A top committee made up of officials from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and its election partners refuted President Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud and irregularities calling the election “the most secure in American history.”
Trump has refused to concede to President-elect Joe Biden and is pursuing lawsuits in a number of states with baseless claims of voter fraud.
The public statement from the president’s own Department of Homeland Security undermines his narrative and is sure to infuriate him.
“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised,” members of the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) Executive Committee said in a statement.
Voting systems were made secure through pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s certification of equipment.
The joint statement acknowledged “opportunities for misinformation” and urged voters to seek out election officials as “trusted voices.”
CISA director Christopher Krebs has told associates he expects to be fired after he angered the White House by debunking election misinformation promoted by Trump online.
The White House also asked Bryan Ware, assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, to hand in his resignation, which he did today.
Krebs has drawn praise from both Democrats and Republicans for his handling of the election, which generally ran smoothly despite persistent fears that foreign hackers might try to undermine the vote.
But he drew the ire of the Trump White House over a website run by CISA dubbed “Rumor Control” which debunks misinformation about the election, according to the three people familiar with the matter.
White House officials have asked for content to be edited or removed which pushed back against numerous false claims about the election, including that Democrats are behind a mass election fraud scheme.
CISA officials have chosen not to delete accurate information.
In particular, one person said, the White House was angry about a CISA post rejecting a conspiracy theory that falsely claims an intelligence agency supercomputer and program, purportedly named Hammer and Scorecard, could have flipped votes nationally.
No such system exists, according to Krebs, election security experts and former U.S. officials.
On Twitter, U.S. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat, wrote: “Chris Krebs has done a great job protecting our elections.
He is one of the few people in this Administration respected by everyone on both sides of the aisle. There is no possible justification to remove him from office. None.”
Krebs has steadily shot down rumors of fraud in recent days, including retweeting leading election security expert Matt Blaze, who for years has warned of specific vulnerabilities in election gear, when the professor wrote that “no serious evidence has yet been found or presented that suggests that the 2020 election outcome in any state has been altered through technical exploitation.”
Gregory Crabb, chief information security officer for the U.S. Postal Service, which was also under pressure over misinformation about mail-in ballots, said: “From my view on the election frontlines, Krebs was a great partner and deserves accolades for his work.”