabulators.
Proponents of hand-marked, hand-counted ballots argue those systems avoid digital vulnerabilities, but some election-technology specialists caution they introduce different operational risks, including counting errors and the potential for ballot-box tampering. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science professor cited by sources, warned that a sudden switch to hand counting could be chaotic and might facilitate cheating.
White House communications disputed characterizations of these internal discussions. A White House spokesman called the accounts selectively leaked and labeled them misinformation. A spokesperson for the director of national intelligence said the reporting contained inaccuracies and false descriptions of that office’s work on election security, without providing further detail.
Broader administration activity tied to election oversight
Officials described the push to reevaluate voting technology as part of a wider pattern of activity: investigators and administration officials in multiple states seeking records, access to equipment and further examination of previously dismissed allegations; and political plans to redraw electoral boundaries earlier than usual with an eye toward congressional contests. Democratic senators have also sought action to remove Olsen from his post amid these controversies.
Within the White House and allied agencies, discussions on how to justify a Commerce Department designation for voting-machine components were serious enough to convene cyber experts at a White House meeting in September. Participants discussed whether any code traceable to Venezuelan actors was present in Dominion hardware, one source said. The meeting led to follow-up inquiries at Commerce, but ultimately produced no action.
Operational and market implications
At stake in these deliberations are both electoral procedures and the regulatory reach of supply-chain controls. Designating technology as a national-security risk can have immediate operational effects - restricting purchases, requiring divestitures or limiting use - and can ripple into procurement decisions, vendor relationships, and vendor liability. The attempt to use such authorities to exclude an established category of election equipment illustrates the intersection of industrial supply-chain policy and electoral administration.
Conclusion
The effort to classify Dominion voting components as foreign-adversary risks did not succeed, in part because proponents could not substantiate claims of foreign hacking or coercion of the equipment. Still, the episode reveals how federal authorities considered deploying commercial supply-chain tools to influence the hardware used in U.S. elections, and how supply-chain assessments can be drawn into politically charged disputes over electoral integrity.