After Trump tweets Defcon Hack video, voting security experts call BS

As President Trump continues to make unsubstantiated allegations of widespread electoral fraud, 59 of the world’s leading e-voting experts are responding, saying that recent allegations of hacking of real voting machines “are either unfounded or technically inconsistent.”

Monday’s letter came after nearly two weeks of unsubstantiated and unfounded claims by Trump and some of his supporters that this month’s presidential election was “rigged” in favor of President-elect Joe Biden . Trump kicked off a new round of disinformation on Thursday when he took to Twitter to say that Dominion Voting-made voting machines had withdrawn 2.7 million Trump votes across the country.

Vulnerabilities are not exploits

Over the weekend, Trump tweeted a video from last year’s Defcon hacker convention. It showed the participants attending an event called voting machine hacking village. The event organizers did so to raise awareness of the importance of security in electronic voting. Some of the event’s organizers were beside themselves that Trump was using the video to indicate that the voting machine hack played a role in this month’s election results or any election in the ‘history.

“Anyone who claims that an American election was ‘rigged’ is making a extraordinary

assertion, which must be supported by convincing and verifiable evidence, “ computer scientists wrote. “Simply citing the existence of technical failures does not establish that an attack took place, much less that it altered the outcome of an election. It is just speculation.

The letter continued:

The presence of security weaknesses in the electoral infrastructure alone does not tell us that an election has been compromised. Technical, physical and procedural safeguards complicate the task of malicious exploitation of electoral systems, as do the police and the intelligence community monitoring potential adversaries. Changing the outcome of an election involves more than the mere existence of a technical vulnerability.

We are aware of the alarming claims that the 2020 elections were “rigged” by exploiting technical vulnerabilities. However, in all of the cases known to us, these claims were either unfounded or technically inconsistent. To our knowledge, no credible evidence has been presented to support the conclusion that the outcome of the 2020 election in any state has been altered by technical compromise.

Monday’s letter follows the release of another strong statement on Thursday by the government’s Coordinating Council for Electoral Infrastructure, which includes officials from the Security Department’s Cyber ​​and Infrastructure Security Agency. Domestic, the Electoral Assistance Commission of the United States, and the state and state clerks of elections for various states.

“The November 3 election was the safest in American history,” the joint statement read. “Right now, election officials across the country are reviewing and reviewing the entire electoral process before finalizing the outcome.

The statement went on to say, “While we are aware that there are many unfounded allegations and potential for disinformation about our electoral process, we can assure you that we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too. “

Earlier today, Reuters reported that the head of the Infrastructure Security and Cybersecurity Agency, Christopher Krebs, told his associates he expected to be laid off. Quoting anonymous people familiar with the matter, the outlet said Krebs “angered Trump’s White House for his efforts to discredit disinformation” related to the recent election.

Monday’s letter shows that computer scientists are also working to debunk conspiracy theories that claim widespread electoral fraud. The signatories of the document are Matt Blaze, professor of computer science at Georgetown University; Ronald Rivest, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and R at RSA; Steven M. Bellovin, professor of computer science at Columbia University; Joseph Lorenzo Hall, senior vice president of the Internet nonprofit company; and J. Alex Halderman, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, specializing in electoral security.