The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) censored social media posts that questioned election integrity and mail-in voting.
America First Legal (AFL) released documents from CISA, alleging that the agency “knew mail-in and absentee voting are less secure than in-person (i.e., verified voting) voting, confirming warnings by former President Trump and others of increased fraud, and shared these concerns with mainstream media outlets during an unclassified ‘media tour’ the Friday before the 2020 election.”
“However, the mainstream media, having derided the notion that ‘vote by mail’ was less secure than in-person voting, covered up the truth,” AFL wrote.
By October 2020, CISA developed a chart describing six risks of mail-in voting.
Those were:
- “Implementation of mail-in voting infrastructure and processes within a compressed timeline may also introduce new risk.”
- “For mail-in voting, some of the risk under the control of election officials during in-person voting shifts to outside entities, such as ballot printers, mail processing facilities, and the United States Postal Service.”
- “Integrity attacks on voter registration data and systems represent a comparatively higher risk in a mail-in voting environment when compared to an in-person voting environment.”
- “The outbound and inbound processing of mail-in ballots introduces additional infrastructure and technology, increasing potential scalability of cyber attacks.”
- “Inbound mail-in ballot processes and tabulation take longer than in-person processing, causing tabulation of results to occur more slowly and resulting in more ballots to tabulate following election night.”
- “Disinformation risk to mail-in voting infrastructure and processes is similar to that of in-person voting while utilizing different content. Threat actors may leverage limited understanding regarding mail-in voting processes to mislead and confuse the public.”
Leading up to the 2020 election, CISA’s Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) targeted “narratives,” AFL explained.
According to a report from EIP, “In the lead-up to the 2020 election, misinformation centered on mail-in voting: the destruction and discarding of real ballots and the ‘discovery’ of fake ones.”
CISA also used the consulting firm Deloitte to censor posts that questioned mail-in ballots’ integrity.
Deloitte shared with CISA that “POTUS accused the ‘fake news’ of a ‘corrupt media conspiracy’ to use COVID-19 pandemic coverage to influence the election, claiming ‘the topic will totally change’ after Election Day.”
The firm also reported to the agency that Twitter flagged Donald Trump’s post that there are “big problems and discrepancies with Mail-in Ballots.”
“Common sense dictates that ballots submitted via mail are inherently less secure than verified, in-person voting by a citizen who shows identification before casting his or her ballot,” America First Legal Vice President and General Counsel Gene Hamilton said. “CISA received reporting and was aware of the risks associated with mass mail-in voting schemes, yet it simultaneously was engaged in an unprecedented censorship campaign to mislead the American people about the truth and about a great number of other things, like Hunter Biden’s laptop. The American people were lied to, and there must be accountability.”
