Executive Order 14248: The Trojan Horse of Our Elections
An investigative deep‑dive into the Executive Order 14248 & how it federalizes voter eligibility, weaponizes citizenship checks, and repurposes surveillance networks to decide what votes count.
I know it’s August and like a lot of people, I’ve been trying to keep up with the tidal wave of policy changes, lawsuits, protests, and executive orders flying out of Washington this year.
Someone recently mentioned Executive Order 14248 to me, and I’ll be honest, I hadn’t fully read it when it came out in March this year. At the time, there was so much happening that it was easy to overlook but I’ve gone back now.
I’m glad I did.
Because the material in this executive order should be talked about more. It was originally talked about in the mainstream media as him trying to use an executive order to make “Save Act” into law before it ever had the chance to go through congress. But it’s actually so much more than that.
The GOP got the SAVE Act through the House, but as of right now it’s going nowhere in the Senate. They have the majority, but not the supermajority needed to force a vote. At least not right now. You can track it’s progress in the Senate by clicking here.
I really want to address something about this executive order. People have been asking me if this executive order is going to outright cancel elections altogether.
The answer is no, at least not directly.
This order doesn’t explicitly abolish elections, but what it does is reshape the conditions under which they happen. It changes the rules, the definitions, and the processes. It alters who is eligible, how voter information is verified, what counts as a legitimate ballot, and who gets the final say on those judgments.
Yes, this executive order is part of the larger voter suppression we’ve seen during Trump’s second term, but look closer and you can also see the groundwork being laid for a centralized surveillance structure under the guise of “protecting elections.”
This was just the first crack in the glass. We’d again see this pattern metastasize in the months to come and the wildest part? It’s only August. We’ve still got well over 3 years until the next election.
Read The Fine Print
Every single one of Trump’s executive orders functions like a trojan horse. That’s the pattern we’ve seen since Inauguration Day. They always come dressed in a cheap pseudo-patriotic sales language, probably written by some half-baked AI like Grok that thinks if it says “freedom” and “integrity” enough times, we’ll forget to read the fine print.
Just like a contract, it doesn’t matter how glossy the cover is. What matters is what it actually says. So, let’s take a look at what this one says:
At first glance, Executive Order 14248 pretends that it’s about protecting elections. That’s the pitch. It opens by claiming our elections are messy, unsecure, and vulnerable to fraud. It blames non-citizens. It blames bloated voter rolls. It blames foreign influence.
It accuses the Department of Justice of not doing enough to investigate and enforce existing laws.
Then, of course, it declares that federal intervention is needed to clean it all up.
Trusting this administration to protect elections is like putting the arsonist in charge of a fire safety class.
This isn’t “election integrity.”
Here’s what this actually means. If you live in a state that tries to protect voter access, this order says the federal government can now pressure that state to change its rules. If your ballot gets flagged by a broken database, you might not even know until it’s too late.
And uried in Section 4(b)(ii) is a bombshell that hasn’t gotten enough attention. For the first time in EAC history, the President is ordering the commission to “review and, if appropriate, re-certify voting systems under the new standards” and then “rescind all previous certifications of voting equipment based on prior standards.” In plain English, that means every machine certified under older federal guidelines could lose its federal certification overnight. Historically, EAC updates have only applied prospectively — new standards for new machines — while older systems kept their certifications unless a state itself pulled them.
Historically, the creation of a new VVSG does not mean that the old machines are automatically de-certified and there’s a reason they’re adding this in.
This flips that precedent on its head, forcing states to either re-certify or replace massive fleets of machines at potentially billions in cost. And because eleven states plus D.C. require federal certification by law, and many others incorporate those standards by reference, this one clause could trigger a nationwide scramble to swap out equipment just months before an election a chaos scenario tailor-made for anyone looking to destabilize confidence in the vote.
This isn’t about fixing problems. It’s about building a system where the people in power get to decide who counts. When a president writes an executive order that lets DHS, and the DOJ rewrite how states run their elections and then threatens to punish states that don’t play along? You’re not looking at reform. You’re looking at fascism. That’s how fascism works.
Now, Are Our Elections Messy? Yes.
But not for the reasons Trump claims.
If you’re new to my Substack, you may not know that I’ve covered election integrity in-depth. You can read my investigative reports by clicking here.
I’ve spent months digging into how our elections really work. I’ve read the court filings, traced the funding, followed the paper trails, and asked the questions no one on cable news seems to want answered.
