The White House is sitting on a voting machine vulnerability report five months before midterms
Reuters dropped an exclusive on June 19 that should be dominating every news cycle. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence completed a report months ago identifying significant vulnerabilities in US voting machines. The White House has refused to release it.
The report, produced under outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard, found that many voting machines run outdated software and some can connect to the internet. These are not new findings. Security researchers have been screaming about both issues for years. CISA, the federal cybersecurity agency, has documented similar flaws at hacking conferences. What is new is that the intelligence community put it in a formal report tied to a Trump executive order from February 2025 that gave the federal government greater control over elections.
The report found no evidence that votes have been altered or flipped. Not in 2020. Not in any subsequent election. Which is probably why it is still sitting in a White House drawer.
Two factions inside the administration are blocking it for opposite reasons. Some officials worry the report would undermine voter confidence, particularly among Republicans. Others are angry because it does not support Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. The intelligence community looked for evidence of fraud and found none. Again.
There are actually two reports. The ODNI assessment is one. The other was commissioned from a contractor called Mojave Research, which studied voting machines seized from Puerto Rico. Mojave also found no evidence of hacking. Their contract was terminated in October. Both reports remain unpublished.
Mojave did identify software and coding vulnerabilities serious enough that they recommended the administration implement an emergency remediation plan. That plan would force states to immediately update their voting machine software systems. According to Reuters’ three sources, that plan has not been implemented. The process of coordinating with states has not even begun.
Gabbard launched the investigation to find evidence supporting Trump’s election fraud claims. She steps down as DNI on Friday. Her interim replacement is Bill Pulte, a federal housing regulator with no intelligence background who Trump appointed because he wants him to investigate “rigged elections.” Pulte has been briefed on the report but has not cleared it for release.
The timing is the story. November midterms are less than five months away. The vulnerabilities are known. The fixes exist. They require coordination with state election officials, which takes months. Every day the report stays unpublished is a day states cannot start patching their systems. ODNI officials and outside experts advocated for starting fixes late last year specifically to have enough time before the midterms. That did not happen.
The White House response to Reuters was a statement from spokesperson Davis Ingle saying the administration “continues to offer assistance to state and local election officials, including through the FBI and CISA, to ensure the security and integrity of all machines used in American elections.” That is not the same as releasing the report or implementing the remediation plan. It is the equivalent of pointing at the fire extinguisher while the building burns.
Democrats have their own concerns. Some privately worry the administration will use the report’s findings about vulnerable machines to push states toward paper ballots, which Trump has advocated for. Others see the delay as political interference ahead of an election where analysts expect Republican losses.
The irony is thick enough to cut with a knife. The administration that demanded Anthropic pull Fable 5 and Mythos 5 over a code vulnerability is sitting on a report about actual critical infrastructure vulnerabilities that affect the democratic process. When AI models have security flaws, the government demands zero jailbreaks. When voting machines have security flaws, the government demands silence.