The American people have seen the evidence. Now they need to see the accountability.
Every American deserves answers to two questions before November.
The first is why federal officials declared 2020 the most secure election in American history, two months after the CIA received intelligence reporting on a technique designed to manipulate electronic vote totals and evade standard audits.
The second is how a company that our own intelligence community secretly rated a threat to U.S. national security in 2006 went on to win a contract worth up to $282 million to build the voting system for Los Angeles County, the largest election jurisdiction in the country, just in time for the 2020 presidential election.
Nobody in Washington has answered either question, and nobody has been asked to answer them under oath. I think that says a lot about the state of accountability in this country, and about what is riding on this election.
I served thirty-three years in the Army, most of them in intelligence. When we found a weakness in a system our troops depended on, we fixed it, and somebody had to explain how it got there. That was how the profession worked, and it’s how any serious country protects what matters most. We have never held the system that decides who governs us to that standard. Five years of looking the other way have taught our adversaries exactly how much we will tolerate.
Most people remember the arguments over the outcome of 2020. The damage that has lasted longer came from how that election was run. Officials in several states changed voting procedures without the approval of their legislatures, even though the Constitution gives that power to the legislatures. Counties that had never handled mail ballots in large numbers suddenly received them by the millions, and many of those offices had neither the staff nor the procedures to verify the mail-in ballots they received. Drop boxes went up with little oversight. The machines that tabulated the votes stayed closed to any real inspection by the citizens whose votes they counted.
When the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced that the election was the most secure in American history, it spoke with a confidence that the government’s own intelligence files did not support. We know that now because the CIA put some of those files on the public record this summer.
The document summarizes intelligence reporting from 2004 through 2020 on Venezuela’s efforts to manipulate electronic voting systems. Much of it is blacked out, and the agency says it covers only selected reporting. What’s left is still damning.
In April 2004, U.S. intelligence recorded Hugo Chávez saying his objective was to prevent the reelection of a sitting American president. Two years later, the National Intelligence Council rated Smartmatic’s purchase of the American voting company Sequoia as a moderate threat to our national security. The assessment cited intelligence that Smartmatic directors held credentials from Venezuelan intelligence services, and it noted that the two companies had contracts in roughly 400 American counties. Washington took the concern seriously enough to pressure Smartmatic into selling Sequoia in 2007.
The reporting kept coming. Before Venezuela’s 2012 presidential election, sources told U.S. intelligence that Chávez’s intelligence services were working with the national electoral council and Smartmatic on a plan to send altered machines to about 300 voting centers, with the goal of padding his margin by roughly 1.5 million votes. According to the same sources, Chávez later congratulated his people for pulling it off. In September 2020, another report described a method that would run a hidden second set of virtual machines alongside the real ones, swap in manipulated results, and make those results appear to come from legitimate equipment.
The CIA’s official judgment was that large-scale fraud did not happen in Venezuela in 2012. Read how the agency got there. It leaned on pre-election polling, a jump in government spending before the vote, the opposition’s concession, and a statistical review of voting patterns. Nowhere does it mention a forensic examination of the machines. The agency’s own internal red-team review in 2013 laid out a plausible way the manipulation could have happened without detection, admitted that analysts had limited insight into key parts of the voting system, and warned that elections in other countries using the same technology provider could be in doubt.
What this memo shows is that our government has understood the threat for 20 years. Tampering that goes undetected requires people on the inside at every step, from programming and securing the machines to storing the paper and running the audit. Washington has known where those weak points are since 2006, and it still hasn’t closed them.
That brings me back to my second question. In 2018, twelve years after that threat assessment, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors awarded Smartmatic USA a contract worth up to $282 million to build its new ballot-marking system, which was used in the 2020 presidential election. Federal prosecutors in Florida have since charged Smartmatic’s parent company and several former executives in a bribery and money-laundering case, alleging that money from the Los Angeles contract helped fund the scheme. The defendants will get their day in court, as they should. A company carrying that intelligence history, and now those allegations, has still never gone through a full national security review of the American contracts it holds.
