Gabbard Intel Office Probed Puerto Rico Voting Machines

By Edwin V. Christopher

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed in February 2026 that it had obtained voting machines from Puerto Rico and subjected them to technical analysis in search of cybersecurity vulnerabilities — an action that former senior intelligence officials described as without precedent in the history of the U.S. intelligence community's relationship to election administration. The revelation came through a formal statement from the ODNI to CNN, which reported the story, making it the first time the intelligence office had publicly confirmed hands-on testing of domestic election infrastructure. The disclosure landed while Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was already the subject of intense scrutiny for what critics described as a broader pattern of using intelligence agencies to support the Trump administration's claims about compromised elections. A week before the Puerto Rico announcement, Gabbard had been present as FBI agents executed a search warrant in Fulton County, Georgia, related to disputed claims about the 2020 presidential election — a visible role that senior law enforcement officials said was outside any established protocol for intelligence community leadership. The Puerto Rico voting equipment probe was conducted with the cooperation of the U.S. Attorney's office in the district, Homeland Security Investigations agents, and an FBI supervisory special agent. The ODNI said these parties facilitated what it called a voluntary surrender of electronic voting hardware and software from Puerto Rico's election authorities. The office's statement said the analysis had turned up findings it characterized as extremely concerning — including, specifically, that voting machines in Puerto Rico had been configured to make extensive use of cellular modems that were actively connected to cellular networks routed through infrastructure outside the United States. That finding was contested almost immediately by technical experts who have studied election infrastructure for years. Kevin Skoglund, a cybersecurity professional who has analyzed election equipment in dozens of jurisdictions across the country, told CNN that the use of modems to transmit encrypted vote totals at the end of election night is a standard practice in many states and territories. He noted that he had personally identified and helped improve similar configurations in more than 35 jurisdictions in 2018 — well before the current political controversy over election integrity — and that the short window in which modems are connected, typically a matter of minutes after polls close, significantly reduces any realistic attack surface. The presence of a modem, he said, is not on its own a security concern. David Becker, the executive director of a nonpartisan nonprofit that works with election officials nationwide on security and administration, told CNN that Puerto Rico's voting equipment is subject to the same cycle of independent testing, chain-of-custody protocols, and paper ballot audits that election officials across the United States rely on to confirm the accuracy of machine-counted results. He said the ODNI's probe appeared designed to intimidate election officials and amplify distrust in an election system that has withstood repeated post-2020 legal challenges without producing credible evidence of systematic fraud. The ODNI justified the investigation by citing publicly reported claims about alleged discrepancies and systemic anomalies in Puerto Rico's electronic voting systems — claims that had circulated on social media and in partisan media channels but had not produced court-validated evidence of actual fraud in any of Puerto Rico's most recent elections. The agency's statement did not reference any specific court proceeding, investigative referral, or credible government complaint that triggered the probe. A former senior U.S. intelligence official who spoke anonymously to CNN said the ODNI has no legitimate authority or relevant technical expertise in domestic election administration. Election security for state and territorial elections has historically been handled through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, which works with election officials voluntarily and does not operate through seizures. The ODNI, the official said, coordinates foreign intelligence analysis across the seventeen components of the intelligence community. It is not designed or mandated to investigate the security practices of domestic election boards. For Puerto Rico, the probe added another layer of tension to an already politically charged period. The island had held elections in November 2024 that brought Governor Jenniffer González-Colón to power and seated Resident Commissioner Pablo Hernández Rivera — the island's first non-statehood-supporting representative in more than two decades. Both officials came from different parties within Puerto Rico's unique political landscape, but neither had sought or invited federal intelligence scrutiny of the election equipment that produced their own victories. The episode drew renewed attention to President Trump's continued insistence, without supporting evidence, that U.S. elections are vulnerable to manipulation, and to the ways in which that political posture has been translated into agency-level action during his second term. Critics said the Puerto Rico probe was the clearest example yet of the intelligence apparatus being directed toward domestic political ends — while the administration argued it was performing the kind of security oversight that the public demands. The probe's broader implications extend well beyond Puerto Rico. If the ODNI's approach — treating domestic election infrastructure as a legitimate target of intelligence community investigation — is accepted without legal challenge, it would represent a significant expansion of the intelligence apparatus's footprint into areas that federal law has historically reserved for state and territorial election authorities and the Department of Homeland Security. Senate Democrats on the Intelligence Committee called for a formal briefing from the ODNI on the legal authority under which the Puerto Rico operation was conducted. No such briefing had been scheduled publicly as of early March 2026. Puerto Rico's own election commission did not publicly confirm or deny the cooperation that the ODNI's statement described as voluntary — leaving open the question of whether the turnover of equipment had been genuinely consensual or had followed some form of pressure from federal officials who were present on the island in connection with other operations. Puerto Rico's election officials, working with the State Elections Commission, stated publicly that all voting equipment used in the November 2024 election had passed pre-election logic and accuracy testing and post-election audits. The commission said paper ballot trails had been preserved and independently verified for all races. Officials said they had cooperated with federal requests in the belief that transparency would dispel any remaining doubts, but that the ODNI's public characterization of the findings as extremely concerning had instead amplified distrust without providing voters or election administrators with specific, verifiable evidence of any actual breach.