- Trump administration officials asked CISA to hack a voting machine just months into his second term
- CISA was told not to disclose any vulnerabilities to the voting machine manufacturer
- CISA has been gutted by job cuts and a lack of funding, with many state officials hesitant to trust the agency with securing the midterm elections
Towards the start of President Trump’s second term, allies in the Department of Homeland Security tasked the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) with secretly acquiring a voting machine with instructions to hack it and not tell anyone except the White House about the vulnerabilities they found.
ProPublica, who spoke to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request, noted that the standard practices of CISA require the agency to let manufacturers know of vulnerabilities in their technology, but the political appointees explicitly asked CISA not to.
“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials told ProPublica. “This goes against everything CISA represents.”
CISA asked to hack voting machine
CISA has been a relentless target of the Trump Administration, with the agency’s jobs being cut by one third and the majority of its senior leadership resigning or being fired.
In total, CISA has cut 1,000 jobs since the start of Trump’s second term - largely down to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency - with additional cuts to funding in 2027 likely to result in a further 900 jobs being lost.
As a result of these job cuts, remaining CISA employees told the political appointees that the request to hack a voting machine couldn’t be fulfilled.
Since 2018, CISA has been responsible for helping to protect election infrastructure from cyber attacks and interference, but has had to cut back on much of its work in these areas due to a lack of funding and staff. Many state officials have been unable to seek election support ahead of the November midterm elections.
As a result of Trump’s cuts to CISA’s jobs and funding, many state officials fear the agency has become a shell occupied by Trump loyalists. “They’ve violated the entire premise of that information-sharing relationship,” a former high-ranking federal cybersecurity official told ProPublica. “There’s no fucking way they’re ever going to give any information to CISA. And it’s unclear if they ever will in the future.”
In response to the claims, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said, “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections.”
“I don’t pay attention to what the president says. I pay attention to what his administration does,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. “And what they’ve done is basically cut us off and left us on our own.”
Voting difficulties start early
Early voting for the midterms has already started in some states, but early polling sites at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and Western Carolina University have been shut down, with Guilford County board members saying the resources could be better allocated elsewhere.
Shutting the polling sites makes it significantly harder for the collective 40,000 students to vote, with university policy preventing some students from owning a car during their first year of study.
Shia Rozier, a senior at North Carolina A&T and cofounder of student organization Protect Ours NC told NPR, “In order to get to the polls, they now have to get a Lyft or get a Uber or get somebody to take them at a time where gas prices are extremely high, creating an additional barrier to the poll.”
In response, students organized a march to the nearest polling site over 45 minutes away.