Survey of election security in 50 US states shows vulnerabilities persist ahead of midterms as only 13 of 40 respondents said they would buy new voting machines
Most states aren't planning to use federal funds to make major election upgrades before November.
Context & Ripple Effects
This survey lands mid-arc: two years after hackers penetrated many voter-registration networks, officials were still warning that infrastructure remained largely unchanged — and the 50-state picture confirms why. Most states declined to spend federal funds on major upgrades before November, with only 13 of 40 respondents committing to new voting machines.
The stall has a supplier side too: security experts later charged that the companies dominating the US election tech market had failed to acknowledge or remedy known vulnerabilities, and the replacement problem lingered long enough that 14 states still ran on paperless machines a year after these midterms.
First-order effects
- States heading into the November midterms do so largely on existing equipment, leaving the vulnerabilities flagged by officials and analysts unaddressed for this cycle.
- Federal election-security funds sit mostly unspent on capital upgrades, so the money's intended effect on machine replacement is deferred past the election.
Second-order effects
- Vendors face no fresh procurement pressure from the 27-plus non-buying states, entrenching the incumbent election-tech market that experts say has been slow to fix flaws.
- With hardware replacement stalled, states lean instead on procedural mitigations and audits, shifting the burden to local election officials and post-election verification.
Third-order effects
- A pattern of slow state procurement plus dominant vendors points toward durable structural dependency on a small election-tech oligopoly — the same concentration that surfaced years later when CISA disclosed nine unexploited vulnerabilities in Dominion machines used in at least 16 states.
- If funding cycles keep missing election calendars, federal money risks becoming recurring maintenance subsidy rather than a modernization lever, keeping paperless and legacy systems in service indefinitely.
The trend: US election infrastructure is modernizing far slower than threats accumulate, as state procurement inertia and a concentrated vendor market outlast successive funding infusions.