2026 Election Security Report Card

"More was done to secure this election than in any cycle in American history — and the part that still isn't finished is the part that isn't up to the President."

Patrick Colbeck

Election Crime Bureau

The 2026 Election Security Report Card is an exhaustive evaluation of the executive branch’s efforts to secure American election infrastructure between January 20, 2025, and September 2026. The security of the 2026 election is evaluated against the backdrop of the 10 attack vectors identified in the 2020 Election: An Attack Upon US Critical Infrastructure.

The central finding in this report is a discrepancy between effort (rated 7.6/10) and net effectiveness (rated 5.1/10). While the administration deployed more instruments and declassified more primary-source material than any predecessor, the total hardening of the system remains constrained by federalism and judicial intervention. Actions requiring no external consent—such as revoking prior orders, securing the border, and terminating federal information-sharing agreements—were successfully executed. Conversely, measures requiring the cooperation of state election offices or federal courts were largely stalled or voided.

2026 Election Security Report Card

Evaluation of the scope, effort and effectiveness of President Trump's actions to address each of the 10 attack vectors cited in 2020 Election report against the critical national infrastructure reflected by our election system.

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The report card catalogues 35 distinct presidential-level instruments carrying a direct or proximate election nexus — 24 executive orders, three proclamations, two national security presidential memoranda, two presidential memoranda, two bill signings, a national-emergency continuation, and an appropriations rescission — alongside roughly 48 additional departmental and agency actions across fifteen federal institutions. Among the findings:

Eleven archives comprising 562 pages of declassified primary-source material on the 2016 and 2020 cycles were published under agency seal — an instrument no previous administration deployed at any scale.
For the first time in the history of federal election-security funding, homeland-security grant money was conditioned on pre-certification hand-count auditing, on reconciliation of voters to ballots, and on documentary citizenship verification of the registration database.
The Justice Department wrote to the chief election officer of every state and the District of Columbia, placing criminal-liability language before all fifty-one, sued thirty states over voter-roll access, and plans roughly one thousand election monitors for November 3 against 714 in 2024 and 289 in 2022.
A national aggregation point that had placed network sensors inside election systems in all fifty states was terminated outright — the single most consequential completed measure in the assessment, because no court can reverse it and no state can decline it.
The federal information-operations apparatus was dismantled at four self-executing points, including the Global Engagement Center and its successor office and the foreign-assistance channel that funded the doctrine behind it. That vector scores 9 of 10 on hardening actually delivered.
Southwest border encounters fell 79 percent year over year and Border Patrol apprehensions reached their lowest level since 1970 — the physical access-control measure underlying the enrollment-integrity and foreign-interference vectors.
Two grand juries are sitting. Eight Foreign Terrorist Organization designations and the first orders ever issued under 31 U.S.C. § 2313a reached the cartel-finance architecture, with a measured 62 percent decline in suspected human-smuggling financial reporting.

Scoring Methodology

The administration’s strategy involved a broad definition of executive action, ranging from formal orders to the strategic use of messaging as a deterrent.

Rating scale. Six dimensions, each 0 to 10:

Dimension	Meaning	Direction
E — Effort	Volume, seriousness, and reach of administration action on the vector	Higher is more
J — Judicial drag	Degree to which courts have blocked, narrowed, or voided that action	Higher is worse
I — Internal drag	Degree to which federal personnel, vacancies, or capacity loss impeded execution	Higher is worse
S — State drag	Degree to which state and local officials resisted or nullified the action	Higher is worse
M — Media drag	Degree to which press coverage and platform distribution conditions denied the action the public assent on which its legal and legislative survival depends	Higher is worse
X — Net effectiveness	Realistic hardening actually delivered before November 3, 2026	Higher is better

Part I: Inventory of Key Executive Actions

President Trump

The President serves as the constitutional author of all executive action, wielding Article II authority to realign the strategic trajectory of the federal apparatus. During the 2025–2026 period, the administration utilized the “bully pulpit” not merely for rhetoric, but as a formal instrument of statecraft to establish a “too big to rig” doctrine. By issuing direct orders and leveraging public mandates, the President constructed a deterrent framework designed to influence judicial posture, compel subordinate agencies to prioritize election integrity, and change the risk calculus for state and local officials who might otherwise resist federal security standards.

