Trump’s Election-Security Czar Is Reupping Debunked Conspiracy Theories to Ban Dominion Voting Machines in an Effort to Subvert Elections

Kurt Olsen, Trump’s election-security czar, tried to ban voting machines used in more than half of U.S. states—relying on the same debunked conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems that Trump has peddled since 2020.

Reuters explains via U.S. News & World Report:

White House adviser Kurt Olsen, a lawyer Trump has tasked with proving widely debunked election-rigging conspiracy theories, pushed the plan to target Dominion Voting Systems machines. The idea emerged as Olsen and other officials brainstormed about how the federal government could take control over elections from U.S. states. Olsen wanted a national system of hand-counted paper ballots—a demand election-security experts say would be less accurate and potentially riskier than the current system. The plan got far enough that in September, Commerce Department officials began exploring what grounds could be invoked to execute it.

A main focus of Olsen’s efforts: the debunked theory that Dominion machines were infected with code controlled by Venezuelans to steal the 2020 election from Trump. Repeated investigations and lawsuits since 2020 have produced no evidence Dominion machines were hacked. In 2023, Fox News paid Dominion $787 million in a defamation case over false election-rigging claims. Olsen aimed to invalidate the machines before the midterms. …

The episode is part of a far-reaching Trump administration push to encroach on state and local governments’ authority to run elections—which is granted to them in the U.S. Constitution to prevent the executive branch from seizing power.

This fits within a broader pattern of Trump efforts to interfere in elections, including executive orders threatening states, working to push through the SAVE Act, and trying to seize election records.

As Andy Craig has argued for The UnPopulist, America’s election system is robust enough to withstand a fair amount of meddling. But even if it is relatively unlikely that Trump will fully succeed in his efforts to subvert American elections, his dangerous intentions are clear enough.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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