The closed-door briefing was chaired by the top election official of the US intelligence community, Bill Evanina, and senior intelligence officials who specialize in electoral security. Authorities ruled out the possibility that foreign powers could interfere on a large scale to produce and send false ballots to voters and electoral authorities, a source said.
The issue of counterfeit ballots only came up when a lawmaker asked about it, a source present on CNN said. Evanina raised no alarm about that possibility, the source said.
The report highlighted the clash of regular views on electoral security between Trump and senior administration officials charged with keeping the November vote safe, both in public and in classified reports.
For months, those officials have routinely warned that the most serious foreign threats are the hacking of electoral and campaign infrastructure, along with disinformation campaigns, largely in China, Russia and Iran. The issue of fake ballots is a topic they don’t raise, according to multiple sources familiar with the ongoing briefings.
At the White House on Friday, Trump specifically stated that foreign countries may falsify ballots.
“This will be the biggest electoral disaster in history,” said Trump.
“And by the way, you like to talk about Russia and China and other places, they will be able to falsify ballots, they will forge, they will do what they have to do,” he said.
Laying the foundations for foreign disinformation
The president is so vocal in his distrust of voting by mail that there is concern among intelligence and law enforcement officials that he is laying the groundwork for the exact type of foreign disinformation campaigns they warn about.
“They can’t physically do anything about it (mail ballots) but (they can) create narratives on social media to create levels of doubt and participate in the debate,” said a police official. “We are alert to the fact that they may have questions about mail ballots and exploit them online.”
A source close to the Trump campaign flatly debunked election experts and dismissed the idea that what the president says amounts to the kind of nefarious disinformation used by opponents, but admitted that the president’s intention is generally to cause chaos.
“The Russians and the Chinese are doing what they do to influence and influence the elections,” the source said. “The president’s tweet, while weighty, is totally different, his intention is different.”
Changing actual votes, he said, as the President repeatedly alleges, is “extraordinarily difficult.”
“The diversity of electoral systems across states, the multiple checks and layoffs in those systems, and the post-election audit make it extremely difficult for foreign adversaries to interrupt or change vote counts without detection,” said Evanina in your statement.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to elaborate on Evanina’s views on the mail-in ballots, saying the statement speaks for itself. The Trump and Biden campaigns also declined to comment on their reports.
Barr echoes Trump
The only senior cabinet official who has echoed Trump’s concerns about the risks posed by voting by mail is Attorney General William Barr.
“Right now, a foreign country could print tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots, and it would be very difficult for us to detect which one was correct and which was incorrect,” Barr told Fox News last month.
Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller, continued the president’s line of attack on Friday, saying that universal voting by mail allows “massive endemic fraud.”
Ballot Complexities
Chris Krebs, who oversees the voting security for the administration as director of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm, CISA, recently ruled out the possibility of other countries trying to intrude in this way due to the complexity of ballot papers.
“First of all, get special cardstock, or paper, from a very small number of sellers who know their customers very well and if it appears as, you know, the order that comes from St. Petersburg and pays in rubles it might not be clear odor testing, “Krebs said in a panel discussion two weeks ago with Dr. Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution, a former Trump chief adviser in Russia.
Krebs has been among the most vocal election officials calling on states to eliminate purely electronic voting in favor of ballot papers to ensure an auditable paper record. CISA regularly participates in information sessions led by Evanina.
“Understanding the different configurations of ballots: printing them the right way, getting the right signatures, verified at the back end” are all obstacles, according to Krebs, for any foreign country to interfere in this way.
A CISA spokesperson declined to comment further.
“Successful attacks on data integrity and voter registration systems have the potential to impact the delivery of ballots by mail and the acceptance of voted ballots unless detected early enough,” they added.
But in unsorted calls with committee members in recent months, Krebs has not raised concerns about foreign countries using fraudulent mail ballots, a Democratic assistant on the committee said.
“We have had no documented cases in any number of presidential elections on fake mail ballots or forged ballots,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who attended a security briefing on Thursday. “If the President’s intelligence community or the FBI has information, they should present it to Congress, plain and simple.”
When asked if he had heard those concerns about the false ballots submitted by the intelligence community to Capitol Hill, Jackson Lee said, “I have not.”
Krebs has praised the cooperation with General Paul Nakasone, director of the National Security Agency and the Cyber Command, who play a critical role in thwarting and responding to foreign computer attacks. He also spoke last week about the growing ability of foreign adversaries to meddle in the 2020 election, but he also did not mention voting by mail.
“Our adversaries know that this is a means through which they can try to have an impact on us and therefore we have seen growth in terms of programs across all major adversaries,” said Nakasone, adding, “Our goal is Number one, our number one goal at the National Security Agency and the US Cyber Command is a safe and legitimate election for 2020. “
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