A team operating under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard seized an undisclosed number of voting machines from Puerto Rico in May, along with additional data copies, as part of a broader examination into the security of electronic voting systems used in the U.S. territory. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed the probe and described what it found in stark terms.
"ODNI found extremely concerning cyber security and operational deployment practices that pose a significant risk to U.S. elections."
That statement, from Gabbard's office, lands with the weight it deserves. This isn't speculation about theoretical vulnerabilities. Federal officials physically collected voting hardware and software, coordinated across multiple agencies, and flagged specific architectural failures in the systems Americans use to cast ballots.
According to the Daily Caller, the turnover of equipment was voluntary. The U.S. Attorney in Puerto Rico, homeland security investigations agents, and an FBI supervisory special agent all participated in facilitating the handoff to ODNI for forensic analysis. An ODNI spokesperson said that collecting voting machines and data is, per Reuters, "standard practice in forensics analysis."
The most alarming detail to emerge from the probe involves the physical architecture of the voting systems themselves. According to the ODNI spokesperson:
"Among the obvious issues ODNI identified was the configuration of extensive use of cellular modems throughout the voting system architecture that actively connected to cellular networks outside of the United States."
Read that again. Voting machines in a U.S. territory were configured with cellular modems that connected to networks beyond American borders. This is not a hypothetical attack vector described in a white paper. It is a real configuration discovered during a real federal examination of real election equipment.
The ODNI spokesperson elaborated on how these kinds of vulnerabilities are not exactly new territory for the cybersecurity community:
"Some of these vulnerabilities have been made public before through CISA reporting and during the Def Con Voting Machine Hacking Village, which found that [many] widely used voting machines can be easily attacked through insecure hardware, exposed ports, weak or disabled protections, and the ability to run unauthorized code."
The Def Con findings have floated around security circles for years. The difference now is that a federal intelligence agency with statutory authority over election security decided to stop treating those findings as academic curiosities and started treating them as actionable intelligence.
This was not a rogue operation. The ODNI spokesperson confirmed the interagency nature of the inquiry:
"This is an ODNI led inquiry that continues to be synchronized with [the] DOJ, DHS, and FBI."
The involvement of the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI signals that the probe carries institutional weight well beyond a single office. The FBI's southern Florida field office also played a role in the effort, according to Reuters, which cited two anonymous sources on that point.
The ODNI spokesperson further explained the legal and statutory basis for the examination:
"Given ODNI's broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence related to election security and our known work on understanding vulnerabilities to foreign and other malign interference, ODNI conducted an examination of electronic voting systems used in Puerto Rico's elections."
There is nothing extralegal about this. ODNI's mandate explicitly covers election security and foreign interference. Examining voting machines in a territory whose systems connect to foreign cellular networks falls squarely within that mandate. The equipment was turned over voluntarily. The probe was coordinated with federal law enforcement. The statutory authority is clear.
The investigation is ongoing. According to the ODNI spokesperson:
"ODNI is currently coordinating with our partners across the U.S. government to provide the findings from our inquiry to agencies that can take actions to improve the security of our system."
That language — "agencies that can take actions" — suggests the findings will move from the intelligence space into enforcement and remediation. Whether that means new security standards for voting equipment, federal directives to replace vulnerable machines, or something more aggressive remains to be seen. But the pipeline from discovery to action is being built in real time.
The Puerto Rico probe does not exist in isolation. On January 28, the FBI executed a search warrant at an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, in an investigation connected to the 2020 presidential election. CBS News, citing an anonymous source, reported the warrant aimed to seize ballots. Both Gabbard and Deputy FBI Director Andrew Bailey were present outside the Fulton County elections office late that night.
Fulton County officials filed a motion on Wednesday seeking to regain election records seized by federal agents during the search. The connection between the Puerto Rico inquiry and the Fulton County warrant has not been explicitly stated by officials — but the pattern is unmistakable. Federal agencies under this administration are treating election integrity not as a culture war talking point but as an operational priority requiring forensic examination.
For years, Americans were told that questioning the security of electronic voting systems was tantamount to undermining democracy itself. Raise a concern about software vulnerabilities, and you were labeled a conspiracy theorist. Point to the Def Con findings — which demonstrated that widely used machines could be compromised through exposed ports and unauthorized code — and you were dismissed as a crank. The institutional consensus held that the systems were safe, the process was sacred, and skepticism was sedition.
Now a federal intelligence agency has physically examined voting machines in a U.S. territory and found cellular modems connecting to foreign networks, cybersecurity practices so poor they "pose a significant risk to U.S. elections," and vulnerabilities that the government's own cybersecurity agency had previously documented but apparently never forced anyone to fix.
The question is not whether these vulnerabilities exist. ODNI just confirmed they do. The question is why they were allowed to persist — and who benefits from the years-long insistence that examining voting machines was itself a threat to democracy.
Every major institution that spent the last several years attacking election integrity concerns now faces an uncomfortable reality: the concerns were grounded in documented, reproducible technical vulnerabilities. CISA knew. Def Con demonstrated it publicly. And the machines kept running.
Gabbard's office denied any connection between the Puerto Rico probe and Venezuela, stating the focus was on vulnerabilities in the island's electronic voting systems. Reuters, citing three anonymous sources, reported the investigation found no clear evidence of Venezuelan interference. Those two points are consistent — the probe was about the machines, not a specific foreign actor.
That distinction matters. The story here is not about one country allegedly infiltrating one territory's elections. The story is about an election infrastructure so poorly secured that cellular modems inside voting machines were actively communicating with networks outside the United States — and nobody in a position of authority fixed it until now.
The ODNI is doing what election security demanded all along: looking at the machines, documenting what's wrong, and coordinating with agencies that can act. The voluntary turnover of equipment, the interagency synchronization, the forensic methodology — this is how a government treats election integrity as a serious national security matter rather than a rhetorical prop.
Puerto Rico's voters deserve to know their ballots aren't traveling through foreign cellular networks. So does every American whose state relies on the same class of vulnerable machines that Def Con researchers have been warning about for years. The probe in Puerto Rico may be the first forensic audit conducted with this level of federal authority and coordination. It should not be the last.
The machines talked to foreign networks. Now the government is finally listening.