The Office of the Director of National Intelligence says it obtained and examined electronic voting machines in Puerto Rico last year to look for possible security vulnerabilities.
Authorities in Puerto Rico voluntarily handed over the equipment to ODNI, which wanted to evaluate the risk to the machinery given that “similar infrastructure is used throughout the United States,” an ODNI spokesperson said in an email.
News of the move by the office overseen by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, follows President Donald Trump’s calls to “nationalize” future elections and have the federal government “get involved” in some states where he says there is a risk of fraud.
Reuters first reported the ODNI’s action in Puerto Rico.
Gabbard says Trump instructed her to be present last week at an FBI search of an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, where agents seized ballots from the 2020 election.
Trump, who lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, has falsely claimed the election was “rigged” against him and has said that investigations will verify his claims.
Under the Constitution, state governments oversee elections. In the past, federal agencies have offered advice to state officials and U.S. territories about how best to secure voting machines.
Democrats in Congress have accused the president of planning to use the federal government to interfere with vote counting in key states in the upcoming midterm elections in the fall.
Gabbard’s office sought to test the voting equipment in Puerto Rico because of “publicly reported claims relating to elections in Puerto Rico alleging discrepancies and systemic anomalies in their electronic voting systems,” the ODNI spokesperson said.
The ODNI did not specify what possible anomalies had been found previously in Puerto Rico.
The spokesperson said that in its examination of the voting systems, the ODNI “found extremely concerning cyber security and operational deployment practices that pose a significant risk to U.S. elections.”
Cybersecurity problems included the use of cellular modems that connected to networks outside the U.S., the spokesperson said.
Local election officials and the governor’s office in Puerto Rico did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Puerto Rico is a territory, not a state, and its residents are American citizens but can’t vote in the general election for president.
Pablo Jose Hernandez, who represents Puerto Rico in Congress as a nonvoting member, criticized ODNI’s actions as a political stunt.
“There is no evidence of foreign interference in Puerto Rico’s elections,” said Hernandez. “Yet the Trump administration has failed to explain why Tulsi Gabbard’s team was there in the first place, while the President continues to send conflicting messages. Voters deserve straightforward answers, not political theater.”
Puerto Rico uses Dominion ImageCast Precinct scanners, according to experts. Some of the vulnerabilities found in Puerto Rico have been highlighted more broadly by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency and by security experts, including how voting machines can be attacked through insecure hardware, exposed ports, weak protections or unauthorized code, the ODNI spokesperson said.
Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonprofit that seeks to promote the responsible use of technology in elections, said he was skeptical that ODNI had discovered important findings in its probe of Puerto Rico’s voting systems, based on its statement.
Given that Puerto Rico is far closer to the British Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic than any U.S. state, “I wouldn’t be shocked if some of the devices are configured to connect through ‘cellular networks outside of the United States,’” he said in an email.
“That doesn’t describe a meaningful vulnerability. It sounds like an attempt to rationalize ODNI’s involvement.”
Gabbard has defended her decision to observe the extraordinary FBI search in Georgia last week, saying her role as director of intelligence includes broad authority to ensure the country’s elections are secure and protected against foreign hackers or other threats.
Gabbard’s office has not stated what foreign threat prompted her focus on the FBI search in Georgia or the examination of voting machines in Puerto Rico.
By law and by custom, U.S. intelligence agencies steer away from taking a leading role in domestic law enforcement operations. But the intelligence agencies, which are prohibited from spying on Americans, share information with domestic law enforcement.
The vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, told NBC News on Thursday that he feared that the administration is working to dismantle the safeguards that protect elections ahead of the 2026 midterms.
“Unfortunately, it appears there may be a coordinated effort to try to interfere in the ’26 midterms,” Warner said. “I think we’ve got a president that can’t get over the fact that he lost in 2020 and now, in kind of a Nixonian effort, is going to try to do everything he can to make sure he doesn’t get another beating in 2026.”
In the 2024 election, U.S. officials did not find evidence of foreign actors successfully hacking into election infrastructure, though foreign adversaries carried out information warfare to try to influence the outcome.
But in the 2016 election, Russian operatives probed voter registration systems and successfully penetrated at least one. The hacking did not alter any votes cast, officials said.
