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The same federal agency that was supposed to protect America's elections from foreign interference is now tasked with protecting the vote of conservative Americans from the censorship of the federal government.
The Trump administration laid out its plan to protect the country's elections in a 13-page document released Thursday by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) under Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. The plan, which covers the 2026 elections, will equip the officials in charge of holding the polls in every state with a range of new cybersecurity tools to protect against threats as well as physical attacks on polling places.
"Making America safe again means more than securing our borders, protecting our streets, and keeping our coasts safe," Secretary Mullin said. "It also means ensuring that our elections are secure, free, and fair. This 13-page plan will guide the election security efforts of officials from every state in the country and be implemented in full as they work to protect the integrity of American elections."
The blueprint touts the use of paper ballots. In guidance for election officials, CISA says that voters should be able to review a paper record of their vote to ensure that it was cast and counted correctly. The agency also says that officials should conduct a post-election audit of paper ballots by hand to ensure that votes were counted accurately. The recommendation is a far cry from what CISA was doing during the last administration — when it was focused on managing online speech about elections.
CISA, created to secure election systems, was found in a 2023 House Judiciary Committee report to have "metastasized" into an arm of the domestic surveillance state. The agency collaborated with Stanford University to pressure Big Tech companies to silence prominent journalists — many of them conservative — in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.
Under the new framework, CISA is positioned to function as an actual security organization. The plan gives election officials access to Risk and Vulnerability Assessments, ongoing network monitoring, 10 regional Election Security Advisors, and fusion centers designed to share intelligence across local, state, and federal entities.
The plan will also address physical threats to polling places, including bomb threats directed at election offices — threats that were not theoretical in 2020 and 2022. Now there is a federal protocol in place for them.
With only six weeks to go until Election Day, this release is a clear signal to the states that federal resources and security architecture are available to help protect their ballots. Whether it results in actually more secure elections remains to be seen. But this plan is focused on ballots and ballot security — not managing the public narrative around elections. That alone is a change worth noting.
