In 2020, 2022, and 2024, our nation held federal elections. Despite the pandemic, threats of violence, denial of results, and extraordinary pressure, these were secure and accurate. Election officials worked together across party lines. The system held.
This year, however, a new threat to free and fair elections has emerged: the federal government itself.
JUL 31, 2025
“In December 2024, I was personally involved in an NSA‑authorized forensic audit of the 2024 election. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz won—by a wide margin. Trump lost dramatically. There are multiple layers of complexity to this cover‑up, including transnational organized crime syndicates that extend far beyond the United States and our elections. To that point, I work in the human trafficking sector, which intersects with the stolen election(s) and has ties to Trump and Epstein—not to President Biden, Vice President Harris, or Governor Walz, but to the Democrats and other allied interests responsible for burying the audit.” — Adam Zarnowski, ex-CIA agent and author of Jörmungandr
With a combination of executive orders, legal maneuvers and staffing decisions, President Donald Trump has already put in motion his next effort to subvert upcoming federal elections in 2026 and 2028.
Since taking office, Trump has installed loyalists who follow his orders into key positions at the Department of Justice, issued executive orders centralizing decision-making within the White House, attempted to unilaterally change state and local election laws, demanded unprecedented access to voter data, dismantled election security protections, threatened elections officials and workers, law firms and others who have historically stood up to protect elections and defended, hired or pardoned those involved in previous efforts to subvert elections.
A seminal case questioning the accuracy of the 2024 Presidential and Senate election results in Rockland County, New York, is moving forward. In open court last Thurs- day, Judge Rachel Tanguay of the New York Supreme Court, ruled that discovery must proceed, pushing the lawsuit brought by SMART Legislation into the evidence- gathering stage. The lawsuit seeks a full hand recount of the Presidential and U.S. Senate races in Rockland County.
The Brennan Center: “...major cuts to the federal support and partnership that local election offices have long depended on to fund and protect elections have raised alarms….Local election officials are working to protect elections, the cornerstone of a healthy democracy, in an increasingly politicized and turbulent environment. The loss of federal support for elections further strains these local offices that are often understaffed. States and civil society need to act to fill the gaps left by the federal government. With the midterm elections coming up in 2026, this work must begin now."
The United States remains one of the few major democracies in the world that continue to allow computerized vote counting—not observable by the public—to determine the results of its elections [1]. Countries such as Germany [2] Norway [3], Netherlands [4], France [5, 6], Canada [7] , Denmark [8, 9], Italy [10], United Kingdom [11], Ireland [11], Spain [11], Portugal [11], Sweden [11], Finland [11], and most other countries [11], protect the integrity and trust of their elections with publicly observable hand-counting of paper ballots.
This analysis lays out why the three counts in Georgia did not confirm the vote count. The entire report is posted here.
The BMDs used there have similar security flaws to the ESS Expressvote XL that we are trying (so far unsuccessfully) to keep out of New York. Stark reports “Moreover, most voters used demonstrably untrustworthy ballot-marking devices; as a result, even a perfect hand count or audit would not necessarily reveal who really won.”
Last week we submitted our initial request for documents, and our interrogatories (questions) to the Rockland County Board of Elections, as part of the lawsuit challenging the 2024 Presidential and U.S. Senate election. We put out a press release which was carried on the AP wires and picked up by local affiliates of ABC, CBS, Fox and published in an exclusive on Newsweek.
The missing votes uncovered in Smart Elections’ legal case in Rockland County, New York, are just the tip of the iceberg—an iceberg that extends across the swing states and into Texas.
On Monday, an investigator’s story finally hit the news cycle: Pro V&V, one of only two federally accredited testing labs, approved sweeping last-minute updates to ES&S voting machines in the months leading up to the 2024 election—without independent testing, public disclosure, or full certification review.
A legal case questioning the accuracy of the 2024 election is moving forward.
The lawsuit, brought by SMART Legislation, the action arm of SMART Elections, a nonpartisan watchdog group, filed the lawsuit over voting discrepancies in Rockland County, New York.
Judge Rachel Tanguay of the New York Supreme Court ruled in open court in May that the allegations were serious enough for discovery to proceed.
In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, a private lab quietly performed sweeping changes to voting machines used in more than 40% of U.S. counties. No one told the public. No one reviewed the updates. No one verified the results. But the machines were altered —and now, serious questions are being raised about whether those changes may have affected the outcome of the election. Some are even asking whether Kamala Harris was the one who actually won.
In the words of watchdog group SMART Elections: “This wasn’t just a glitch in some sleepy county. It was a stress test of our entire system.”
A seminal case questioning the accuracy of the 2024 Presidential and Senate election results in Rockland County, New York, is moving forward. In open court last Thursday, Judge Rachel Tanguay of the New York Supreme Court, ruled that discovery must proceed, pushing the lawsuit brought by SMART Legislation into the evidence-gathering stage. The lawsuit seeks a full hand recount of the Presidential and U.S. Senate races in Rockland County.
Times Union: "With all this uncertainty, we’re left with the question: What in the current system is so broken that it urgently needs to be replaced with a new technology whose security, accuracy and legality are still being argued?”
Why has the New York state Board of Elections allowed the use of voting machines that some watchdog groups and people on both sides of the political aisle don’t trust?
It’s both puzzling and troubling. So, too, is the decision by various counties around the state to buy them even with legislation and litigation over them still pending.
This afternoon a state appellate panel in Albany is hearing a case to reinstate a good government group lawsuit against the state Board of Elections for wrongly allowing new voting machines that dispense with the indispensable needed for a secure franchise: paper ballots.
Yes, good old paper is the best and only way to have foolproof elections. It is something that Donald Trump has long insisted on and he is entirely correct. Unlike computers, paper can’t be hacked.
Times Union "The strife boils down to whether a touch-screen machine with a barcode system can be trusted to document votes as accurately as a person with a paper ballot and pen in their hand. If something went wrong, would voters know? Would votes be lost? “
Comment: Trump directed the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to decertify voting systems that record a vote within a barcode in the counting process. But like so many of Trump’s “executive orders”, it is more of a distraction that will never come to pass while obscuring what he is really doing to undermine the vote count.
Mark Elias "We will not win the battle for democracy if those in the pro-democracy movement prize caution over taking risks. We cannot permit ourselves to be deterred by the inevitable defeats and public criticism that are inevitable along the long path of restoring democracy. Now is the time for fearless leadership and bold action.
"The fight for democracy is the fight of our generation. It may not be the battle we wanted, but it is the one we face. The state of our democracy and the future of our country depends on our willingness to take risks, ignore the naysayers, weather setbacks and fight fiercely for democracy and free and fair elections."