The administration’s strategic pivot is best characterized by the shift from registration expansion to rigorous verification. By revoking the preceding administration’s EO 14019—which had effectively directed the “all-of-government” apparatus to act as a registration agent—and replacing it with the verification-heavy EO 14248, the President centered federal power on the integrity of existing voter rolls. This doctrine treats documentary proof of citizenship as the mandatory baseline for the franchise, attempting to correct what the administration identifies as systemic vulnerabilities in state-level enrollment processes.

The deterrent weight of this strategy was solidified during the July 16, 2026, primetime address. Despite significant “media drag”—where only one in six major outlets carried the address in full, reaching a fraction of the customary audience—the administration treated the messaging as a formal instrument of statecraft. By announcing the declassification of infrastructure risks and calling for the SAVE America Act, the President signaled that election security is now viewed through the lens of critical infrastructure protection. This high-profile positioning was intended to raise the stakes for non-compliant officials, even as media distribution channels attempted to throttle the delivery of the message.

These broad directives from the Oval Office provided the strategic air cover necessary for the Department of Justice to begin its legal enforcement and structural overhaul.

Department of Justice

The Department of Justice has undergone a strategic realignment to enforce the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), pivoting away from defending “quiet periods” toward aggressive voter-roll maintenance and criminal accountability. This shift represents a move toward restorative statutory enforcement, targeting the removal of ineligible registrants through direct litigation and grand jury process.

Legal Obstacles and Judicial Findings

Following the issuance of the “July 7, 2026, Demand Letters” to all 50 states, the DOJ initiated litigation against 30 jurisdictions to compel access to voter-roll data. However, the Department has faced substantial judicial resistance:

Consecutive Litigation Losses: As of August 7, 2026, the DOJ has lost 21 consecutive cases regarding voter-roll access, primarily due to “procedural drag” and judicial stays.
HAVA Enforcement Success: A singular victory occurred in North Carolina, where a consent order was secured against the State Board of Elections. The DOJ successfully identified 100,000 voters who lacked mandatory HAVA identifiers (Social Security Numbers or Driver’s License numbers).
Grand Jury Activity: Two grand juries (Fort Pierce and North Carolina) are currently investigating 18 U.S.C. § 241 violations, though no indictments have yet been unsealed.

A critical component of this overhaul was the transformation of the Public Integrity Section. The administration effectively removed the “Consultation Policy”—a gatekeeping mechanism institutionalized during the tenures of Jack Smith and Richard Pilger. Under the previous “Eighth Edition” manual, U.S. Attorneys were barred from interviewing voters or issuing subpoenas without Washington’s assent, often until after an election was certified. By suspending this requirement in May 2025, the administration restored prosecutorial discretion to individual U.S. Attorneys, allowing for investigations to proceed within the statutory preservation periods rather than being deferred until evidence is beyond reach.

Documented Noncitizen Voting Convictions

The administration has substantiated its claims of enrollment vulnerability through several high-profile prosecutions:

E.D.N.C. (North Carolina): Conviction of Denis Bouchard, a Canadian citizen who voted in nine federal elections over two decades.
S.D. Fla. (Florida): Convictions of three noncitizens (Lima Junior, Louis, and Figueredo) for illegal voting in the 2024 cycle.
E.D. Mich. (Michigan): The flight of Haoxiang Gao, a Chinese national who fled to Shanghai after being charged with illegal voting.
State Referrals: Ohio’s Secretary of State referred 597 suspected noncitizens, 138 of whom were confirmed to have cast ballots.

While the DOJ handles the legal enforcement of these standards, the intelligence-gathering operations of the ODNI provide the technical and evidentiary basis for these actions.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence

The ODNI has adopted a doctrine of “Declassification as an Offensive Vector,” utilizing the release of primary-source evidence to provide state legislatures and the public with direct proof of infrastructure risks. This transparency initiative is designed to bypass “internal federal drag” by moving evidence from classified silos into the public square.

