Last Thursday, President Trump declassified election-related documents from the intelligence community, which suggest a range of detrimental issues with election infrastructure, ranging from known machine vulnerabilities to severe voter roll vulnerabilities and exploits to foreign interference by bad actors in the United States and abroad.
In this series, some of the most concerning declassified documents will be assessed and, in some cases, compared to issues that occurred during the 2020 election and beyond.
“Trust” is Not a Security Measure
Often, political pundits and lawmakers stand on their soapboxes and claim that trust in elections is eroding amid constant calls for election security and integrity. Even President Trump during his public address on Thursday said, “You have to trust your country… if there can be no trust, there can be no greatness. And that’s very simple. No trust, no greatness.”
But trust should never be built on blind faith – it should be built on the ability to verify. We demand audit trails from banks and financial institutions, secure chain-of-custody procedures in criminal investigations, and rigorous testing for the technology that carries our money, protects our health, and transports our families.
When experts discover that a system contains a vulnerability that could allow its results to be altered without reliable detection, we don’t simply hope no one exploits it; we ask whether that system should continue to be trusted at all.
After all, the institutions responsible for investigating and remedying those vulnerabilities include intelligence agencies and elected officials whose authority and political futures depend upon the very elections the public is being asked to trust. That reality makes independent verification—not institutional assurances—the cornerstone of public confidence.
The declassified intelligence report in this article does not, by itself, establish any election was stolen or that a U.S. system was successfully compromised. Rather, it documents that intelligence officials recognized vulnerabilities that could be exploited and undermine the integrity of electronically recorded votes.
In virtually every other field that involves public trust, the discovery of such vulnerabilities and the mere potential for impropriety that would go undetected would be enough to suspend the use of that technology.
Because the ‘secret ballot’ makes it impossible to reconstruct individual voter intent in a post-election audit, the highest standard should not be whether or not fraud can be proven after an election, but whether the system is designed to make meaningful verification possible before the results are accepted.
The CIA’s Own Words: Known Capabilities, Unproven Use
In a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Note released on June 29, 2026, the agency begins with a summary that alleges the Venezuelan government’s “sustained interest and likely some capability” to manipulate its own elections as well as a desire to “influence US politics.”
The document focuses on Intelligence Community (IC) reporting from 2004-2020 and “documented persistent concerns” about the “Venezuelan government manipulation of electronic voting systems and the potential national security implications for US election infrastructure.”
This ultimately led the US government to force Smartmatic, a company that was based in Florida and owned by three Venezuelan expats, to divest its US operations in 2007, in part because “electronic voting systems contained vulnerabilities that could theoretically be exploited by sophisticated actors with insider access.”
An April 2004 IC report indicated that then-President Hugo Chávez “stated his objective was to prevent the reelection of a sitting US president.” This assessment formed part of the 2006 IC’s assessment that Smartmatic’s acquisition of Sequoia Voting posed a “moderate threat” to US national security, according to the CIA report.
Before the 2012 presidential election in Venezuela, the report says that Chávez’s intelligence agencies “worked with the National Electoral Council and Smartmatic to develop plans to manipulate election results using preprogrammed voting machines.”
The reported plan called for deploying altered machines to approximately 300 voting centers in traditionally pro-Chávez areas, with the objective of ensuring victory by approximately 1.5 million votes.
The report states:
In September 2020, <redacted> reported that Venezuela <redacted> had developed detailed technical plans to manipulate the December 2020 National Assembly elections using what were <redacted>. According to this reporting, the technique involved creating a second set of virtual machines that would replicate legitimate voting machine results, then substitute manipulated data while making votes appear to originate from legitimate machines.
Whether any technically comparable circumstances existed in the 2020 U.S. election is a separate question that will be examined in Part 2.
In 2006, CIA analysts assessed that certain capabilities in regard to electronic voting manipulation “were technically possible and operationally feasible.” Specifically, the report claims that “unspecified artificial intelligence components” could “alter vote tallies…detect when they were being audited, and could provide receipts without registering, recording or transmitting those votes.”
In a 2013 Devil’s Advocacy assessment — an alternative-analysis exercise designed to challenge the prevailing judgment, the CIA “outlined a plausible scenario for how large-scale electronic manipulation could have occurred in Venezuela’s 2012 election.”
The CIA’s baseline assessment, however, “maintained that no large-scale electronic fraud occurred.” The basis for this assertion? It was “based on pre-election polling data, absence of irregular voting patterns, and the opposition’s concession.”
A September 2020 intelligence report highlighted “the most detailed description of a specific technical approach to election manipulation.” It claims the technique would entail:
- Replicating digital hash files sent to the central vote counting database
- Mimicking real voting machines that favored the ruling party
- Overwriting hash files of voting machines that favored the opposition
- Making altered votes appear to originate from legitimate voting machines
This is a significant acknowledgment that intelligence reporting contemplated methods capable of making altered electronic results appear legitimate while evading ordinary audit procedures and will be explored in Part 2 of this series.
The assessment concluded that the acquisition of Sequoia Voting by Smartmatic was “a potential instrument for Venezuelan officials seeking to undermine confidence in, or manipulate the electoral process in, the United States.
As a result, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) forced the divestiture of Smartmatic’s ownership of Sequoia Voting in 2007.
Surprisingly, the report notes:
In March 2018, Smartmatic ceased operations in Venezuela after publicly accusing the Maduro regime of inflating voter turnout by over one million votes in the August 2017 National Constituent Assembly election – figures that diverged from data recorded by Smartmatic’s voting machines. This represented a break between Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government after years of the company providing electoral technology to Venezuela.
The reversal raises an obvious question: how should one reconcile Smartmatic’s earlier reported relationship with Venezuelan authorities with its later public accusation that the Maduro government falsified turnout?
In 2014, SGO Corp., a London-based holding company, was named as the “parent company” for Smartmatic with Lord Mark Malloch-Brown as the Chairman. Malloch-Brown would become the President of the Open Society Foundation in December 2020, following the 2020 election in the US.
The CIA Note acknowledges that a 2006 Intelligence Community assessment that concluded that neither Venezuela nor Smartmatic possessed the level of control or access required to manipulate an election outside Venezuela in a predictable fashion.
In order to do so, they would need the ability to control “every stage of the electronic voting process” including pre- and post-voting machine security, programming, storage of paper voting receipts, and control of the audit process.
Further, the report states that the CIA’s baseline assessment for the 2012 Venezuelan election claimed “large-scale election fraud did not occur.” And in the December 2020 National Assembly election, “the regime did not need to resort to gross fraud to win the December 2020…elections, given that virtually the entire opposition boycotted” the election.
The Declassified Election Files, Part 2: When Theory Meets the Evidence
The question is no longer whether these vulnerabilities were considered possible. The question is whether the evidence from the 2020 election demonstrates that the same vulnerabilities were exploited—and whether the American people were ever given satisfactory answers.
Part 2 will examine the 2020 U.S. election record and compare specific, documented incidents to the vulnerabilities described in the CIA report—including unauthorized access, weaknesses in chain of custody, failures in auditability, and instances in which election systems or data were exposed to actors operating outside normal controls.
You can read the report in its entirety here:
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