Somewhere inside the White House right now there’s a federal intelligence report sitting in a drawer, and Trump’s lickspittles who put it there are betting you won’t see it before you vote in November.
It’s an assessment of the security of America’s voting machines, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Reuters revealed last week that White House officials have spent months refusing to authorize its release even as the 2026 midterms come barreling toward us.
The findings are almost comic in their irony, but they could also become the weapon that brings down our democracy this November. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first the backstory.
Tulsi Gabbard launched this whole investigation to dig up proof of Donald Trump’s endlessly repeated lie that voting machines stole the 2020 election from him. What her people reportedly found instead was that some states are running outdated equipment that ought to be patched, and that there’s no evidence anywhere that a single vote was flipped or manipulated.
So the one document that could actually help election officials harden their systems before Election Day has been buried, precisely because it tells the opposite of the story the president wanted told.
And consider who now controls that report. Gabbard stepped down this spring, and last week Trump installed Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, a man who runs the federal housing agency and chairs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has no intelligence background whatsoever, and didn’t even hold a security clearance until days before he walked in the door.
He reportedly showed up early asking for a list of every employee so he could decide whom to fire, floated cutting hundreds of intelligence jobs (a Putin dream for decades), and wondered aloud whether he could carry the President’s Daily Brief home with him.
Trump has been remarkably candid about why Pulte is there, telling reporters that his new spy chief may “find out some things about the rigged elections.”
David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who works with election officials in both parties, warned that Pulte appears hand-picked precisely because he embraces the same 2020 lies Gabbard chased for eighteen months and never could prove.
Elections lawyer Marc Elias put it more bluntly, calling the appointment a straightforward attempt to seize control of our elections, and Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, called Pulte a “national security threat”.
So, the person who’ll decide whether that voting-machine report ever sees daylight, and what gets done with the weaknesses it describes, is now the president’s hand-picked election man, a guy who at Housing was willing to violate the standards of his office and common decency to dig into Letitia James’ and Adam Schiff’s mortgage records just to make Trump happy that he could then punish them with lawfare.
That by itself would be a scandal in any other administration: a regime that talks about election integrity from sunup to sundown is sitting on the very report that could improve it. But the worry that’s been keeping voting-rights lawyers awake runs in a direction most Americans haven’t yet let themselves imagine.
Back in February, the Guardian’s George Chidi walked through how this could unfold.
After the FBI raided Fulton County’s election office and hauled off 2020 materials, Trump went on Dan Bongino’s podcast and announced that Republicans should “nationalize the voting” and “take over” elections in fifteen places.
That same week we learned Gabbard had quietly trucked voting machines out of Puerto Rico to hunt for vulnerabilities. Set those moves next to each other, as the Campaign Legal Center’s Bruce Spiva did, and the pattern becomes shockingly clear.
“This is not a coincidence,” he said.
Trump’s March executive order declared a national emergency over supposed foreign interference in our elections, invoking a 2018 order called EO 13848 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Miles Taylor, who helped draft 13848 when he was at Homeland Security and is a regular guest on my radio/TV program, told the Guardian they wrote it “to create a mechanism for sanctions, not to empower the director of national intelligence to fiddle with elections.”
But that law lets a president block the use of “property” like voting machines and tabulators that he claims are tainted while an investigation grinds on, and he never has to prove a thing. He can, in other words, selectively seize the machine that registered your vote this November and refuse to release it until long after people are sworn into office.
Disinformation researcher Joohn Choe validated that concern, pointing out that this fall the federal government could start seizing machines across the country, classify the supposed evidence, and then tell judges it can’t reveal what it’s looking for or how long it’ll take because national security forbids it.
“States would not be able to certify what they would not be able to access,” Choe said.
Picture what that would do to a close election. If federal agents declared a swath of digital voting machines (from heavily Democratic parts of swing states or in critical elections) off-limits in the last week of October, you’d get a cascade of emergency court hearings, county election directors scrambling to print and hand-count ballots they never planned for, early voting collapsing in the targeted places, and the results of a handful of razor-thin House races hanging unresolved for weeks.
Trump wouldn’t need to flip a single vote to steal a chamber of Congress; he’d only need to make the counting impossible in the right districts at the right moment, then let the chaos and the lawsuits do the rest.
