A federal effort to expand security testing of voting systems was abruptly halted after Mojave Research found serious vulnerabilities in Dominion equipment used in Puerto Rico’s 2024 elections but found no evidence that the weaknesses had been exploited or that votes had changed. The cybersecurity firm’s executives described the episode at DEF CON as a clash between technical findings and political demands for evidence of election manipulation, Defense One reported.

Mojave spent about six weeks examining the systems and identified at least a dozen high- or critical-severity software vulnerabilities. Researchers found reused passwords, disabled firewalls and weakly implemented cryptographic protections. The Puerto Rico equipment also contained active cellular hardware modems that created additional paths into software believed to be isolated.

The findings exposed substantial security problems, but they did not establish that an attacker had used them during the election. Mojave successfully executed five of the major vulnerabilities, according to Chief Technology Officer Manbir Gulati. None were newly discovered flaws, and fixes were already available for them, in some cases before the equipment was used in the election.

Federal officials initially appeared ready to continue the work. CEO Jason Wareham said Mojave was asked to expand the team assigned to the effort from about 10 people to roughly 60. Gulati said the company received authorization for a follow-on project, hired personnel and obtained funding to purchase equipment for examining additional voting systems before the November midterms. A contracting officer had also been brought in to complete the new agreement.

The planned expansion did not proceed. As Mojave prepared to move forward, the company received a stop-work order and no additional funding, Wareham said. He connected the termination to dissatisfaction among officials who wanted the research to produce evidence supporting claims that the 2020 election had been manipulated, while stopping short of saying he had direct proof that White House officials ordered the cancellation.

Mojave’s election-related work began through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where the company was already performing unrelated technical work. ODNI officials asked whether its reverse engineers and forensic specialists could travel to Puerto Rico and capture an image of a voting system used in an actual election without the vendor overseeing the process. The request was linked to a broader federal examination of allegations that Venezuela had hacked Puerto Rico’s voting systems, although the investigation produced no clear evidence of Venezuelan interference.

Wareham and Gulati said the ODNI personnel directly overseeing the technical work acted professionally and wanted the research to continue. Wareham said resistance came from what he called a “White House-adjacent” group that was dissatisfied that Mojave had not identified evidence showing Trump won the 2020 election. He said he believed that failure was part of the reason the contract was terminated.

The account also includes an allegation involving Kurt Olsen, a Trump adviser involved in efforts to investigate the 2020 election who now works at the Justice Department. Wareham said an ODNI official told him Olsen had accused Mojave of receiving funding from billionaire George Soros and had led efforts to end the company’s work after its research failed to find evidence that Puerto Rico’s machines had been hacked. Mojave denied the funding allegation. ODNI has said the contract ended because the company completed its voting-machine analysis. The White House, ODNI and Olsen did not respond to requests for comment cited by Defense One.

Mojave believed it was moving toward additional work to address the vulnerabilities before the midterms and examine more deeply whether the weaknesses had ever been abused. Instead, the government shutdown coincided with the stop-work order. Wareham said he believed the shutdown gave White House-adjacent officials an opportunity to “take their shot,” but he did not claim to have direct evidence that those officials ordered the expansion halted.