Fact-check: the most secure election in history (CISA)
CISA's statement is technically true, but meaningless.
Claim: CISA’s claimed the 2020 election was “most secure election in history”. Democrats cite it as evidence the election was secure, Republicans cite it to mock them, since in their minds, it’s obviously false.
Rebuttal: CISA’s statement is technically true, but it’s taken out of context. People should instead be focused on the lack of evidence of election computer hacking.
Verdict: meaningless
After the 2020 election, Trump stoked fears that election computers may have been hacked. Hackers are seen as wielding black magic, and the claims were exploiting the public’s fear of witchcraft. Chris Krebs and CISA responded by issuing a statement saying:
“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised”.
That’s the main point of their statement, that there’s no evidence supporting Trump’s claims. This is true and remains true. This should be the sentence everyone is arguing, not other sentences in that statement.
That statement also said:
“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”
But this was only a minor supporting statement.
When Trump supporters make claims of election fraud, they taken this one statement out of context in order to discredit their opponents. In their mind, that statement is obviously absurd in the face of “evidence” they think they see.
For example, Dinesh D’Souza starts his movie “2000 Mules” with a video of Chris Krebs making this statement. But Krebs was talking about computer security whereas D’Souza was walking about ballot harvesting. The two subjects are unrelated, and the statement is out of context.
The only valid context is election computer security.
In this context, it’s true. It’s true for the reasons cited by CISA, namely:
Almost all election computers are airgapped, meaning not connected to the Internet in any way. This makes them impossible to hack them without the help of election officials (or at least, a mistake on their part).
CISA has been working with county election authorities, making sure they remain airgapped, and investigating anomalies.
Election computers have been switching to paper trails, so that even if they are hacked, votes can be recounted manually. This is by far the most important feature, highlighted by the CISA statement, and it means that even if hackers get into the computers, they can’t change the outcome, only disrupt the election.
By far the biggest issue is the paper trails. As CISA describes, in the states that were close that were paper trails that could be audited. Georgia’s election was audited twice — even if other fraud occurred (e.g. ballot harvesting), we can be confident computer hacking wasn’t involved.
There is no evidence making us even suspect computer hacking. Trump supporters keep making this claim, like Mike Lindell, the Arizona auditors, or the analysis of the Mesa Count (Colorado) computer, but they still haven’t found any evidence — at most, things they simply don’t understand.
Note that the meaningless of Kreb’s statements cuts both ways. Trump supporters are wrong to mock it, but Democrats are wrong to cite it as some sort of evidence.
This FactCheck.org piece makes such an error in its preface, claiming that CISA’s statement of “most secure election ever” implies that it couldn’t have been hacked. This is wrong. Fact-checking should rest upon the facts we know, not assurances from authorities that we should trust them.
Likewise, journalists and politicians have repeated this claim “most secure ever”. It’s fair to see why Trump supporters mock this statement so often when Trump’s opponents keep repeating it seriously.
Our conclusion is thus: that claim should be ignored, the only important statement from that CISA document is that there’s been no evidence of computer hacking, nothing suspicious indicating hacking might’ve occurred. It was true when the statement was published, and remains true two years later.