New CISA Advisory Identifies Problems with Automated Election Systems

Maybe 2020 wasn’t the most secure election ever after all

According to a new official advisory from the Dept of Homeland Security, the 2020 election may not have been as secure as has been frequently reported by many since November 2020.

The conventional wisdom conveyed by the legacy media, the Democrat Party, and even a number of Republicans since November 2020 is that the 2020 election “was the most secure election in American history,” as noted here in a Fox News report on 12 November 2020. This narrative was based on a joint statement made by the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) Executive Committee and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council (SCC) on 12 November 2020. Posted on the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) website, the joint statement included the following excerpt: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history… There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Two data points evinced from this announcement: (1) it was made while the election was still being contested and irregularities in multiple states were just beginning to be reported by independent observers and analysts, and (2) Chris Krebs – the CISA director at the time – not only exceeded his authority in authorizing that joint statement (CISA has no role in determining whether or not election fraud exists, as noted here) but was also connected to James Clapper, Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, and to the Dutko Group (a major Democrat lobbying organization) as noted here.

Since the election, several cracks have occurred in the façade of that “most secure” narrative, including the result of the partial forensic analysis in Maricopa County (Arizona) reported out in August 2021, as well as an interim report provided in March 2022 by Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, that recommended Wisconsin decertify the 2020 election results in the state, as reported here. Both of these have been successfully stymied through legal maneuvers by those who would prefer to let sleeping dogs lie.

However, two recent events have significantly undermined the claims in that joint statement by CISA.

2000 Mules

The release of Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary, 2000 Mules, on 2 May in theaters across the US provided evidence of a coordinated, funded, illegal ballot trafficking network that operated in at least six states during the 2020 election. The evidence was based on analysis of geospatial locating data from cell phones that was correlated with publicly available videos taken of ballot drop boxes. True The Vote, a nonprofit organization focused on election integrity, analyzed 27 terabytes of data, including 4 million minutes of video and 10 trillion cell phone pings to draw the conclusion in the documentary cited above. TTV set a high threshold for identifying a particular cell phone/person as a likely mule (a “ballot trafficker”). For example, in Georgia, a person needed to have made at least two dozen trips to drop boxes and also five visits to one or more non-profit organizations to be counted as “mule.” The result was the discovery of 242 traffickers in that state who made 5,662 trips to ballot drop boxes between the hours of midnight and 5 AM, as reported in the documentary.

2000 Mules was a major crack in the election narrative, as Rasmussen Reports determined in a poll released 3 June that 77% of the documentary’s viewers concluded afterwards that “the movie strengthened their conviction that there was systematic and widespread election fraud in the 2020 election.” Rasmussen reported that “only 15% of voters have seen 2000 Mules,” but that is a rather large number, as 15% of the ~232 million eligible voters reported by the US Census Bureau in 2020 works out to be 34 million people (and counting)!

THE CISA ADVISORY

On 3 June, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) announced on their website the release of an official Industrial Control Systems Advisory (ICSA) that details “vulnerabilities affecting versions of the Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite ImageCast X, which is an in-person voting system used to allow voters to mark their ballot.” [Note: Dominion machines are used in 28 states across the US.]

The ICSA itself (linked here) was based on discoveries made by J. Alex Halderman, Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Michigan, and Drew Springall, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Auburn University. Their self-ascribed experience and interests from their own websites linked below include:

Halderman. My research focuses on computer security and privacy, with an emphasis on problems that broadly impact society and public policy. Topics that interest me include software security, network security, security measurement, privacy and anonymity, election cybersecurity, censorship resistance, computer forensics, and online crime.

Springall. “I focus on nation-state/highly privileged attackers, Internet-scale measurement/vulnerabilities, and election security. I recently left Google’s Production Security team where I was working to mitigate insider threats, secure core infrastructure, and improve the overall security and privacy properties of Google’s products and services.”

Halderman in particular has had lengthy experience in analyzing election fraud in America. For example, he was the principal investigator who examined the reported voting irregularities in Antrim County, Michigan, during the 2020 election. His 54-page report, “Analysis of the Antrim County, Michigan November 2020 Election Incident” can be found here. He also gave this tutorial on election systems [in]security at a CyberSec and AI conference in Prague, Czech Republic, in October 2019, long before the election integrity controversies erupted after the 2020 election.

With their expertise firmly established, we return to the CISA’s latest advisory.

This sentence from CISA’s announcement is key: “Exploitation of these vulnerabilities would require physical access to individual ImageCast X devices, access to the Election Management System (EMS), or the ability to modify files before they are uploaded to ImageCast X devices.” It is important to note that the advisory did not preclude these actions from having happened in 2020, as many of the counties used various people from non-profits like Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), as well as local election workers and IT contractors, who could have compromised the system. For example, the New York Post reported last October that Zuckerberg spent $419 million to fund “a targeted, private takeover of government election operations by nominally nonpartisan — but demonstrably ideological — nonprofit organizations.” [emphasis added]

The final sentence in that CISA announcement is also important: “While these vulnerabilities present risks that should be mitigated as soon as possible, CISA has no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in any elections.” This is eerily similar to the joint statement made by CISA that claimed no evidence of any votes having been changed or other election fraud. There is no known report from CISA (or, perhaps more importantly, the FBI) of an investigation that verifies that none of the Dominion machines have been compromised, nor was any CISA/FBI investigation completed in 2020 before that joint statement was rushed out just nine days after Election Day 2020 declaring “the most secure election in American history.” The burden of proof is with CISA (and the FBI) to verify that the election was secure, not with the general public. In short, there is no proof that the 2020 election was “the most secure” or that Dominion machines were not compromised.

Lastly, a flurry of news articles popped up before the release of the CISA advisory hinting at its contents. Here is one from ABC News that repeats the above unsubstantiated claim verbatim: “[T]here is no evidence the flaws in the Dominion Voting Systems’ equipment have been exploited to alter election results.” Were these news reports just deflection in support of the “most secure” narrative similar to the original joint statement by CISA? You decide.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Where there is smoke, there is [usually] fire, as the old idiom goes. The latest two in a series of “smoke events” are convincing ever more people that there really was a “fire” in November 2020. And it’s not just Americans who are drawing that conclusion.

As reported here, Niclaus Fest, the Chairman of AFD in Parliament, the biggest patriot party in Germany, and Marcel de Graaff, a member of the European Parliament for Forum for Democracy (FVD), have watched 2000 Mules and were shocked by what they saw. Fest made a very astute observation: “We don’t really see a strong reaction from the federal government in the United States, but still, this movie had a big exposure. Millions and millions of people have seen it.”

Yes, many Americans are awaiting a “strong reaction” from our government, too. So far, the US political class doesn’t seem to be too interested in ensuring election integrity in future elections.

The end.

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