Smartmatic is not the only vendor that deserves a hard look. In 2022, Los Angeles prosecutors arrested the chief executive of Konnech, a company that managed poll worker data, on allegations that it stored Americans’ personal information on servers in China. The charges were dropped within weeks; the county later paid the company a settlement, and the public never learned whether the original allegations held up. Supply chain studies have found that a substantial share of the parts inside American voting equipment come from China. Internal vendor emails have shown remote access built into county election networks without two-factor authentication. I would never have accepted those conditions on a classified network under my command, and we shouldn’t accept them on the networks that count our votes.
The prosecutions we have seen so far have gone after small targets. A former Milwaukee election official was convicted after she requested military absentee ballots under fake names, a crime against the very people who defend this country. A number of noncitizens have been charged for voting in federal elections. I’m glad those cases were brought. None of them reaches the officials who rewrote election rules without authority, the agency leaders who vouched for 2020 while their colleagues held contrary reporting, or the vendors whose foreign ties have never been fully examined.
I support President Trump, and I believe supporting him means being honest with him. Releasing a document does not secure a single ballot. Since July, we have seen plenty of coverage and very little follow-through. There is still no federal rule keeping components from adversary nations out of our voting equipment. No vendor has faced the kind of foreign ownership review that forced the Sequoia sale in 2007. The pages remain redacted, and both questions I started with still have no answer.
Look at Michigan. In August, Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf announced that a whistleblower inside the Secretary of State’s office had brought him what the sheriff describes as evidence that the state’s driver and vehicle records system automatically registers noncitizens to vote when they update their addresses. He referred the matter to the Department of Justice. When his investigators tried to interview two supervisors in that office, both gave the same answer. They had been told not to speak with him or help his investigation. Michigan’s own records show that noncitizen voting is no myth, because the Department of State has referred dozens of suspected cases to the Attorney General since the 2024 election, and several have already led to criminal charges. The Justice Department has spent a year in court trying to get Michigan’s full voter rolls, and the state still hasn’t handed them over. Most Americans would call it obstruction when officials order their employees to stonewall a sworn law enforcement officer. In our election system, it barely makes the news.
Michigan is not alone. In Georgia, prosecutors have charged people for voting twice, and the FBI seized Fulton County’s 2020 election records this year after the county spent years resisting efforts to examine them. Each of these cases involves a handful of people. Taken together, they describe a system whose safeguards depend almost entirely on whether a sheriff, a clerk, or an ordinary citizen is willing to go looking.
The midterms will show us whether anything has changed at the national level. If the voter rolls are cleaner, the paper trail holds up, the audits match the machines, and at least one official who destroyed election records finally faces a jury, then the last two years accomplished something. If instead we see counts that stall for days, observers kept at a distance, and state attorneys shielding election administrators from scrutiny, the American people will draw their own conclusions about how serious Washington ever was.
The Democratic Party no longer hides what it has become. Its rising stars call themselves democratic socialists, and the rest of the party has fallen in behind them. If Democrats take the House, proof of citizenship requirements will die in committee and face endless challenges in court. Voter identification will be attacked as bigotry, as it has been for years. The vendors will keep their contracts and the foreign parts will stay in the machines. The officials who changed the rules in 2020 will keep their jobs and their pensions. Every investigation opened since 2025 will be defunded, buried under subpoenas, or quietly shut down.
I don’t believe it would stop with elections. A socialist majority holding the power of the purse and the investigative authority of Congress would turn the administrative state against the citizens who raised these questions in the first place. They would call it protecting democracy, and the networks would repeat the phrase every night. Americans would still line up to vote every other November, but the decisions that shape their lives would be made by people they never elected and cannot remove. Liberty usually slips away gradually, when citizens stop guarding the one mechanism that keeps power answerable to them, and by the time most people notice, the damage is done.
The evidence has been sitting on the table for a long time. What we still need is the will to act on it, and that will has to come from the people, because Washington has shown it won’t supply it on its own. Every soldier knows the most dangerous moment on a watch comes when everyone assumes someone else is awake. If Americans assume someone else will fix this, the Democratic Party will take the House, and the socialist agenda its leaders have promised will move from campaign rallies into federal law. Nobody will have to cancel an election to take this country from you. They will simply control the people who run them, and they will have two full years to arrange it.