What I’ve learned is this: our elections didn’t suddenly become messy. They were made that way (deliberately) by wealthy organizations that saw democracy as a business opportunity.
Our elections are infested with for-profit corporations and private equity-backed vendors who got power after they cozied up to secretaries of state, congressional staffers, and election boards, lobbying their way into control of the very systems that count our votes.
They pushed for proprietary voting machines. They demanded secrecy around source code and cast vote records needed for true forensic audits. They sold software updates behind closed doors, and they lobbied to make sure oversight didn’t exist. They pushed for HAVA.
The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002 was another trojan horse wrapped in patriotic language. What it actually did was open the door for private companies to run our elections behind closed doors.
For-profit certification labs like CIBER (who are contractors paid by voting machine companies to approve their machines) had rubber-stamped voting machines with no real oversight until the Black Box Voting scandal hit. The Election Assistance Commission is not the watch dog you’d think they should be, and nearly every safeguard we should have like public access to source code or cast vote records was buried under corporate confidentiality agreements.
So when Trump’s executive order talks about election vulnerabilities and the need for federal enforcement, I’m not disagreeing that the system has problems. I’m saying that maybe start by cleaning up the mess your rich friends made instead of turning the U.S. into an authoritarian state.
The Rest of This EO? Also Terrifying
Section three is where the real machinery of authoritarianism starts moving. Not just through prosecutions, but through surveillance.
It gives the Department of Justice new marching orders to investigate and enforce violations of federal election law, especially so-called “false representations” in voter registration or voting. But it does not clearly define what that means. That kind of vagueness is not a mistake. It is a strategy.
Because in order to find those violations, the government has to collect data. A lot of it. That is exactly what this executive order sets in motion. It quietly connects our election systems to the same invasive surveillance networks already used in immigration enforcement, and even against Americans for all we know.
We know from leaked ICE memos and government records that the agency is already using advanced surveillance apps to monitor immigrants.
These tools pull data from credit records, property databases, utility bills, facial recognition systems, blockchain activity, and even social media platforms like TikTok.
They are doing this right now.
Those companies buy massive amounts of personal data from third-party brokers. Most people have never heard of these brokers, but they exist to collect and sell information about you.
Companies like Acxiom and Oracle’s data marketplace know where you live, what you search, who you text, what car you drive, what prescriptions you filled, and how much debt you carry and they sell that information to the federal government.
Congress is not unaware. In 2024, lawmakers introduced the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act. The goal of that bill was to stop federal agencies from buying this kind of personal data without a warrant. But the bill has gone nowhere. It has been buried in committee for over a year.
Now, take that same surveillance infrastructure and apply it to voting. Then apply it to the rest of America.
This executive order does not just allow information-sharing between the DOJ and DHS. It mandates it. It tells federal agencies to verify voter identity and citizenship status using shared databases.
That verification will not stop at basic state records. It will include Social Security Administration flags, DHS watchlists, ICE immigration records, and even commercial data points from third-party brokers.
ICE already uses a next-generation software against immigrants, and they’re getting an upgrade this year with ImmigrationOS courtesy of Palantir.
This software tracks, flags, and helps determine whether someone should be detained. If that same logic is applied to voter rolls, what happens when a federal system decides your ballot looks suspicious?
What happens if you are flagged and never even know it? Who is to say it will stop there? Predictive policing is not something new.
This is not about protecting elections. They love to throw that word around. Protect.
We’re doing this for YOU… said every fascist government ever…
What it’s really about is about building a federal database that profiles Americans in the background and gives law enforcement agencies the power to decide who gets counted and who gets investigated. It was only the precursor of what’s to come.
Once your name is in a system like that, you cannot just remove yourself. You cannot ask to opt out. You do not get to argue with an algorithm that already marked you as a threat.
Note From Dissent in Bloom:
If you made it this far, you already know this isn’t just politics. It’s not about left or right. It’s about power and it’s about control. It’s about who gets erased while the cameras are pointed somewhere else.
I am one person doing the work they hope no one has time for. I’ll keep reading the executive orders. I’ll keep pulling the contracts, filing the FOIAs, and chasing the paper trails they wanted buried. I’ll follow the shell companies. I’ll stalk the databases. I’ll connect the dots they’re counting on you to ignore.
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They have billionaires. I have this keyboard. And you.
Thank you so much for unpacking this bill si thoroughly.
Thank you. I have learned so much in the short time I have been reading your messages. Your writing is clear, and easy to digest.