Explainer: How Trump could use his speech to target voting machines and promote election chaos

President Donald Trump is expected to allege in his primetime address Thursday night that foreign governments — likely China — meddled with election systems in the 2020 presidential race, citing newly declassified intelligence information, multiple media outlets reported.

In reality, U.S. intelligence has concluded that no foreign actor altered any aspect of the voting or vote-counting process, or even tried to. 

But election experts warn that Trump may try to use his false and misleading claims to crack down on the use of electronic voting machines — a longstanding prong of Trump’s anti-voting crusade — perhaps by ordering the decertification of machines over alleged vulnerabilities. 

It wouldn’t be simple. Trump likely would not be able to unilaterally decertify the machines — let alone prevent states from using them. The decertification process is governed by rules and procedures that the president has little formal role in.

Still, that might not stop Trump from trying. After all, decertification could leave some states scrambling to re-jigger their voting procedures, potentially spurring election chaos.

And it would serve Trump’s broader goal of undermining faith in America’s elections in the run-up to the 2026 midterms. 

Adding to concerns is that Trump last week fired the members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the federal agency in charge of certification, potentially allowing him to control the panel himself. He could even try to sidestep the EAC through an emergency order asserting control over elections — something some of his supporters have lately urged him to issue.

Trump targets election administration body

Last week, Trump decapitated the EAC, a four-member, bipartisan commission designed to help states administer elections and set standards to certify the voting systems used in all U.S. elections.

The dismissals weren’t Trump’s first interactions with the agency. In fact, in his first anti-voting order last year, Trump ordered the commission to decertify all EAC-certified voting systems currently in use and recertify them under new guidelines he demanded.

Courts quickly blocked Trump’s order to the EAC, finding that the president has no authority over federal election administration.

But with the EAC now without commissioners, its staff — specifically its executive director — likely still have the authority to certify or decertify voting machines under existing standards.

Trump and officials around him may now be wagering that they have a better shot at curtailing voting machines if they focus their pressure on one official instead of dealing with commissioners, some of whom were Democrats deeply opposed to Trump’s anti-voting agenda.

Such an effort might well be blocked in court. District courts have established that neither federal law nor the Constitution gives the president the authority to dictate the certification process.

The Department of Justice is appealing those court orders.

Decertification would lead to lawsuits

For the EAC, decertifying machines isn’t like hitting a light switch. The agency must follow a detailed, multi-step procedure defined in its internal guidelines.

For starters, the agency can only decertify after conducting an “impartial,” “diligent,” “prompt,” and “confidential” investigation into alleged vulnerabilities.

It also must give companies a chance to cure identified vulnerabilities in a system before a final decertification decision is made. An immediate decertification would deny companies that right.

While the EAC’s internal guidelines are just guidelines that can be broken, any deviation from them opens the agency up to lawsuits from states and voting system companies that would be affected by decertifications.

Forcing the EAC to decertify an array of election equipment would create legal complications, particularly for the 11 Democratic and Republican states and D.C. that have laws requiring their elections to be carried out with EAC-certified equipment.  Lawsuits from at least some of those states would be likely. 

For voting machine companies, a decertification means they can no longer advertise systems as being certified by the EAC, which would deal a major blow to their reputations.

Companies likely would be able to dispute abnormal decertifications under the Administrative Procedure Act’s “arbitrary and capricious” standard, which directs courts to invalidate agency rules or decisions if they lack a rational basis.

Critically, the EAC cannot force states to stop using specific machines, as its certification program is completely voluntary. It has no enforcement mechanisms. Decertification only strips the federal certification, and states themselves get to determine whether that leads them to change their election systems.

Still, all signs point to voting machines

But Trump could try to take even more drastic action to sidestep the EAC to achieve his goal. 

Since Trump’s re-election, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), in close cooperation with White House officials, has been probing conspiracy theories related to 2020, specifically those alleging vulnerabilities in election systems. 

Under former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, ODNI obtained and probed Puerto Rico’s voting systems. The office may also have obtained voting system data through the FBI’s seizure of 2020 records from Fulton County, Georgia, in which Gabbard participated.

There’s a link between both Puerto Rico and Georgia. Both use election machines produced by Dominion Voting Systems Corporation, a company that has long been at the heart of the election denial movement. (Dominion was purchased by a new company called Liberty Vote last year.)

For weeks now, ODNI has delayed the release of a report purporting to show vulnerabilities in the country’s voting machines, perhaps specifically Dominion machines. Those claimed findings may be included in Trump’s speech tonight.

As prominent anti-voting officials with ties to the White House have claimed for months now, he could instead use ODNI’s allegations and the declassified materials as the basis to declare a national security emergency to assert sweeping federal control over election machines.

While past presidents, including Trump in his first term, have declared national emergencies related to foreign meddling, no president has ever asserted that emergencies allow him to determine the nuts and bolts of elections — not even in the country’s darkest moments.

The president’s emergency authorities are sweeping, and many of them are legally untested. But they are still legally constrained by the U.S. Constitution and federal statutes, as demonstrated by the Supreme Court’s rejection of Trump’s unilateral attempt to impose sweeping tariffs earlier this year.

Just as the Court ruled then that the president has no authority to tax and regulate foreign commerce — a constitutional power that resides exclusively with Congress — a court could, and likely would, rule that an emergency order on elections exceeds the president’s powers.

Still, for democracy supporters, pinning hopes for fair elections on the Roberts Court’s conservative majority may be a risky strategy.  And there’s another danger: Regardless of what Trump does next, his speech will attempt to erode Americans’ trust in their elections.