July 16, 2026, Declassification Packages (269 Pages)

Tranche / Subject	Core Contents
Vulnerabilities in Electronic Voting	CIA notes on Venezuelan manipulation capabilities (2004–2020); 2020 infrastructure risk reports and NICM judgments.
China’s Acquisition of Voter Data	NSA/FBI communications regarding the compromise of 200 million voter records; 45 GB of exfiltrated data.
Michigan Voter Investigation	FBI case file 56D-DE-3407960 (Detroit); GBI Strategies material and Public Integrity Section declinations.
Noncitizens on State Voter Rolls	12 pages of DHS-derived analysis documenting state-level registration of noncitizens.

A significant technical milestone was the adversarial examination of Dominion hardware obtained from Puerto Rico. For the first time, a federal entity subjected fielded equipment to analysis outside the standard certification process. Mojave Research identified “high-severity vulnerabilities,” specifically citing reused passwords, disabled firewalls, and active cellular modems that created unauthorized pathways into the software. While the firm noted a lack of documented exploitation, the administration argues that the existence of such architectural failures—and the ability to manipulate logs—constitutes a critical risk that warrants immediate remediation.

Furthermore, the administration utilized security clearance revocations as a tool for institutional accountability. By stripping the clearances of the “51 signers” and former CISA leadership (including Chris Krebs), the ODNI signaled that the perceived “weaponization” of expertise would result in permanent loss of access. These actions were accompanied by a 40% workforce reduction at ODNI to minimize internal friction.

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Director Kash Patel said on April 19, 2026: “I can announce on your show that we have all the information we need. We’re collaborating with our prosecutors at the Department of Justice under Attorney General Todd Blanche. We are going to make arrests, and it’s forthcoming. I assure you, it’s coming soon” (USA Today). Those arrests have not materialized. The Bureau assigned 260 investigative analysts to Fulton County 2020 records (New York Times) and, per the White House, Patel “was directed to ensure the Michigan matter was fully investigated and to work with the Department of Justice to prosecute those responsible for crimes” (whitehouse.gov).

Department of War

The Department of War holds no election-administration authority and issued no election-specific instrument in this period. It appears in this inventory for three reasons: it supplies the physical-access-control component of the border program that Vector 01 and Vector 10 both depend on, it executed the kinetic component of the counter-cartel program assessed under Vector 06 and Vector 10.

Department of Homeland Security

The Department of Homeland Security is the largest body of election-relevant executive action in the record by volume, and the most internally divided in direction. Its grant conditions are the most substantively valuable single measure in the entire inventory; its border components delivered the one component of the record-integrity vector that neither a court nor a state could nullify; and its cybersecurity component was reduced, defunded, and partially furloughed over the same period. The subsections below follow the Department’s own components. Secretary Markwayne Mullin was confirmed 54–45 on March 23, 2026.

Department of State

Two institutions within the Department of State built the doctrine and the money pipeline behind the information-control vector, and both are now gone. This is the largest structural change in the entire inventory that no court has reversed and no state can decline.

United States Postal Service

The rule “Ballot Mail for Federal Elections,” 91 FR 54966, effective August 21, 2026, added Domestic Mail Manual § 705.24 under claimed authority of 39 U.S.C. § 401, implementing EO 14399. Its operational core was a voter-unique serialized Intelligent Mail barcode on outbound and return federal ballot envelopes, a USPS portal, a Mail-In and Absentee Participation List holding voter name, address, both barcodes, and originating state, pre-acceptance verification by USPS, and USPS authority to refuse or return non-compliant ballot mail.

Judge Indira Talwani entered Document 218 on August 27, 2026, jointly in California v. USPS, No. 1:26-cv-13917-IT, and League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump, No. 1:26-cv-11549-IT. The form of relief is “an emergency fourteen-day stay of the implementation or enforcement” of enumerated sections, “as to elections occurring before or on November 3, 2026.” There is no geographic limitation in the order — it restrains the provisions as such, not merely as applied to the twenty-four plaintiff jurisdictions, and is therefore effectively nationwide. The stay expires on or about September 10, 2026. The order bars “no further preparatory steps,” requires counsel notice within twenty-four hours under penalty of contempt, and leaves the preliminary-injunction motions under advisement. The preliminary-injunction hearing is set for September 3 at 9 a.m., and the Postal Service is appealing to the First Circuit.

