Voting Machines Have Real Security Issues. Researchers Worry They Could Be Weaponized By Election Deniers.

Last spring, the Trump administration asked a small cybersecurity firm based in Virginia to scrutinize electronic voting systems the federal government had seized from Puerto Rico.

The task before the company, Mojave Research, was nominally simple: to determine whether the machines had any major security flaws that could have affected the results of the 2024 presidential election.

The company ultimately discovered numerous security gaps in these machines, made by election giant Dominion Voting Systems, including weak or recycled passwords used across networks and other vulnerabilities that had previously been identified but remained unpatched.

But according to Jason Wareham — the chief executive of Mojave Research who presented the findings of this investigation for the first time publicly last Friday at the DEF CON cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas — they had no reason to suspect that these security issues had any material impact on the results of the election.

This distinction is critical to election security researchers, who worry that the Trump administration could seize upon their legitimate findings to support long-debunked conspiracy theories about election fraud or sow doubt about the integrity of U.S. elections.

“There’s a lot of people that will hear, ‘there’s a weakness, there’s a vulnerability, or there’s potential for it,’ and that’ll be used as fodder to say, ‘China did X, Y, Z’ or ‘Russia did X, Y, Z,’” said Kendall Spencer, a board member of the Election Integrity Foundation, the organization that supports DEF CON’s Voting Village where Wareham presented his findings.

Researchers have repeatedly warned of security flaws inside U.S. voting infrastructure, though they — as well as numerous state and federal agencies that audit U.S. elections — have found no evidence that these flaws have been exploited to change the outcome of an election.

Federal authorities have said the most significant effort to influence U.S. elections came ahead of the 2016 presidential contest, when Russian hackers successfully accessed the voter registration databases of a few U.S. states. But they did not alter the voter rolls or change any votes.

Security experts say President Donald Trump and his allies have routinely warped these legitimate security concerns into political ammunition to back claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” and to distract from the more mundane work of identifying and fixing the underlying technical issues with voting systems.

Michael Moore, chief information security officer for the Arizona secretary of state’s office, said during a DEF CON panel on Saturday that the conversations security experts are having about vulnerabilities are being “ceded to people who want to weaponize it.”

“That’s where a lot of this conversation gets lost,” Moore added.

On election night in 2020, unofficial results in Antrim County, Michigan — a consistently Republican-leaning area — briefly showed former President Joe Biden leading Trump. State officials later determined that the discrepancy came from human error in configuring the election system, not from voting machines changing ballots post-facto. At the time, Trump tried to use the incident to pressure officials to overturn the results in Michigan and other key swing states.

During the midterm elections in 2022, a small percentage of electronic vote tabulation machines in Arizona’s Maricopa County — a critical swing county that has been at the center of long-debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 elections — reportedly malfunctioned.

While technicians were quickly deployed to fix the issue — and although a judge ruled that Republicans provided no evidence that anyone was unable to cast a ballot due to the interruption — Trump and his allies implied that the issue disproportionately affected conservative voters and riled up some voters who claimed they were being disenfranchised.

Wareham told reporters on the sidelines of DEF CON that Mojave Research’s findings on Puerto Rican voting machines were not as Earth-shattering as some election skeptics in the Trump administration, including Kurt Olsen, had hoped.

“We found extensive and largely unacceptable weaknesses,” Wareham said while presenting his company’s research, “but we did not find evidence that those weaknesses were actively exploited or that votes were altered.”

In large letters on a screen accompanying his presentation, it said: “BOTH CAN BE TRUE: Serious risk can exist without evidence of exploitation or outcome impact.”

Olsen, a senior attorney at the Justice Department and close Trump ally involved in the “Stop the Steal” effort, was reportedly frustrated that Mojave Research’s report did not provide evidence of foreign election manipulation.

Wareham told reporters that Olsen accused his company without evidence of being secretly funded by George Soros, a billionaire who has backed Democratic candidates. Wareham denies any connection to Soros.

By October 2025, Wareham says Mojave Research received a stop-work order and ended its contract with the federal government, and ODNI has yet to release the firm’s findings to the public.

Olsen, as well as spokespeople for the White House and ODNI, did not respond to a request for comment.

Manibar Gulati, chief technology officer at Mojave Research, said that while ODNI officials he worked with “actually do genuinely care” about making sure U.S. elections are free from outside interference, other factions of the Trump administration “want the boogeyman to be out there and are willing to do anything to find it.”

Gulati said Mojave Research has discussed its findings with Liberty Vote — a company run by a former GOP elections director that acquired Dominion Voting Systems last year — but Liberty Vote told the researchers it does not plan to make changes before November. Dominion Voting Systems was at the center of since-debunked election fraud allegations in 2020 by Trump and his allies.

A spokesperson for Liberty Vote did not comment on whether it planned to fix any of the issues with its machines discovered by Mojave Research. In a statement, the spokesperson told POLITICO that it is “not in receipt of any such report, so, therefore, we cannot provide any comment.”

“As always, Liberty Vote is committed to advancing the future of secure American elections.”

Investigations into U.S. voting equipment are part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to crack down on the country’s electoral system, which it claims is riddled with issues of voter fraud.

The Justice Department has demanded that states hand over their voter rolls, claiming that necessary federal oversight is needed to determine whether states are maintaining accurate voter records. The Justice Department last month threatened to prosecute state officials if they allowed any non-citizen voting — an occurrence that has been investigated by states and found to be rare in U.S. elections.

The president has repeatedly tried to change American election policy via executive order, only to be rebuffed by the courts, and is pushing Republican lawmakers to pass controversial legislation that would require voters to show proof of citizenship at the polls.

Trump last month claimed during a national address that Americans “were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including the security of electronic voting machines” — an assertion that security experts believe could do more harm to public confidence in American elections than the vulnerabilities themselves.

Maggie Miller contributed reporting.