U.S. intelligence warned that foreign entities possessed the ability to “compromise” the nation’s voting infrastructure, according to a report from Just the News, citing information from a declassified memo.
“We judge that US adversaries, including, at a minimum, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure for the 2020 presidential election,” the National Intelligence Council (NIC) wrote in January 15, 2020, memo. “Adversaries gaining access to US election-related systems could disrupt the voting process, steal sensitive data, or undermine confidence in the election results, but we do not know whether any of them have specific plans to manipulate election-related systems.”
Discussing voter registration databases, the memo, penned by then-National Intelligence for Cyber Christopher Porter, warned that adversaries could “alter data to potentially prevent individual voters or groups of voters from voting, causing delays on election day or forcing voters to use provisional ballots.”
Despite foreign concerns, the memo noted that voting systems that “tabulate, transmit, or display election results are vulnerable to localized exploitation but would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.”
While the memo described potential threats to U.S. election infrastructure, Chris Krebs, who served as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, testified before Congress that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.”
“On November 12, 2020, I approved CISA’s publication of a joint statement from the election security community, reflecting that community’s consensus that the 2020 election [was] the most secure in U.S. history,” Krebs said at the time.