Domestic Mail Manual provision	Substance	Status under the order
705.24.1	Definitions	Operative
705.24.2	Optional 90-day pre-mailing notice	Operative
705.24.3.1	Outbound envelope standards, serialized voter-unique barcode, design review	Restrained to the extent mandatory
705.24.3.2	Return envelope standards, serialized barcode	Restrained to the extent mandatory
705.24.3.3	Mailer responsibility for barcode creation	Operative
705.24.3.4	Recommendations	Operative
705.24.4.1	Portal registration two business days before mailing	Restrained to the extent mandatory
705.24.4.2(a)–(f)	Mail-In and Absentee Participation List enrollment; the voter-level federal database; subsection (f) certification gate	Restrained to the extent mandatory, in full
705.24.4.3	USPS furnishes state participation lists on or about election day	Operative
705.24.5.1	Pre-acceptance verification by USPS	Restrained in full
705.24.5.2	Authorized verification	First two sentences restrained; remainder operative, including the disclaimer that acceptance does not constitute verified compliance
705.24.5.3(a)	Return of non-compliant ballot mail to mailer	Restrained
705.24.5.3(b)	Further review of non-compliant mail	Restrained
705.24.5.3(c)	No USPS responsibility for resulting delays	Restrained
705.24.5.3(d)	Duty to comply with postal laws	Operative
705.24.5.4	Section 24.5 inapplicable to return ballot mail	Operative
705.24.6	Non-interference	Operative

Independent Agencies and Ancillary Departments

The administration has engaged independent agencies to address information integrity, ballot delivery, and the financial vectors of election influence.

FCC and Information Integrity: The FCC issued a decisive statement on September 6, 2026, regarding polling accuracy and broadcast content. These actions aim to ensure the “information environment” does not disenfranchise voters through inaccurate reporting or suppressed results.
Treasury and Financial Influence: The Department of the Treasury has targeted cartel finance and the migrant-services funding channel. By designating these entities as FTOs, the administration seeks to disrupt the “financial influence” vector that facilitates illegal enrollment.
Commerce and Apportionment: The Department of Commerce has focused on structural reform by advocating for the exclusion of noncitizens from the census apportionment base, preventing the dilution of citizen voting power.

This multi-agency effort is supported by a government-wide initiative to reduce internal resistance through personnel and funding reforms.

Government-Wide Personnel, Workforce, and Funding Rescissions

The administration identified “Internal Federal Drag”—the institutional friction caused by the permanent bureaucracy—as the primary obstacle to election security. To counter this, the Rescissions Act of 2025 (P.L. 119-28) and “Schedule F” personnel actions were deployed to eliminate positions within the “weaponized” bureaucracy.

Funding Contractions

Target Organization	Rescission Amount	Outcome
Corporation for Public Broadcasting	$1.1 Billion	Organization dissolved (Jan 2026); NPR layoffs and fee drops.
Global Engagement Center (GEC)	Unspecified	Termination of the federal credibility-rating apparatus.
Total Rescissions Act (P.L. 119-28)	$8.973 Billion	Total cancelled funding across multiple election-adjacent agencies.

The implementation of “Schedule F” was designed to eliminate the capacity of the permanent workforce to engage in what the administration labels the “Weaponization of Government.” By contracting the funding of election-adjacent organizations and removing non-compliant personnel, the administration aimed to streamline the execution of security mandates.

The totality of these efforts reflects a historic level of executive activity, yet the delivery remains bifurcated. The administration achieved an Effort Score of 7.6, reflecting the unprecedented volume of instruments deployed. However, the Effectiveness Score stands at 5.1. This gap is directly attributed to the 6.8 Media Drag score—highlighted by the July 16 address reaching only one-eleventh of its potential audience—and the unyielding resistance of federal district courts. While the Article II will was forceful, the ultimate delivery of results was constrained by a decentralized system and a hostile information environment.

Part II: Vector-by-Vector Analysis

Vector 01: Election Record Integrity

The foundational layer of election trust rests upon the integrity of voter rolls and the verifiable chain of custody for ballots. Without a clean accounting of the eligible electorate, all secondary security measures are structurally compromised. To address this, the Department of Justice (DOJ) launched a 30-state litigation strategy, punctuated by the “July 7, 2026 letters” which warned state officials of potential criminal liability for knowingly retaining noncitizens on voter rolls. A notable success in this vector was the consent order in North Carolina, where the DOJ successfully challenged the state’s failure to maintain accurate rolls, providing a remedy for approximately 100,000 voters who lacked mandatory identifying information.

