The Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) had warned internally of potential issues with mail-in voting during the 2020 election cycle while publicly proclaiming the vote "safe and secure" and censoring social media posts about the risks of a massive vote-by-mail operation, according to newly released CISA documents.
The documents, which show the federal agency’s concerns about mail-in voting while it was also monitoring online opinions about such concerns, were released on Monday by America First Legal (AFL).
"These documents demonstrate federal bureaucrats knew that there was no credible evidence supporting the claim that in-person voting spread COVID-19, and that mail-in and absentee voting were indeed less secure than in-person voting, precisely as President Trump, Attorney General Barr, and others had warned," said AFL Senior Counselor and Director of Oversight and Investigations Reed D. Rubenstein.
"Yet, the government and its allied social and legacy media companies covered up the truth, using unlawful censorship and bogus 'fact checks' to advance mass vote-by-mail schemes," he continued. "This 'mail-in ballot cover-up,' like Russia Collusion, Ukraine impeachment, and the Hunter Biden laptop suppression, shows how Deep State bureaucrats, liberal operatives, and their corporate allies combined to interfere in our Presidential elections. It is a monumental scandal."
In October 2020, CISA had made a list of the risks of mail-in voting.
The list of risks were:
1. “Implementation of mail-in voting infrastructure and processes within a compressed timeline may also introduce new risk.”
2. “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.”
3. “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.”
4. “The outbound and inbound processing of mail-in ballots introduces additional infrastructure and technology, increasing potential scalability of cyber attacks.”
5. “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.”
6. “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.”
CISA also listed three “major challenges with absentee voting” by September 2020, noting “the process of mailing and returning ballots,” the “high numbers of improperly completed ballots (figures not yet released),” and “the shortage of personnel to process ballots in a prompt manner.”
Despite being aware of the concerns of mail-in voting, CISA contracted accounting and consulting firm Deloitte to monitor and flag social media posts regarding the 2020 election and vote-by-mail. One such post that was flagged by Deloitte to CISA was from President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, which said that there were “big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots.”
Mike Benz, executive director of Foundation For Freedom Online, told Just the News on Monday that the CISA documents showed how this was a “scandal because DHS was the entity responsible for censoring anybody who questioned mail-in ballots and questioning anything about them that might be fraud," or where there was "risk of fraud.”
He added that CISA “pulled off the heist of the century to argue that as cybersecurity agency, they had the power to censor the internet because misinformation about elections is a cyber threat to critical infrastructure, the critical infrastructure being elections, the threat being disinformation, and cyber being internet related.”
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