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Since our last post, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about what all of this means, so we wanted to add some more context. So why is the National Design Studio information we just posted important?
It points to a situation that looks a lot like Watergate, except this time involving election infrastructure ahead of the midterm elections. One of the biggest concerns is the timeline.
Recently, during litigation over the Trump administration’s election executive order, the Department of Justice told the court that the voter verification infrastructure had not yet been built and that the agencies involved were still in the deliberation phase. However, publicly available certificate transparency records appear to show that a Vote .gov-related environment connected to the Executive Office of the President was created on April 10, 2026. If that timeline is accurate, it raises serious questions that deserve to be examined by the courts. There are also allegations of additional violations of federal law.
Start with the structure. The National Design Studio was created by executive order and placed inside the White House. It does not report to the General Services Administration, the agency that normally manages federal technology. It does not report to the agencies whose websites it is building. Instead, it reports directly to the White House Chief of Staff. That isn’t just a technical detail, that is the entire governance structure.
Normally, when a federal agency builds a website, it must publish privacy disclosures, file notices in the Federal Register, and report contracts through the federal spending database. Those transparency requirements were strengthened after Watergate to prevent secret government programs from operating without oversight. According to the research shared, none of those required public filings have been identified for the National Design Studio’s reported projects. If accurate, each missing filing represents a potential legal issue.
One researcher began examining certificate transparency logs using crt.sh, a public database that records website certificates when they are issued. According to that research, roughly forty previously undisclosed National Design Studio domains were identified, including State Department sites, NASA sites, DHS sites, a staging environment labeled fbi-kirk-tipline, and what appeared to be a preview version of Vote .gov. That Vote .gov preview was reportedly registered to the Executive Office of the President, not the Election Assistance Commission, which operates the public Vote .gov website.
After the 2000 election, Congress created the Election Assistance Commission to help ensure federal election infrastructure operated independently of the White House. The public-facing Vote .gov remains under the Commission. However, the certificate records identified by the researcher appear to show a second Vote .gov-related environment registered to the Executive Office of the President on April 10, 2026. That date is why this matters.
If DOJ told a federal court after April 10 that the voter verification infrastructure had not yet been built, while publicly available certificate records indicate related infrastructure already existed, that discrepancy deserves a full explanation.
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