Overview
- A White House adviser pushed Commerce Department officials last year to consider labeling Dominion Voting Systems components a national-security risk as a way to remove those machines from use.
- Commerce staff briefly explored legal options but declined to act because the advisers who pushed the plan failed to produce evidence tying the machines to foreign-controlled malicious code.
- A federal teardown of Dominion machines seized from Puerto Rico found known software and hardware vulnerabilities but no signs of Venezuelan-origin code or other evidence of remote hacking.
- The push included proposals to shift to a national system of hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots, an approach that election experts warn could increase counting errors and ballot-chain vulnerabilities.
- The White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disputed aspects of the reporting, and the episode has intensified scrutiny of federal moves that seek to challenge states’ constitutional authority to run elections.