DHS ties full election-security grants to paper-ballot audits, citing Chinese-made voting-machine parts

The Department of Homeland Security will withhold a fifth of a state's counterterrorism grant award unless the state agrees to hand-count a random sample of paper ballots after this fall's elections, according to a letter Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent August 20 to the White House Government Transparency Task Force and disclosed publicly on Thursday. The letter frames the requirement around a specific supply-chain concern: the three companies that build more than 80 percent of the voting machines used in the United States have all acknowledged that some components in their systems are manufactured in China.

"Voting machines with components manufactured by foreign adversaries introduce significant security risks," Mullin wrote in the letter, adding that a compromised part could "serve as a point-of-entry for hackers" before a machine is ever assembled or shipped to a county election office. He named Election Systems & Software, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic as the three vendors whose machines dominate the market and whose supply chains include Chinese-made microchips, circuit boards and networking hardware used in tabulators, electronic pollbooks and ballot-printing equipment.

The numbers behind the mandate

The audit condition is attached to the fiscal year 2026 Homeland Security Grant Program funding notice, which makes just over $1 billion available nationwide: $394.25 million through the State Homeland Security Program, $584.25 million through the Urban Area Security Initiative and $85.5 million through Operation Stonegarden. FEMA will hold back 20 percent of each award until a state or high-risk urban jurisdiction certifies compliance with the election-security conditions attached to the grant. Those conditions require jurisdictions using barcode or QR-code tabulation to submit a plan for moving to hand-marked paper ballots, to manually audit at least 5 percent of all ballots cast after each election, to reconcile the number of ballots against the number of registered voters who participated, and to run poll workers and election-system vendors through the DHS SAVE database within 120 days of receiving an award to confirm citizenship status. DHS first attached these conditions to the grant program in a July 10 announcement; the August 20 letter adds the Chinese-component argument as the rationale for treating the paper-ballot audit specifically as non-negotiable.

A year of escalating warnings

Mullin has raised the specter of foreign interference in voting equipment repeatedly since taking over DHS this year, an effort that runs alongside a wider push inside the administration, formalized through the White House Government Transparency Task Force, to tie federal money to state compliance with election-integrity measures the administration favors. In July he told reporters that foreign adversaries "can change voter registration and your vote," a claim a joint PBS News and PolitiFact fact-check found no evidence to support. J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer scientist who has spent years testing voting-system security, told the fact-checkers that while machines do have exploitable weaknesses, "there's no evidence that voting machine vulnerabilities have ever been used to attack a real U.S. election." Federal intelligence agencies likewise found no proof that foreign actors manipulated vote tabulation in past elections, even as they have documented attempts to interfere with voter perceptions through disinformation. The Chinese-parts argument in the August 20 letter does not claim any machine has been hacked; it argues instead that the theoretical exposure alone justifies a mandatory paper backstop.

Who has to comply, and who is objecting

The requirement reaches nearly every state and many large cities and counties, since the three vendors named in Mullin's letter supply the large majority of tabulation equipment nationwide, and Homeland Security Grant Program money funds far more than elections work — bomb squads, emergency operations centers, cybersecurity teams and active-shooter training among local police and fire departments. That breadth is the source of the sharpest pushback. Local government associations, responding when the underlying funding notice first appeared in July, argued that Washington is using unrelated public-safety money as leverage over a function the Constitution leaves to the states. Irma Esparza Diggs, director of federal advocacy at the National League of Cities, said "election administration has long been a state and local responsibility" and that "using homeland security grants to influence state election policies raises concerns about federal overreach and the potential erosion of state and local authority." Eryn Hurley, chief government affairs officer at the National Association of Counties, noted that "counties are on the front lines of both election administration and homeland security preparedness, and many rely on Homeland Security Grant Program funding to protect critical infrastructure, train first responders and secure public spaces" — money now at risk over a condition unrelated to any of those functions.

"This notice threatens to withhold 20% of a state's entire homeland security grant, taking hostage the very funds that support fusion centers and other unrelated national security funding for things like bomb squad equipment and active-shooter preparedness," said Tim Harper, project lead for elections and democracy at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Election officials in jurisdictions that still rely on barcode or QR-code tabulation face the tightest squeeze: they must produce a credible transition plan toward hand-marked paper ballots while also standing up a 5 percent manual audit apparatus, in most cases with the same short-staffed teams that will be running the November midterms. The SAVE-database citizenship checks for poll workers and vendors add a further compliance task inside the 120-day window.

What happens next

States now have to decide whether to accept the conditions in full, seek a partial award and forfeit the withheld 20 percent, or challenge the requirement outright. Litigation is a live possibility: federal courts have already blocked other pieces of the administration's broader election-security push this year, including efforts to use the SAVE database for voter-roll purges, on the grounds that election administration authority belongs to the states. Congressional Democrats, who do not control either chamber, have limited tools to intervene directly but are likely to use oversight letters and hearing requests to press DHS for the underlying technical basis of the Chinese-parts claim. In the meantime, the compliance clock is running against the same November calendar the audits are meant to police, leaving state election directors to build new audit and verification procedures in the span of a single election cycle.