Declassified election-related documents from the intelligence community have shed light on a range of detrimental issues with election infrastructure, including known machine vulnerabilities, severe voter roll vulnerabilities, and exploits by foreign actors in the United States and abroad.
Experts argue that trust in elections should not be built on blind faith, but rather on the ability to verify. In virtually every other field that involves public trust, the discovery of vulnerabilities and the mere potential for impropriety would be enough to suspend the use of that technology.
The declassified documents do not establish any election was stolen or that a U.S. system was successfully compromised. Instead, they document that intelligence officials recognized vulnerabilities that could be exploited and undermine the integrity of electronically recorded votes.
In a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Note released in June 2026, the agency highlighted the Venezuelan government's sustained interest and likely capability to manipulate its own elections as well as its desire to influence U.S. politics.
The document focuses on Intelligence Community (IC) reporting from 2004-2020 and documented persistent concerns about the Venezuelan government's manipulation of electronic voting systems and the potential national security implications for U.S. election infrastructure.
The CIA report noted that then-President Hugo Chávez stated his objective was to prevent the reelection of a sitting U.S. president in 2004. This assessment formed part of the 2006 IC's assessment that Smartmatic's acquisition of Sequoia Voting posed a moderate threat to U.S. national security.
The report also described a plan by Chávez's intelligence agencies to develop plans to manipulate election results using preprogrammed voting machines in 2012. The plan involved deploying altered machines to approximately 300 voting centers in traditionally pro-Chávez areas.
The CIA's own words acknowledge that certain capabilities in regard to electronic voting manipulation were technically possible and operationally feasible. The report claims that unspecified artificial intelligence components could alter vote tallies, detect when they were being audited, and provide receipts without registering, recording, or transmitting those votes.
The CIA's baseline assessment for the 2012 Venezuelan election claimed that large-scale election fraud did not occur. However, the report noted that the Venezuelan government's manipulation of electronic voting systems and the potential national security implications for U.S. election infrastructure were persistent concerns.
The question is no longer whether these vulnerabilities were considered possible. The question is whether the evidence from the 2020 election demonstrates that the same vulnerabilities were exploited—and whether the American people were ever given satisfactory answers.
Part 2 of this series will examine the 2020 U.S. election record and compare specific, documented incidents to the vulnerabilities described in the CIA report—including unauthorized access, weaknesses in chain of custody, failures in auditability, and instances in which election systems or data were exposed to actors operating outside normal controls.