However, the broader effort was stymied by “21 consecutive voter-roll losses” in court. The primary obstacle is a structural “catch-22” created by the “statutory preservation period” and the policies institutionalized in the Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses, Eighth Edition manual. Historically, the DOJ is restricted from conducting overt investigations until after an election is certified. By the time evidence can be gathered, the legal window for a remedy—the contest window—has already closed. This ensures that even when hardware vulnerabilities are identified, the underlying record integrity remains unaddressable until it is too late to change the outcome.

Vector 02: Electronic Voting System Integrity

Modern election security requires adversarial technical examinations of fielded equipment to identify vulnerabilities that standard certification processes overlook. The seizure of Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Puerto Rico marked a historical first: a federal entity subjecting active hardware to an independent examination.

The subsequent analysis by Mojave Research identified several critical systemic weaknesses:

Access Control Failures: The use of reused, software-embedded, or easily cracked passwords.
Infrastructure Breaches: Disabled firewalls and the presence of active cellular modems.
Unintended Pathways: Modems created entry points into software previously categorized as “air-gapped” or isolated.
Findings on Exploitation: Mojave found “no observed exploitation” of these vulnerabilities during the specific period examined.

Critically, the administration interprets the “no observed exploitation” finding through the lens of a “Venezuelan official” declaration regarding the “SAES data utility tool.” This tool can emulate machines and inject false votes without leaving a trace in audit logs. Therefore, the technical conclusion is that the system’s logs are as manipulable as the tallies they record. In this framework, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but a designed feature of a system architecture where manipulation is undetectable by design. This technical instability directly informs the legal battles over results certification.

Vectors 03 & 4: Election Results Certification Integrity & Judicial Malfeasance

The administration’s efforts to standardize certification—mandating hand-count audits and citizenship verification through orders like EO 14248—encountered a “delivery wall” in the form of judicial rulings (Vector 04). While the administration sought to enforce strict ballot-receipt deadlines and documentary proof of citizenship, the Judicial Drag factor (5.1) became the decisive impediment. District courts in multiple jurisdictions issued stays on these measures, including a nationwide stay on operational Postal Service rules intended to secure ballot transit.

This judicial posture represents a significant hurdle for executive actions that are not “self-executing.” From a national security standpoint, the judicial decision to stay security measures until after an election is viewed as an active decision to allow known vulnerabilities to remain exploitable during the voting period. This judicial “interference” effectively neutralizes the administration’s proactive hardening efforts, leaving the control of information as the primary remaining instrument of executive influence.

Vector 05: Information Control

The “Declassification Program” serves as a strategic instrument to bypass traditional media gatekeepers by injecting primary-source intelligence directly into the public domain. On July 16, 2026, the administration released 269 pages of declassified material (out of a 562-page total) across four key packages:

Vulnerabilities Package (37 pages): Documentation of Venezuelan electronic voting manipulation capabilities and CISA infrastructure reports.
China Package (167 pages): Intelligence claiming that 204 million American voter records (45 GB) were compromised. Crucially, these records are from the 2016 cycle but were found in the possession of hostile actors as of 2019.
Michigan Investigation (53 pages): FBI case files on GBI Strategies and voter-fraud spreadsheets in Detroit.
Noncitizen Package (12 pages): DHS analysis of noncitizen registrations on state rolls.

Despite the volume of this material, the “Media Drag” (rated 6.8) neutralized its impact. Major outlets largely refused to carry the President’s July 16 address, and those that did frequently declined to vouch for the evidence. This resulted in the address reaching only one-eleventh of the standard primetime audience. This isolation of the executive narrative is further compounded by the financial flows supporting election-adjacent operations.

Vector 06 & 07: Financial Influence & Privatized Election Operations

The administration’s strategic objective is to sever the “nongovernmental threat-designation partners” and “migrant-services funding channels” that it views as conduits for privatized election interference. To this end, the Department of the Treasury and the FBI moved to dismantle the federal information-sharing architecture embedded in state networks. A primary target was the Global Disinformation Index and the Global Engagement Center, which were identified as part of a federally subsidized “credibility-rating” apparatus used to marginalize dissenting information.

