
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin sent a letter on August 20th warning that voting machines used across the country contain components manufactured in China and the Philippines — and that those components "introduce significant security risks" to American elections.
Three companies control 80% of the voting machine market in the United States: ES&S, Hart InterCivic, and Dominion. All three use foreign-manufactured parts.
Mullin's letter laid out the threat in terms that don't leave much room for interpretation. "These vulnerabilities mean that malicious actors could potentially compromise election infrastructure at any stage of the supply chain, even before the machines are assembled or deployed," he wrote. That's the Secretary of Homeland Security telling us that the machines we use to run elections could be compromised before they ever leave the factory floor in a country run by the Chinese Communist Party.
Mullin went further. "If a component is tampered with during manufacturing, it could serve as a point-of-entry for hackers, allowing for the possibility of synchronized attacks across multiple machines and jurisdictions." Synchronized attacks. Across multiple jurisdictions. From components built overseas by a foreign adversary that has already stolen 220 million American voter registration files, including 633,000 from Arizona's largest county alone.
ES&S CEO Tom Burt responded by calling his overseas facilities "very secure" and insisting the components "are trusted, tested and free of malware." Dominion's CEO offered a different kind of reassurance — admitting that "in some cases, there are simply no alternative suppliers." So we're supposed to feel better because one company says trust us and the other says we have no choice.
The Trump administration isn't treating this as a suggestion. DHS is pushing to tie Homeland Security Grant Program funding to specific election security measures: transitioning away from electronic voting systems that use bar codes and QR codes, requiring a minimum 5% manual ballot audit, implementing voter-ballot reconciliation, and using the SAVE system for citizenship verification. The administration already banned foreign-manufactured internet routers earlier this year. Voting machines with Chinese guts are the logical next domino.
What makes Mullin's letter land harder is the timeline underneath it. U.S. Intelligence first detected Venezuelan plans to manipulate voting machines back in 2004. By 2006, officials were raising alarms about foreign election interference capabilities. In December 2019, Democratic senators — yes, Democrats — sent letters to private equity firms that own voting machine companies expressing concern about security vulnerabilities. They'd done the same thing to the manufacturers directly in 2017. Biden-era Intelligence Community memos from 2024 flagged ongoing concerns.
So everyone knew. The CIA knew. The FBI knew. The FCC knew. The U.S. House Administration Committee has been briefed. NBC News reported on it. Democratic senators wrote letters about it. And through all of that knowing, Chinese-manufactured components kept shipping, kept getting installed, and kept counting American votes.
The voting machine companies want this framed as a supply chain inconvenience — just the cost of doing business in a global economy. But DHS isn't talking about supply chain efficiency. They're talking about synchronized cyberattacks launched through components that were compromised before the machines were even assembled. Those are two very different conversations.
The White House Transparency Task Force is now involved. President Trump has made election integrity a centerpiece of his administration, and Mullin's letter reads less like a warning and more like the opening brief in a case that's already been built.
Twenty-two years of intelligence warnings. Bipartisan letters of concern. Two hundred twenty million stolen voter files. And the machines still have Chinese parts inside them.
At some point, "nobody knew" stops being an excuse and starts being the tell.


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