WASHINGTON, Nov 13 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Senior US federal and state election officials said that there was “no evidence” that votes were lost or
changed, or voting systems corrupted, in the presidential election.
The officials, responsible for election security across the country,
rejected claims made by President Donald Trump and Republicans that fraud and lost ballots led to his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in last week’s election.
“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” they
said in a statement.
“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed
votes, or was in any way compromised,” they said.
“While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for
misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too.”
The statement was issued by the Election Infrastructure Government
Coordinating Council, a public-private umbrella group under the primary
federal election security body, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency (CISA).
It was signed by the heads of the National Association of State Election
Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State — the
officials who manage elections at the state level — and by the chairman of
the US Election Assistance Commission.
It came hours after Trump retweeted a baseless claim that an election
equipment maker “deleted” 2.7 million votes for him nationwide and switched hundreds of thousand from him to Biden in Pennsylvania and other states.
It was the latest in a series of bogus assertions Trump and Republicans
have put forth in order to reject Biden’s victory.
The company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the Pennsylvania Department of States flatly denied Trump’s claims.
The statement from the election security officials also came amid reports
that Trump could fire the head of CISA, Chris Krebs, who has made a strong
effort to stifle unsupported allegations of fraud that have surfaced while
the votes have been counted around the country.
Despite that, rumors and conspiracy theories of a corrupted vote that
allegedly “robbed” Trump have flooded the internet, and Republicans and the Trump campaign have filed multiple lawsuits around the country claiming irregularities.
So far none have been substantiated in court.
The statement said that election officials across the country are currently
“reviewing and double-checking” their state and local results prior to
certifying the numbers.
“When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the
states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of
each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if
necessary,” the officials said.
Separately, TWITTER labeled 300,000 tweets related to the US presidential election as “potentially misleading” in the two weeks surrounding the vote, making up 0.2 percent of election-related posts, the company said.
The social network said the labels were issued between Oct 27 and
Nov 11, one week before and after the US presidential election on
Nov 3 — which Democrat Joe Biden won over incumbent Donald Trump.
Of the 300,000 flagged tweets, 456 were covered over by a warning message
and had engagement features limited — users could not like, retweet or reply to the posts, said Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, policy and trust
and safety, in a blog post.
She estimated that 74 percent of people who saw the problematic tweets did
so after they had been labeled as misleading or flagged with a warning
message, and sharing of the posts, as a result, declined by about 29 percent.
During the election period, Twitter posted messages on American users’
pages which were seen 389 million times that “reminded people that election results were likely to be delayed, and that voting by mail is safe and
legitimate,” Gadde added.
Nearly half of Trump’s tweets were flagged by the platform in the days
following the election, as the president claimed, without evidence, that he
had won and that the process had been tainted by massive fraud. — NNN-AGENCIES
