Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne sat down with Pete Santilli for the first installment of a Gateway Pundit exclusive election 2026 series and laid out what he calls years of fieldwork into foreign election-manipulation technology.
Byrne, author of The Deep Rig and Danger Close and co-founder of the America Project with Gen. Michael Flynn, said he partnered after the 2020 election with legendary CIA figure Gary Burnson and longtime Venezuela specialist Martin Rodil after cartel sources pointed them to a “weapon” that allegedly could fix elections. Eventually, up to fifteen Venezuelan defectors worked with Byrne and described the systems from the inside.
In this recent interview, Byrne told Santilli the work took him overseas for roughly two and a half years undercover. Byrne said sources demonstrated equipment that could spit out any result, leave no audit trail, and defeat verification. At Byrne’s prompting, one source told Flynn the network had manipulated elections for twenty years across seventy-two countries — a moment Byrne called among the most dramatic of his life.
Patrick Byrne also estimated that around 25% of Democrat votes today may actually be fraudulent. This is something that sounds plausible considering their insistence on cheating in elections anyway possible.
Byrne framed the alleged election apparatus as one arm of a larger Cuban-Venezuelan project, with China as the “main shareholder,” aimed at the incremental capture of Western institutions and the eventual collapse of the United States through “movement warfare” rather than a conventional invasion.
President Trump discussed the vulnerabilities of electronic voting with the American people in July and released previously classified information, including:
“Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot-counting systems. We are releasing a series of previously classified U.S. Intelligence Community Assessments and other reports proving that our government has long known these machines are extremely vulnerable to attack. As one assessment states: “We judge that U.S. adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.” The documents also state: “We assess that centralized election-related data repositories, such as voter registration databases, pollbooks, and official election websites, are most vulnerable to exploitation, and adversaries could use access to these systems to disrupt election processes.” Tonight, we are releasing all of these findings, spanning from January 2020 to June 2026. This is a cyber threat aimed at the very heart of our democracy.
Byrne and Santilli also walked through what Byrne presents as a staged social-control playbook — classification, visual separation, demonization, and preparation — applied to COVID-era vaccine and mask politics, which Byrne has detailed in his recent presentation The Greatest Hack in History (X).”
Looking ahead to November 2026, Byrne warned that a House flip would put Hakeem Jeffries in the speakership with an immediate push to impeach Trump and Vance, and that another Democrat-led administration could simply naturalize millions of illegal aliens and make election rigging unnecessary.
His bottom-line recommendation: Trump should use emergency authorities now to force a clean, transparent election — small precincts, ID and citizenship checks, ballots counted where cast, machines out — before any result can be spun as “sore loserism.”
