Cuts to election security programs threaten to make Trump’s Big Lie a reality | Editorial
Funding and personnel reductions at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency may make elections less secure, while voter ID legislation could disenfranchise millions.
It’s been fewer than 100 days since Donald Trump returned to the White House, and in that short time, the president, his ultra-MAGA cabinet, and tech mogul Elon Musk have taken a sledgehammer to the institutions, values, and norms that hold together American society.
The Trump administration has gutted foreign aid, fired thousands of government workers, detained people for political speech, challenged the power of the judiciary, embraced strongmen like Vladimir Putin, shutdown medical research, and upended the stock market by unilaterally imposing what appears to be the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history. Even programs to plant trees and weatherize homes in Philadelphia have not been spared.
Now, the president and his cadre of GOP sycophants are coming for the most important institution of them all: free and fair elections.
For years, Trump has falsely claimed the American election system is unreliable and vulnerable to malign influence — back in office, he wants to make his Big Lie a reality.
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His administration has announced cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which aids states in safeguarding our election systems. According to election administrators, these cuts have meant the end of federal programs intended to safeguard critical election systems and detect threats.
States are now on their own, forced to build redundant infrastructure from the ground up. Even foreign threats, which states lack the capacity to handle on their own, are now left to local leaders.
Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth, Al Schmidt, was among the first to sound the alarm. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Schmidt, who is not known for rhetorical exaggeration, wrote, “I have seen firsthand how CISA’s work has helped prevent and address security incidents, and I worry about the serious consequences of removing this support for our local elections officials without an adequate substitute.”
Schmidt identified specific examples of CISA’s essential support, including dealing with bomb threats, manufactured videos of election fraud, white powder in envelopes, and text message scams. Without CISA, local officials will be responsible for dealing with these incidents alone.
In place of CISA, Trump has instructed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a group controlled by billionaire Musk, to undertake a review of the country’s voting machines. No doubt in search of evidence of the long-debunked theory that Joe Biden was able to rig the 2020 election.
The Trump administration is also pushing a new federal voter ID requirement called the SAVE Act.
The bill, which echoes a Trump executive order, would require voters to produce either a passport or a birth certificate to cast their ballot. This would potentially remove millions of voters from the rolls, including women who have changed their last names to match their husbands’, or anyone who can’t find their original birth certificate in a timely manner.
The Brennan Center for Justice has said the proposed legislation would be the “most significant voter suppression bill ever passed by Congress.”
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Meanwhile, Musk has been engaged in his own questionable election campaigning. In the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, the Tesla owner used million-dollar lottery tickets to financially reward voters who supported the Republican candidate. Additionally, Musk’s America PAC offered canvassers a bounty for each voter they brought to the polls, a bounty promised to the voters, as well.
These tactics take the country back a hundred years to the days of party bosses like Matthew Quay, who at least bothered to hold public office before looting the public coffers.
The threat is clear. Trump and Musk aren’t just coming for Americans’ retirement savings, immigrant neighbors, and the cancer treatments of tomorrow. They are coming for the right to vote in a free and fair election.
It is up to the free and fairly elected members of Congress to stop them.