The Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency knew that mass mail-in voting during the 2020 election contained risks but continued to flag social media posts raising such concerns as disinformation, according to new documents obtained by America First Legal in its lawsuit against the agency.
The CISA documents appear to show that in September 2020, officials knew that mail-in voting came with election security risks and that there was no evidence to support the claim that in-person voting would “increase the spread of COVID-19.” Officials also were reportedly aware that mass mail-in efforts presented challenges for election officials.
“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,” Reed Rubinstein, AFL senior counselor and director of oversight and investigations, told Just the News.
While aware of the dangers of mass mail-in voting, CISA contracted consulting firm Deloitte to monitor and target social media posts that spewed election mis- and disinformation narratives.
Some of the reported posts tagged included “a conservative online activist [who] accused Twitter of censoring her posts about voter fraud she is ‘witnessing here in Nevada,’ and expressed her frustration with Twitter’s disclaimers stating that mail-in ballots are secure,” according to AFL.
Deloitte also reportedly informed CISA of a conservative who alleged that Twitter suppressed a story about the “Democratic presidential nominee’s son to help the nominee win the election.”
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In late 2022, America First Legal sued CISA “to compel the immediate release of records shedding light on the nature and extent of the federal government’s collusion with the media and Big Tech to censor information and shape public opinion.”
“The terms ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’ are so dangerously vague that they invite bureaucratic abuse. Based on the evidence disclosed to date, these terms are functioning as the pretext for domestic propaganda operations. State and CISA are not ministries of ‘truth’ – the public has a right to know precisely who decides what information to censor, and how the government is using its private sector allies to shape public opinion,” Rubinstein said in a press release announcing the lawsuit.
