A White House adviser spearheaded a desperate initiative that could have resulted in voting machines in half of the U.S. states being seized, according to a report.
Kurt Olsen, Trump’s election-security czar, has been tasked by the administration with investigating long-debunked claims that Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory was the result of widespread voter fraud.
As part of his probe, Olsen sought to uncover evidence that Dominion Voting Systems machines—which have long been the target of unsubstantiated claims surrounding the 2020 election—posed a national security risk and could be hacked by foreign adversaries, Reuters reported.
Olsen had hoped his scheme would succeed before November’s midterms, when Trump and the GOP are seeking any advantage they can get ahead of an expected electoral wipeout, two sources told Reuters.
Olsen’s attempts to find evidence of foreign hacking focused on the QAnon-linked conspiracy theory that Venezuela had hacked the machines to rig votes in favor of Biden during the 2020 election, according to Reuters.
The plan from Olsen—a former Trump campaign lawyer who worked on the “Stop the Steal” movement—fell apart when neither he nor his team of Trump allies could substantiate their claims about the voting machines.
However, Reuters reported that the effort to remove Dominion Voting Systems machines ahead of the midterms advanced to the point that Commerce Department officials had begun examining whether there were legal grounds to carry it out last September.
If the machines had been removed, Olsen would have pushed for half of the U.S. states to use paper ballots and have them counted by hand, an idea Trump has frequently pushed for.
“We have to get to honest elections, we have to go back to paper ballots,” Trump said during the first Cabinet meeting of his second term in February 2025.
Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science professor, said that shifting to hand-counted paper ballots carries significant risks, including vulnerability to fraud and human error.
“Changing to hand counting would be chaotic,” he told Reuters. “And it might facilitate cheating.”
Others involved in Olsen’s effort included Paul McNamara, a senior aide to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Brian Sikma, a special assistant to Trump who serves on his Domestic Policy Council.
In April 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems a mammoth $787.5 million settlement after the network repeatedly aired false claims that the company had helped rig the 2020 presidential election in favor of Biden using fraudulent voting machines.
A White House spokesperson dismissed the Reuters report as misinformation based on selectively leaked information.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for further comment.