That’s the scenario Eric Levitz mapped out in a chillingly plausible Vox analysis that’s been circulating among election experts. The old fear was that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and send the military to grab ballots on election night: this version the experts now consider more likely is quieter and far harder to fight.
As Derek Clinger of the University of Wisconsin’s State Democracy Research Initiative put it, Fulton County points toward a seizure of ballots “conducted with the appearance of a legal process,” which is both more probable and tougher to challenge while the clock is running.
Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center told Vox that anyone still doubting this administration is laying the groundwork to interfere in our elections should now have those doubts erased.
And this is where that buried report comes back into the picture. A federal document, stamped with intelligence-community authority and describing machine “vulnerabilities,” is exactly the kind of prop a White House could pull out of the drawer in late October and wave in front of the cameras as the official-sounding justification for declaring machines compromised and votes thus not counted.
No source has yet reported that’s the plan, but that’s sure my read of where these pieces point. And with Trump it isn’t hard to imagine how a report written to chase a lie, then held in reserve, could end up serving as the excuse for the very seizure the experts are warning about.
The Founders saw this coming, which is why they deliberately handed the running of elections to the states rather than to a national executive who might tip the scales. The federal judge who permanently blocked Trump’s March order last fall said exactly that, but Trump and his toadies appear hell-bent on ignoring this court as they have so many others over the past 18 months.
And every strongman of the last century who set out to capture a democracy began by capturing the machinery that decides who won, almost always under the banner of an emergency and an investigation.
When Louise and I lived in Germany in the early 1980s, I spent evenings with older Germans who’d been young in the 1930s, and the thing that haunted me wasn’t the violence they described. It was how ordinary each step felt while it was happening, how every move was cloaked in legal language and official reassurance, right up until the morning they understood the ballot no longer meant anything.
It’s all starting to come into focus: the report in the drawer, Pulte parked atop the intelligence community, the Postal Service rewriting its rules to choke off mail-in ballots in the very states that lean Democratic, the demands for voter rolls, and the gerrymanders.
And all of it springs from the one hard fact that the American people have spent the better part of a half-century rejecting what the GOP is selling:
Without his treasonous deal with Iran to hold the hostages, Reagan never would have become president; without his brother purging 10,000 Black people from the rolls weeks before the 2000 election, George W. Bush would have lost to Al Gore; without Russia and Facebook skewing the messaging toward Trump in 2016, Hillary would have become president.
Fifty years representing $40 trillion in trickle-down tax cuts put on the national debt and then shoveled into billionaires’ money bins while everyone else’s wages flatlined, fifty years of culture-war crusades against queer, Black, and Hispanic people designed to keep working folks fighting each other instead of looking up at who’s picking their pockets: the voters have finally had enough of all of it.
They want their damn middle class back, the one we had before Reagan killed the unions, stopped enforcing anti-monopoly laws, gutted higher education, told us government was the problem, and the morbidly rich among us started pulling away from the rest on the foundations of their tax cuts.
A party with something real to offer ordinary Americans wouldn’t need to seize the machines and gut the mail to hold onto power: the rigging is their confession that they’ve already lost the argument.
The special elections held so far this cycle have mostly gone against Trump, and his earlier schemes to rig the maps and purge the rolls have run into one legal wall after another, which is probably what’s driving these extreme measures.
Even Chuck Schumer says Democrats already have teams of senators and lawyers war-gaming every angle of attack, with people in place “to make sure they count the votes fairly.” The courts and the states still hold the line, but a line only holds when the people behind it are paying attention.
So pay attention, and then act. Call your members of Congress through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and demand that the ODNI report be released now, while there’s still time to patch the systems it describes, instead of being saved as a weapon for October to set aside our votes.
Check your own registration and find your polling place at vote.org, keep an eye on your state’s election rules through openstates.org, and program the Election Protection hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE, into your phone before the fall so you’ll have it the moment something looks wrong at your precinct.
Like the early 2000’s in Russia and Hungary, this is the season when democracies are either defended or quietly lost, and the defending falls to ordinary people like us who refuse to look away.
If this piece helped you understand what’s at stake, share it with the friends and family who still think the midterms will simply happen the way midterms always have, and forward it to someone who can volunteer as a poll worker or an election observer this November.
The more of us who see the drawer they’re hiding this report in, the harder it becomes for anyone to use it against us. Support independent journalism, subscribe and share the Hartmann Report, and let’s make sure every vote in 2026 is cast, counted, and honored.
