China-Made Voting Machine Parts Under Scrutiny as DHS Links Funding to Election Audits

The Department of Homeland Security will deny grants to states that do not conduct post-election audits, as the department notes growing concerns about China-made parts in voting machines.

“The Homeland Security Grant Program requires states to trust but verify the results produced by the voting machines,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a memo to the White House Transparency Task Force.

“To receive full grant awards, states must demonstrate that they have conducted random post-election manual counts of paper ballots to ensure that any errors or manipulation are detected,” the secretary added. “This is in addition to numerous other actions being taken across DHS components to secure election infrastructure.”

The random audit will likely be a test of about 5% of the ballots cast, a senior White House official told reporters Wednesday.

During the Biden administration, a National Intelligence Council memorandum from October 2024, shortly before the last presidential election, stated, “We assess that some U.S. adversaries, at a minimum China, Iran, and Russia, have the technical capability to access some U.S. election-related networks and systems.”

“That said, we assess foreign actors will probably refrain from disruptive attacks that seek to alter vote counts because they almost certainly would not be able to tangibly impact the outcome of the federal election without detection; such activity would carry a risk of retaliation, and there is no indication they attempted such attacks during the past two election cycles,” the memo continued.

Mullin also cited the recently declassified 2024 Annual Threat Assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“China remains the most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. government, private-sector, and critical infrastructure networks,” the ODNI report says. “Beijing’s cyber espionage pursuits and its industry’s export of surveillance, information, and communications technologies increase the threats of aggressive cyber operations against the United States and the suppression of the free flow of information in cyberspace.”

A senior White House official noted that, to date, there is no evidence China or any other foreign country altered a vote count in the United States.

Still, voting machines with components manufactured by foreign adversaries introduce significant security risks, Mullin wrote.

“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,” the Mullin memo says. “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.”

Across the United States, nine voting system vendors are used for elections. Mullin wrote that three of those vendors, ES&S, Hart InterCivic, and Dominion, make up more than 80% of the market share. Each has acknowledged that its voting machines are manufactured with parts made in China.

“Unfortunately, the voting-system industry, like other sectors of critical infrastructure, is impacted by the fact that some necessary components cannot be sourced from domestic manufacturers, so vendors are dependent on foreign suppliers,” Mullin noted.

On Jan. 9, 2020, the House Administration Committee, under a Democrat-controlled House, held a hearing on election security, where executives from the major voting machine companies said the machines relied on parts from China.