(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Very hackable Trump administration vows to ‘secure’ elections [1] ['Lisa Needham'] Date: 2026-09-30 People stand in line at a polling place on the first day of early in-person voting in Black Mountain, North Carolina, on Oct. 17, 2024. Oh, thank goodness. If you’ve been worried about the upcoming election, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is here to make sure everything is all safe and secure, and he’s gonna go all warfighter to do it. Cyberwarfighter, that is. Having actual troops at the polls is wildly against federal law, but Hegseth has nonetheless figured out a way for the military to intervene in our free and fair and safe elections, all part of President Donald Trump’s quest to make sure those elections remain none of those things. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Dec. 2, 2025. AP So Whiskey Pete is going to have the National Security Agency and military intelligence agencies “guard” our election systems against foreign interference. Yeah, sure. It isn’t that the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command haven’t helped secure elections previously—they’ve been doing so since election equipment was designated as critical infrastructure back in 2017. It’s that the Trump administration cut the actual specialized defenses against election interference ages ago. It no longer funds security improvements for the states or shares threat information on foreign actors. In the biggest blow to election security, the administration gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, which provided cybersecurity support specifically for elections. Why? Because agencies like CISA fight actual election interference instead of pretending that Trump won the 2020 election, and failing to pretend Trump won in 2020 is treason or something. As David Becker, who runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told the Associated Press, Hegseth announcing this big initiative just a few weeks out from Election Day “suggests this is just theater.” He also pointed out that “If the administration was serious about assisting state and local election officials, they shouldn’t have dismantled all of the federal government’s election cybersecurity capacity and fired all their experts in early 2025.” Exactly. We do, of course, have to worry about foreign interference in elections. However, the interference we have to worry about is Russia meddling in any way they can to help Trump, just as they did in 2016. And we do know that Russia is already trying to attack this election—our own intelligence services are reporting it. Somehow, though, it doesn’t really seem like the administration is interested in helping combat the Russian efforts to put the GOP over the top. There’s also the problem that even if this were all in good faith, the administration kinda sucks at cybersecurity? The FBI, which is supposed to be the agency combating cybersecurity attacks, just got its shit absolutely rocked, with hackers getting access to what appears to be the private data of every FBI employee. Related | FBI hack is even worse than it seems And speaking of the FBI: Director Kash Patel will not commit to saying he won’t deploy federal agents to the polls. Similarly, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says ICE agents may be there if there is a “threat” or if they are serving a warrant—which pretty much sounds like they’re going to invent reasons to post up at the polls and intimidate anyone they think looks like an immigrant. So now voters face the possibility that Hegseth and pals are rooting around in their voter data. They face the possibility of armed federal agents showing up where they vote. This sort of thing is specifically intended to deter people from voting—particularly voters of color and naturalized citizens, all of whom would be right to be fearful of the goons who work for this administration. Add this to Trump’s mail-in ballot shenanigans and the laughable attempts to assert that states have tens of thousands of noncitizens on the rolls, eagerly poised to steal the election for Democrats. Those things fell apart, and Hegseth’s efforts may as well. But it doesn’t actually matter if these plans come to fruition. The chaos is the point. The destabilization is the point. People are going to decide not to vote. People are going to worry their vote won’t be counted. And for Trump, that’s the entire goal. The only shot the GOP has at winning these midterm elections is some combination of malfeasance and severely depressing voter turnout, and the administration is going to do everything it can to make that happen. 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