Gabbard’s Seizure Of Voting Machines Heightens Concerns Of Midterm Meddling

President Donald Trump is growing louder in his scrutiny of U.S. elections as the midterms creep closer.

Trump in recent weeks has resurfaced baseless claims that the 2020 elections were “rigged,” and called on Republicans to “nationalize” and “take over” voting in at least 15 places. He has also tasked law enforcement agencies and allies with investigating allegations of voter fraud and election insecurity.

One of those allies is Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who was recently spotted on site during an FBI raid on an Atlanta-area elections office at the center of Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims. It also emerged this week that her team seized several voting machines in Puerto Rico last year and has since claimed that they are riddled with cybersecurity vulnerabilities that could put U.S. elections at risk.

Lawmakers and election security experts are warning that the Trump administration is exaggerating these security risks and could be co-opting work to improve election security to cast doubt on future votes.

“They seem to be laying the seeds to contest the next election, terrified that they are going to lose — and lose big,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who previously served as chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview. “They’re trying to prepare the soil for the growth of new conspiracy theories.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed that Gabbard led an investigation into Puerto Rico’s voting machines last year. Reuters first reported on the investigation, which it said was due to concerns of Venezuelan interference in previous U.S. elections. ODNI denied the probe’s connection to Venezuela.

One person familiar with Gabbard’s work, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it publicly, said the seizures of voting machines in Puerto Rico were part of a broader effort to assess the susceptibility of U.S. voting machines to foreign hacking. The person added that a team of former CIA and NSA hackers was contracted to perform forensic work on the machines, and that DNI’s team had briefed some U.S. attorneys on their findings, but that the work was ongoing.

After extracting some of the voting machines from Puerto Rico for examination, analysts “found extremely concerning cybersecurity and operational deployment practices that pose a significant risk to U.S. elections,” ODNI said, pointing to cellular modems embedded in the machines that could connect to foreign telecommunications networks.

But these findings, and the timing of their release, are worrying Democratic lawmakers who have been involved in investigating election security concerns for the past decade. They say Gabbard is overstepping her legal authority as the U.S. spy chief — where she is tasked with overseeing U.S. intelligence agencies. They note that people in her role usually don’t get involved in domestic investigations.

“I have huge concerns that somebody who is supposed to be focused on foreign interference is sticking her nose in domestic election activities,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) said. “This is why we all have to be on total guard against this administration's real efforts to interfere in the 2026 elections.”

House Intelligence Committee ranking member Jim Himes (D-Conn.) said that Gabbard “has no business at a law enforcement operation unless there is a legitimate foreign nexus, of which we’ve seen no indication.”

“If, as she claims, Gabbard has compelling evidence to suggest foreign interference against the election infrastructure in question, she must share that information with Congress immediately,” he added. “Otherwise, in concert with the president’s call for nationalizing elections, this is a political stunt that raises profound Constitutional questions about ODNI’s mission and integrity.”

Even House Intelligence Chair Rick Crawford (R-Ark.) was cautious with his assessment of Gabbard’s election probe. He said in a statement that while ODNI plays a statutory role in protecting elections against foreign interference, “we will see where the investigation leads and what it yields.” He said he was confident the Trump administration would make the findings public.

The exact make of the machines seized is unclear. Jorge Rivera Rueda, president of the Puerto Rican State Elections Commission, said in a statement Friday that the organization would cooperate with any investigation. A spokesperson for voting machine manufacturer Election Systems & Software said that its products are not used in Puerto Rico. The Verified Voting Foundation tracked machines from Dominion, recently rebranded as Liberty Vote, as being used in the U.S. territory. A spokesperson for Liberty Vote did not respond to a request for comment.

In its statement, ODNI said that the issues discovered mirror previous findings by cybersecurity researchers involved in DEFCON’s Voting Village — which invites cyber experts to test companies’ hacking skills on decommissioned voting machines to identify potential vulnerabilities in U.S. election equipment.

But election security experts say that the vulnerabilities are not new — and would be incredibly difficult for hackers to exploit without physical access to the machines.

Matt Blaze, board chair of the Election Integrity Foundation, which runs the Voting Village, said that while “virtually all precinct voting equipment can under some circumstances be maliciously compromised, or have software errors that can potentially lead to incorrect results,” there is no evidence that these issues have “changed the outcome of any U.S. election.”

“We at DEFCON have been talking about this for nearly a decade,” said Jake Braun, a co-founder of the Voting Village and former principal deputy national cyber director under the Biden administration. “The only thing that changed is which party is angry about possible election interference at the time.”

The administration’s renewed interest in evaluating election security follows recent cuts to programs across the federal government that have long supported efforts to protect voting infrastructure and stop foreign threats to U.S. democracy. ODNI’s Foreign Malign Influence Center, which tracked foreign election interference, was cut back last year. Funding for other programs, including the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which shares cyber threat information with election officials, was also slashed. And the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, key to countering foreign disinformation campaigns, was shuttered entirely.

“What we're going to see is that this administration is likely going to try to throw as much confusion into the air as they possibly can, hoping to delegitimize future elections,” David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said.

— John Sakellariadis contributed to this report.