NIC & DOJ Reports on Election Are Smokescreens

 

Recent US government reports on foreign interference in the 2020 election are not only erroneous, but attempt to throw up a smoke screen to shield the public from knowing what these agencies don't know.

The ignorance of the United States Intelligence Community (IC) agencies, as well as the Department of Justice (DOJ) the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Homeland Security is on display for the world to see. 

According to the NIC assessment (my emphasis added):

"We assess foreign cybercriminals probably did not work to interfere or influence the US elections on behalf of or at the direction of a nation state. We have low confidence in this assessment."

There it is...."probably did not...low confidence." 

On page 10, "Low Probability" is defined as:

 "the information's credibility and/or plausibility in uncertain; that the infomation (sic) if fragmented, dated, or poorly corroborated; or that the reliability of the sources is questionable."

In the passage posted at right, the NIC wrote about serious cyber attacks impacting our election systems.  An incident of implanted ransomware shut down the voter registration system in New York state, but our NIC officers don't know if these actors worked to interfere or influence the US elections on behalf of or at the direction of a nation state.

The latter bolded section is an important qualifier because it makes clear that there was interference, but it could not be tied to a nation state.   

In other words, the NIC is not sure if China (or other adversaries) hacked our election systems.

History clearly shows that China has been targeting and breeched our government systems for many years.   In 2013, China made its first intrusion in the Office of Personnel Management's systems and by 2014 a second set of cyber-hackers were inside and began removing sensitive files (mine included).  Another report revealed that China used hacking tools it stole from the National Security Agency (NSA) to carry out sporadic, specifically targeted attacks.

Former DNI John Ratcliffe, quoting the Intelligence Community's (IC) Analytic Ombudsman, relayed that IC Chinese analysts “appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tend to disagree with the administration’s policies, saying in effect, I don’t want our intelligence used to support those policies.”

The NIC assessment, to its credit, provided the alternative view of Chinese meddling referred to by Ratcliffe, but stated the IC had "no information suggesting that the Chinese tried to interfere in our election processes.  This statement was made with moderate confidence. 

After all the weasel wording is put aside, the bottom line is the NIC claims it has no idea whether or not China, Russia, Iran or any other nation hacked our election system or infected it with malware or did anything else that was nefarious.

The DOJ, FBI, and DHS report was all of five pages long and didn't bother to discuss its methodology for determining its findings.   However, the primary findings in the report are derivative to the NIC report -- as it is the IC that is responsible for foreign intelligence.  

So, that assessment is equally worthless.

Given that DOJ, FBI, and DHS are responsible for domestic intelligence, those agencies should be providing a report on the possibility that domestic actors could have interfered in the 2020 election.  Domestic actors include, but are not limited to, election workers, political party operatives, third party interlopers, such as the individuals staffing CTCLs, and individuals employed by the companies who provide US election systems. 

We all breathlessly await their report.

As for the NIC report, it was eleven pages of content and almost everything in the NIC report was reported in the news media.

Neither report lends credence to the many anomalies and irregularities noted by data scientists, statisticians, and other experts.  Instead, the reports seem to rely on media fact checks to make blanket statements about the 2020 election not being compromised.

It was if the authors live in the media echo-chamber and refuse to confront the realities of the 2020 election.  

Completely out of touch 

Both reports make key findings that no foreign actor could "manipulate election processes at scale without detection" by intelligence collection, post-election audits, or physical and cyber security monitoring of voting systems across the country.

The obvious fallacy in their statement is that a foreign actor would have only had to manipulate the election processes in four (4) counties to change the outcome of the election.   

Had foreign actors impacted the vote counts in Fulton County, Georgia;  Maricopa County, Arizona, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Douglas County, Nebraska they could have swung the election to whichever candidate they so desired.

 The manipulation of the United States election system is not an issue of scale whatsoever.

Misunderstanding of Audits

Next, the reports make reference to post-election audits being able to detect the problem, however, none of the counties listed above would have been able to conduct a post-election audit given that they had poor administrative controls over the ballots.  

To be clear, these jurisdictions would need to know how many ballots were cast in the election in order to perform an audit and some of the states had not updated their official records at the time the election results were certified.  

When the integrity of the Pennsylvania election was challenged by Representative Frank Ryan, who alleged more votes were cast than received, the Pennsylvania Secretary of State response was the discrepancy was due to the SURE database not yet being updated by four counties -- and this was eight (8) weeks after the election had ended.

When are these fraud detecting audits supposed to take place?  

In a logical world, these audits should take place before the results are certified -- not after.  

Georgia's alleged recount and so-called risk limiting audit had similar issues.   Again, to perform an audit of any kind after an election you have to know the number of ballots cast.  In Georgia's case, it found batches of ballots that were never counted and votes from memory cards that were never uploaded -- during its audit. 

If you take the time to grind through all of the county results, you'll discover that official certified vote counts by the respective Secretaries of States in Arizona and Pennsylvania don't match the results provided by the counties.   

Write-in votes are especially problematic.

No mentions of malware (malicious code)

I'll end where I started.  

Neither report mentions how a foreign actor could change the election results by infecting the computers with malware.

As I wrote here, there were 113,000 less minor party and write-in votes in Pennsylvania in 2020 than in 2016.  Pennsylvania was decided by approximately 80,000 votes and, according to experts,  vote swapping malware could have been installed to change all of those votes to Biden. 

Moreover, if a foreign actor injected malware that enabled Ranked Choice Voting in Philadelphia County, where votes can be fractionalized,  it could have swung the PA election in just that one locality.  

Malware can also have the capability to erase the logs, therefore, how would DHS/CISA or DNI or anyone else figure out that malware was shifting votes without performing a recount or audit of the paper ballots?

It's clear that the individuals writing these election reports don't know the first things about how elections are conducted, let alone how to conduct an audit.  And they are certainly not cognizant of the many anomalies in the election data that have been pointed out by experts -- as election data/results are conspicuously absent from both reports.

There's no mention of investigating the potential that foreign adversaries were behind the 100K plus vote dumps that occurred in many key battleground states.

Of course, there's also no mention of the "great pause" that occurred at 3AM EST on November 4th.  If a foreign actor did strike, as some have alleged, wouldn't one of these agencies have made mention of an investigation of the most probable time the alleged intrusion occurred?  

Nope. 

In summary, these reports are incomplete, erroneous and only reinforce the fact that the Federal government has no ability to monitor or evaluate the integrity of our elections. 

Ray Blehar, March 17, 2021, 10:36 PM EST