Fired election cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs appeared Sunday night on “60 Minutes” to publicly dispel the “nonsense” flowing from the Trump campaign team about voting machine manipulation.
His agency saw no evidence of system hacking or compromise “on, before, or after Nov. 3,” he told Scott Pelly of CBS.
With 95 percent of 2020 ballots on paper (up from 82% in 2016), there is an auditable paper trail in place to reveal any manipulation of machine counts.
“That gives you the ability to prove that there was no malicious algorithm or hacked software that adjusted the tally of the vote,” Krebs said. Hand recounts in Georgia confirmed machine tallies there.
“And that tells you what?” Pelly asked.
“That tells you that there was no manipulation of the vote on the machine count side.”
If there was some foreign algorithm flipping votes, it did not work. Most likely, it did not exist, Krebs said. Claims by Rudy Giuliani and the president’s legal paper tigers are “farcical.”
Allegations of votes counted in Germany? Venezuelan software? Communist money?
“The proof is in the ballots,” Krebs responds. “The recounts are consistent with the initial count, and to me that’s further evidence, that’s confirmation, that the systems used in the 2020 election performed as expected, and the American people should have 100% confidence in their vote.”
For months after Ohio went for Bush in 2004, allegations flew that the election had been stolen there. People cited statistical anomalies found in studies and totals diverging from exit polls. Rumors flew of voting machines vulnerable to hacking. But that’s different from proving they were hacked. The distributed nature of America’s election system makes manipulation both difficult to pull off and to conceal. Too many people need to be involved.
Get back to me, I said, when you have a live perp who confesses and had the means, motive, and opportunity to do it. I’m still waiting.