Gary Berntsen is convinced Venezuela stole the 2020 U.S. election.
That myth has been debunked numerous times, including as part of Fox News' 2023 $787 million settlement with voting machine company Dominion, but Berntsen, a former CIA operative, has been pushing it for years.
"One of the things that we learned is there's 14 different technical ways that you can steal an election," Berntsen explained in an interview in the fall with conservative podcaster Lara Logan.
But ahead of the 2024 election, Berntsen says he couldn't get anyone to listen to him. Not the FBI. Not the media.
Finally, he went to Congress, where he says he was similarly rebuffed by almost everyone, including Republicans. Except one.
"One politician in America was not afraid," Berntsen told Logan. "It was Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma."
Allies of Berntsen say Mullin — then a U.S. senator, now the head of the Department of Homeland Security — brokered a meeting at Mar-a-Lago so Berntsen could brief President Donald Trump's team on conspiracy theories about Venezuelan interference in elections.
That is just one time of many that Mullin has gone to bat for election denial.
"[D]ue to all of the fraud and uncertainty surrounding the 2020 election there is no way I can vote to certify the Electoral College," Mullin wrote online on Jan. 2, 2021. Four days later, after a mob overran the U.S. Capitol during the certification, Mullin was one of 147 congressional Republicans who still voted not to certify the results.
Mullin's history of false election fraud claims has heightened concerns that voting officials have had for more than a year: that DHS will not be a partner helping to secure elections, but rather a threat seeking to undermine results that Trump dislikes.
Numerous local election officials, across the political spectrum, have told NPR they are avoiding sharing voter data or other security information with the federal government for fear that information could be used against them in some way.
"I'm actively discouraging it," said Matt Crane, a former Republican county clerk who now runs the professional organization for local election officials in Colorado. "I don't trust how the administration is using that data. I don't trust that they're going to keep it confidential. And so I can't in good conscience advocate that any of my counties do any work with them right now."
Trump has spoken about wanting to "take over" elections in America. And Crane noted that the current DHS point person for elections, Heather Honey, also has a long history of spreading election misinformation.
"All of this points to the fact that these are not trusted partners anymore," Crane said. "They've brought the fox into the henhouse."
From allies to adversaries
It's hard to overstate how different the federal election security landscape looks heading into this year's midterms, compared with two years ago prior to the last federal campaign.
The Trump administration has taken unprecedented steps to investigate local election administration, including taking states to court in an effort to get their private voter registration data and attempting (and in some cases succeeding) to access voting machines and ballots.
Administration officials, like White House border czar Tom Homan, and other Trump allies have seemed open to deploying immigration enforcement to voting locations this fall. That would be against federal law.
"They say illegal aliens don't vote. But … part of DHS' job is [to] secure elections, and I'm not going to say, you know, what our plan is going forward," Homan said on The Charlie Kirk Show this spring. "But if only U.S. citizens can vote, I don't see the issue."
At his confirmation hearing in March, Mullin said DHS agents would only be present at polling places if there was a specific threat at those locations.
And in a statement to NPR about this story, DHS said Secretary Mullin is "committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and ensuring that American citizens, and only American citizens, are electing American leaders."
But he now helms a department where most people working on election security issues, at least within its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), were pushed out or resigned last year. That agency — which Trump created in his first term — has also been without a Senate-confirmed leader for the entirety of Trump's second term.
Paul Lux, a Republican election supervisor in Okaloosa County, Fla., says the federal government has told local officials it is still providing the same cybersecurity services as were offered under the Biden administration and during Trump's first term, but he has not heard of any counties in Florida that have actually received services from the agency recently.
"You know, try calling somebody at CISA and see who answers the phone," Lux said in an interview earlier this year. "Because at the end of the day, it's been radio silence from CISA when we reach out about just about anything."
In response to a request for comment from NPR, a CISA spokesperson said the agency provides "state and local election officials, upon request, no-cost voluntary services such as the sharing of threat information, technical expertise, vulnerability scanning, and resilience-building support."
But the spokesperson did not detail how many election jurisdictions it has provided services for during Trump's second term.
Until recently, Lux chaired a national cybersecurity partnership for local and state election officials called the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC). The organization spawned after Russia's efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election exposed how little threat information was being communicated across the nation's thousands of election jurisdictions.
For its first seven years, the EI-ISAC — which provides numerous cybersecurity tools like endpoint protection and malicious domain blocking, in addition to issuing best practices to its members — was funded by the federal government. But in 2025, the Trump administration zeroed out the funding as part of its DOGE cuts.
Election officials are still baffled by how that move and other cuts at DHS square with Trump's language on wanting to secure U.S. elections.
"The actions of defunding and dismantling those protections speak for themselves," said Jocelyn Benson, Michigan's Democratic secretary of state and a candidate for governor. "And it's meant that we as states have had to rebuild networks to protect our respective states from foreign interference. That's not easy. And we can never replicate what the federal government has built and had done."
A fractured landscape
The EI-ISAC scrambled last year to create a membership model funded by its county and state members, but the organization told NPR that membership is less than 20% of what it was before the federal funding cut.
"So that collective collaboration is unfortunately becoming more fractured," Lux said.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., introduced legislation this month that would restore funding for a broader threat-sharing service that covers all local governments. But there's no indication the bill will gain traction.
Marci Andino, a former South Carolina election official who now runs the EI-ISAC as executive director, said without federal backing, a big challenge is just communicating with the thousands of election jurisdictions. Some are eligible to join the group for free because their state pays for a membership plan, but it's a struggle to reach all of them to let them know that.
"We're continuing to get the message out that the EI-ISAC still exists," Andino said. "We're having to say, 'Hey, we're still here.'"
In addition to the cybersecurity services the organization provides, the EI-ISAC also plans to stand up a virtual situation room for elections, similar to one that was previously provided by the federal government through CISA.
On Election Day, election officials can log on to share physical or cyber threats they're encountering in real time and see whether other local governments are seeing the same thing.
There was no such space during the off-year elections last year, but the EI-ISAC plans to offer one this year. All members will be invited, but no one from DHS will be there.
If the federal government wants a role in election security again at some point, said Lux, the Florida voting official, they'll be invited back — skeptically.
"[They'll] probably be that uncle that we keep at arm's length at Thanksgiving rather than giving him a big bear hug," Lux said. "But, you know, we'll have to see. Certainly, the relationship has been damaged. And how long it takes to rebuild that trust will depend on how dedicated they are to trying to rebuild that trust."
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