ICYMI: How Trump’s Obsession With ‘Rigged’ Voting Machines Spread Across US Government

Reuters: How Trump’s obsession with ‘rigged’ voting machines spread across US government

In June 2025, a team of US government computer experts shuttled between a dusty warehouse in Puerto Rico and the headquarters of the island’s election commission. Their mission: analyze a voting machine for evidence that could upend the accepted history of the 2020 US election.

The operation was led by Kurt Olsen, a Washington lawyer who had spent years promoting US President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen. To the Trump officials backing the effort, the Puerto Rico machine, which had been used in the US territory’s 2024 elections, offered a chance to prove what courts, audits, election officials and intelligence agencies had repeatedly rejected: that a foreign actor had manipulated votes in Democrat Joe Biden’s favor.

What began as a forensic examination of a single voting machine grew into an investigation spanning the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which coordinates the nation’s intelligence agencies, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

While Reuters previously reported on the inspection of voting equipment in Puerto Rico and Olsen’s hunt for evidence that the 2020 election was rigged, this account reconstructs for the first time how that operation unfolded inside the government. It includes previously unreported details about Olsen’s access to sensitive information before he formally joined the administration, his role in obtaining election records from Arizona’s Maricopa County and his push to inspect voting equipment in Venezuela.

Based on interviews with more than two dozen people with knowledge of Olsen’s operation, including two current US officials, four former US officials and two figures with direct knowledge of the Puerto Rico operation, Reuters found that the effort had two goals: to find evidence that the 2020 election had been rigged and use it to support sweeping changes to the American voting system.

Some White House and intelligence officials believed that if Olsen could prove that foreign adversaries or Trump’s political opponents had altered the results of the 2020 election, the findings could help justify expanding federal authority over elections. Some election officials fear his mission has laid the groundwork for the Trump administration to seize voting equipment or ballots during November’s midterms.

Read more from Reuters here.