This op-ed by Susan Greenhalgh was originally published by Democracy Docket.

As Donald Trump implements plans to attack the November elections, a key ally in the Department of Justice is linked to serious breaches of election equipment.

Several senators recently sent a letter to the White House demanding the removal of Kurt Olsen, Donald Trump’s so-called ‘election security czar.’ The senators identified Olsen as a threat to free and fair elections because he had been instrumental in causing the raid on the Fulton County, Georgia, election office and had been behind the seizure of voting machines from Puerto Rico by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Shortly after the letter was sent, it was reported that Olsen moved to the Department of Justice.

But the danger Olsen presents to elections is even more alarming.

Since 2020, Olsen has served as counsel on several lawsuits brought to challenge election results or to challenge the use of certain voting systems. Olsen’s lawsuits relied on declarations and testimony from experts that blatantly stated that they accessed and studied voting software that had been taken without authorization from multiple jurisdictions.

A letter sent this month by Free Speech for People to the Democratic senators details these ties to unauthorized voting system breaches and the misappropriation of voting software.

Here’s the context: In the months and years immediately following Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, operatives hired by Trump’s attorneys broke into voting systems in multiple swing states (Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania), and took copies of the voting system software that records and counts votes. The software was then shared with a network of Trump supporters and extremists. In Michigan, they also took possession of voting machines and held them for months.

Having access to the voting systems and software creates serious election security threats. It enables bad actors to examine the voting software for vulnerabilities that could be exploited, or even develop malware that could be injected into the system with minimal physical access by unskilled accomplices, like poll workers or custodians. This is why the Georgia Attorney General opposed giving copies of voting software to Trump’s attorneys through a court order in 2020, saying it would be giving away the “keys to the software kingdom;” why the Dominion Voting Systems company opposed it, saying it would do “irreparable damage” to the election security of the nation; and why the chief technology officer in Georgia said the voting software provides a “roadmap” to hack the system. One of the alleged conspirators in Michigan reportedly boasted that having access to the voting machines enabled him to create a ‘lab’ where he could develop ways to manipulate the machines to produce fraudulent vote counts.

Though there have been very limited local attempts to prosecute those involved in Colorado and Michigan, there was never any comprehensive federal investigation to determine the scope of the scheme, the breadth of the distribution of the software, or to stem the further unlawful distribution of it. Nor has there been any action to address the increased security risks created by the stolen software.

This is the largest known election security breach in U.S. history, and it has been ignored. And it represents a fatal failure of the Department of Justice under Merrick Garland — all out of unfounded fear that it will depress voter confidence.

Now, Trump has installed Kurt Olsen, an attorney tied to the software taken through these breaches, at the Department of Justice.

We can’t continue to ignore this scheme and associated threats to election security because of the wrongheaded notion that it could undermine voter confidence, or that it’s just too scary to discuss. We need to be clear-eyed about these threats so we can confront them and defeat them. Election officials and elected officials should support the call for the removal of Kurt Olsen from the Department of Justice and an investigation of the voting system software breaches carried out by Trump allies.

The good news is we can still take actions to minimize the security risks to our voting machines by discontinuing the use of universal use touchscreen voting machines (used widely in Georgia, South Carolina, Nevada and other states) in favor of hand marked paper ballots as the primary method of ballot marking, and expanding our currently inadequate post-election audits so that they are comprehensive, thorough and publicly observable.

Our democracy is in a very precarious place. We can’t afford to shy away from the facts if we want to preserve it.

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Susan Greenhalgh is the Senior Advisor on Election Security for Free Speech For People.