The core instrument in this vector was the Rescissions Act of 2025, which cancelled $8.973 billion in funding. This massive contraction of capital specifically targeted NGOs and “threat-designation partners” involved in monitoring “disinformation.” By starving this privatized infrastructure, the administration aims to dismantle the government-adjacent spaces that have increasingly replaced traditional government functions. This financial severance is mirrored by an aggressive shift in the legal framework of the DOJ.

Vector 08 & 09: Seditious Conspiracy & Weaponization of Government

To circumvent the “internal federal drag” that has historically suppressed election-crime enforcement, the administration utilized “Special Attorney” vehicles, appointing Joseph diGenova and Dan Bishop to lead grand jury investigations in Fort Pierce and North Carolina. This move coincides with a dramatic contraction of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which was reduced from over 30 attorneys to approximately five.

The heart of this institutional shift is the “Gatekeeper Removal” theory, achieved by suspending the “consultation requirement” in U.S. Attorneys’ Manual Section 9-85.210. Previously, this section required the 93 U.S. Attorneys to obtain Washington’s approval before taking overt investigative steps in election cases. By removing this central veto point, the administration has shifted power to decentralized prosecutorial discretion, ending the policy of “deferral until after certification” that characterized previous cycles. This domestic decentralization is seen as a prerequisite for effectively countering foreign exploitation of the system.

Vector 10: Foreign Interference

Foreign interference is analyzed not as a standalone phenomenon, but as a force that exploits the domestic vulnerabilities in hardware and voter rolls described above. The “China nexus” remains a primary concern, illustrated by the case of Haoxiang Gao, a Chinese national who illegally voted in Michigan and fled the country before prosecution. Declassified NSA and FBI communications further indicate that foreign actors have actively leveraged compromised American voter data.

In response, the administration reissued NSPM-5 and implemented “Hemispheric measures,” including expanded sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela. These are viewed as technical election security measures rather than mere diplomatic actions, as they target the specific partnership between Cuban intelligence and the Venezuelan state responsible for developing the “SAES-style” voting manipulation capabilities.

Overall Score

Overall effort: 7.6 of 10. The volume, breadth, and institutional seriousness of executive action across these ten vectors exceeds that of any prior administration by a wide margin, and the margin widens once the border and citizenship program is counted. More than twenty presidential instruments with a direct or proximate election nexus, 562 pages of declassified primary-source material, the first federal grant conditions in history tying money to hand-count audits and citizenship verification, thirty-state litigation, two grand juries, roughly one thousand planned monitors, a sustained presidential communications campaign, and the largest single-year reduction in border encounters in the modern record.

Overall net effectiveness for November 3, 2026: 5.1 of 10. The gap between 7.6 and 5.1 is the entire analytical finding of this assessment, and it decomposes cleanly. Media drag at 6.8 is the largest single component of that gap, judicial drag at 5.1 the second, internal federal drag at 4.4 the third, and state drag at 3.5 the fourth — though state drag remains the binding constraint on the two vectors that touch the mechanics of voting most directly. Net effectiveness is unchanged by the addition of the media dimension, because that column measures hardening actually delivered; what the new dimension does is attribute a share of the gap that the other four columns could not explain.

What worked is what did not require anyone else’s consent: revoking a prior executive order, revoking clearances, declassifying documents, terminating an agreement, designating foreign organizations, imposing sanctions, and rescinding appropriations. Vectors 05, 07, 10, and 06 — information control, privatized election operations, foreign interference, financial influence — score highest precisely because their instruments are self-executing. Vector 07 is the clearest case: dismantling the Albert sensor and information-sharing-center architecture eliminated a nationwide aggregation point outright, with no court able to reverse it and no state able to decline it.

What did not work is what required a court’s tolerance or a state’s cooperation. Vectors 01, 02, 03, and 04 — the four that touch the actual mechanics of casting, counting, and certifying — score lowest because every instrument aimed at them ran through a court or a state election office, and most were stopped in one or the other.