When they didn’t find fraud while testing a voting machine for the Trump admin, this cyber firm faced a wave of backlash

How a Small Cybersecurity Firm’s Honest Findings Sparked Political Backlash

Earthguardiansonline.com – A cybersecurity company with no prior election testing experience found itself at the center of a political storm after delivering straightforward results about voting machine vulnerabilities. Mojave Research, led by CEO Jason Wareham, was contracted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to examine a Liberty Vote voting machine originally purchased from Puerto Rico. The firm’s honest assessment—acknowledging significant weaknesses while finding no proof of actual vote manipulation—ultimately cost them their government contract.

The Unexpected Contract

When the ODNI reached out to Mojave Research in the spring of 2025, the company had never tested election systems before. The agency was conducting a broader investigation into voting equipment across the country, and they needed someone to analyze a specific machine from their Puerto Rico acquisition. What followed was an intensive six-week examination conducted entirely in Wareham’s basement in Reston, Virginia.

The technical work revealed important findings. According to Mojave’s chief technology officer Manbir Gulati, who presented the results at DEF CON’s “Voting Village” symposium in Las Vegas, the team discovered “extensive and largely unacceptable weaknesses” in the machine’s security architecture. Crucially, however, they found no evidence that these vulnerabilities had been actively exploited or that any votes had been altered as a result.

“We found extensive and largely unacceptable weaknesses, but we did not find evidence that those weaknesses were actively exploited or that votes were altered,” Gulati stated at the conference.

When Honesty Becomes a Problem

Mojave submitted its comprehensive report to the ODNI in July 2025, though the document remains unpublished to this day. The findings should have been straightforward, but they became a political lightning rod. Wareham, a Republican, explained that White House-adjacent allies were dissatisfied with his refusal to make sweeping claims about the 2020 election.

“I was not willing to name and shame at that moment and to say, ‘Turns out 2020 was a landslide for Trump. Nobody knew,'” Wareham told the DEF CON audience. This measured approach did not sit well with certain Trump allies who were actively promoting false claims of widespread voter fraud.

What happened next illustrates how quickly political narratives can override factual findings. Allies of President Donald Trump began spreading misinformation about Mojave Research, falsely claiming the company was funded by liberal billionaire George Soros. These claims gained traction despite having no basis in reality, and they helped derail the firm’s government work.

A Declaration Under Oath

In September, Wareham took the unusual step of submitting a formal declaration under penalty of perjury to the Trump administration. The document explicitly refuted allegations that his company was “some form of deep plant meant to ensure the suppression of truth around compromised elections or election systems.” The declaration included financial statements demonstrating that Mojave had no affiliation with Soros, who has long been the target of conspiracy theories regarding hidden influence.

The declaration also highlighted the role of attorney Kurt Olsen, who had inserted himself into the ODNI’s voting equipment investigation through a program called the Director’s Initiatives Group. Despite having no election law experience before 2020, Olsen had cultivated a direct line to the president through his efforts to challenge election results in court. The Arizona Supreme Court had previously ordered $2,000 in sanctions against Olsen and his co-counsel for making false claims about the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.

“During many of those interactions and meetings, Mr. Olsen would inform me he was speaking with [t]he President on the election topic and at times seemed to intimate that he spoke on this issue for him,” Wareham’s declaration noted.

The Stop-Work Order and Broader Implications

Within a month of submitting his declaration, Wareham received an email confirming that the ODNI had issued a stop-work order on the contract. The abrupt termination came despite Mojave’s thorough work and honest findings.

This episode reflects a larger pattern in how the Trump administration has approached election security questions. The administration’s renewed interest in the 2020 election has extended beyond Puerto Rico to Arizona, where the FBI obtained records of an audit that confirmed Joe Biden won the state. Yet even as factual evidence accumulates, certain political figures continue to dispute established results.

The Mojave Research case serves as a cautionary tale about the challenges of providing unbiased analysis in a polarized political environment. A company that sought to deliver straightforward election security findings found itself caught in a web of misinformation and political maneuvering. The firm’s experience demonstrates how quickly factual findings can be dismissed when they do not align with predetermined narratives, and how quickly false claims can undermine legitimate work.

As election security continues to evolve, the Mojave Research story offers important lessons about the intersection of technical expertise and political dynamics. The firm’s basement testing operation, conducted by a team with no prior election experience, produced findings that were technically sound but politically inconvenient. Whether those findings will eventually be made public remains to be seen, but the episode has already highlighted the ongoing tensions between evidence-based analysis and political storytelling in American elections.