Venezuela had plans to manipulate voting machines, raising alarm in U.S. intel circles back in 2020

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From 2004 to 2020, the U.S. intelligence community monitored plans by the Venezuelan leadership to electronically manipulate their country’s own voting machines, including the use of substituting false votes, in order to secure victory for the ruling socialists.

President Donald Trump, who declassified intelligence information on those plans and released them to the public on Thursday, says the Venezuelan capabilities are evidence that American voting systems need to be better secured.

The Venezuelan plots specifically raised alarm bells in the United States because Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez collaborated with Smartmatic, a voting machine company that in 2005 acquired the U.S.-based Sequoia Voting Systems, to develop them.

Susceptibility to Venezuelan government manipulation

In 2006, the intelligence community assessed “that Smartmatic’s susceptibility to Venezuelan government manipulation makes the acquisition a potential instrument for Venezuelan officials seeking to undermine confidence in, or manipulate the electoral process in, the United States,” according to a June 2026 CIA summary of prior intelligence reporting on Venezuela’s electronic voting manipulation capabilities.

That finding later led to the U.S. government intervening to force Smartmatic to divest its ownership in Sequoia in 2007. Smartmatic did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Just the News.

Though intelligence analysts raised red flags about potential vulnerabilities, they detected no interference in U.S. election systems.

You can read the “CIA Note” below:

The memo was declassified earlier this year and made public by President Donald Trump on Thursday alongside a primetime speech about election integrity in which he urged lawmakers to pass legislation to better secure American elections.

In that speech, President Trump said the intelligence about Venezuelan vote manipulation plans and capabilities—spanning from 2004 to 2020—highlights the potential vulnerabilities in American voting machine systems, requiring urgent action to prevent such consequences in the U.S.

“Today, we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela, and that’s exactly what happened. Conspiring to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020, and that’s what they did,” Trump said at the White House on Thursday.

“This reporting included precise details about methods the regime developed to digitally alter vote totals in ways that could not be detected, even with an audit, no matter how deep they went,” he added. “This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never ever be hacked or compromised […]”

Maduro’s plans to make false votes appear legitimate

President Trump was referring to intelligence reporting on Venezuelan plans to swing the country’s 2020 election by manipulating electronic voting machines in a way that would make false votes appear legitimate, and leave no trace of the changes.

The technique, developed for the 2020 parliamentary elections while Nicolás Maduro still ruled Venezuela, was allegedly designed to “Replicate digital hash files sent to the central vote counting database,” “Mimic real voting machines that favored the ruling party,” “Overwrite hash files of voting machines that favored the opposition,” and “Make altered votes appear to originate from legitimate voting machines.”

Hash files are a “digital fingerprint” used to validate software and ensure the integrity of data files, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The CIA warned that such a technique “would, in theory, allow the Venezuelan government to monitor and adjust results in real-time during and after the election.” The agency also concluded that such technology would be employed to evade detection by standard audit procedures.

Ultimately, CIA analysts concluded in 2006 that “neither Smartmatic nor the Venezuelan government had the capability—that is the level of control or access required—to manipulate the outcome of an election outside of Venezuela in a predictable fashion.”

Likewise, in 2020, they concluded the regime “did not need to resort to gross fraud to win the December 2020 National Assembly elections” because many opposition parties boycotted the election.