Thread by @BBuchman_CNS

Today, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee meets for a hearing on the integrity of the 2020 election.
I'll have a report for you later today. The witnesses include @C_C_Krebs and Kenneth Starr.

@CourthouseNews

.@GaryPeters, after chair Ron Johnson delivered a minutes-long remark claiming fraud, without evidence, in the 2020 election (that echoed much of the same rhetoric from President Trump):

Entered into the record by Peters in this morning's hearing, was a log of the 60 failed attempts in court by Trump to overturn the 2020 election.

Stream of today's hearing is available here:
hsgac.senate.gov/examining-irre…
@CourthouseNews

Chair of the committee @SenRonJohnson asked all witnesses here today to testify under oath. All agreed.

.@C_C_Krebs reminds the committee that government and industry reps from the election security community issued a joint statement saying the 2020 election was the most secure in US history on Nov. 12.
Here: cisa.gov/news/2020/11/1…
@CourthouseNews

This evaluation was reached thanks to audits and healthy cross-communication with intel agencies, he adds.

@C_C_Krebs: "While elections are sometimes messy, this was a secure election, of that, I have no doubt."

Sen. Ron Johnson says he understands all that - he's seen the statement - but he is insistent that there was "fraud in this election" but he doesn't "know to what extent."
He's confused over how voting machines function at this juncture of the hearing.

Krebs is trying to explain how paper ballots work to Johson explaining, yes, some voting machines may have modems that are temporarily disabled or enabled to transmit data. That is not abnormal nor is it patently a sign of fraud.

"Technology is used to increase accuracy, but election officials are very careful that technology is not a single point of failure... There are controls before, during, and after the process," @C_C_Krebs says.

Reminder: Trump's own DOJ found there was no fraud in 2020 election.
@GaryPeters notes it has been five weeks since Trump lost. He's still pushing conspiracies of "demonstrable irregularities." Asks Krebs, what is the danger to the democratic process?

@C_C_Krebs noting results of EC: "We're past the point where we need to be having conversations about the outcome of this election. Continued assaults on the outcome of this election are ultimately corrosive to the institutions that support elections."
courthousenews.com/electoral-coll…

.@C_C_Krebs: "Going forward it will be that much harder. The trick about elections is: You're not so much trying to convince the winner they won, it's the loser that they've lost."
@CourthouseNews

The hearing degraded quickly. Johnson accuses Peters of spreading disinformation, Peters accuses Johnson of spreading disinformation.

Conspiracy theories abound from Senator Rand Paul.
He decries the notion of every American being mailed a ballot to vote in a general election saying it would spread corruption "throughout the land"

I'll have a report on today's hearing later for @CourthouseNews.

WASHINGTON (CN) — Appearing for the first time before Congress since Trump fired him, the nation’s former cybersecurity chief told senators during a contentious hearing that claims of fraud in the 2020 election are baseless and undermine democracy.
courthousenews.com/fired-cybersec…

Committee Chair Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who is set to retire next year, was adamant during Wednesday’s hearing that most Americans were not confident in the election results for a variety of factors.

He blamed this on news coverage of what he called the “Russian collusion hoax” during Trump’s presidency as well as the “ongoing suppression and censorship of conservative perspective by biased media and social media.”

A survey conducted last week by Morning Consult/Politico found disparate opinions on the election results along party lines, with about 83% of Democrats trusting the outcome compared to just 33% of Republicans.

Several other witnesses besides Krebs were invited to testify before the committee. Trump campaign attorney Jesse Binnall was given ample time to testify on flimsy legal theories that have been shot down in court...

Including Binnall's claim that a wave of irregularities in Nevada was to blame for Trump’s loss there.

The Nevada Supreme Court rejected the campaign’s challenge to the state’s results last week based on a lack of evidence. Biden won Nevada by over 33,000 votes.

Trump tweeted during the hearing that “Nevada must be flipped based on testimony!” Another tweet took aim at Krebs, claiming Krebs “was totally excoriated and proven wrong” at the hearing. Both posts were flagged by Twitter as containing disputed claims about election fraud.

Before Trump fired Krebs, the CISA director launched a “rumor control” webpage to address baseless claims about the election. He testified that claims of “malicious algorithms” that manipulated results and...

other accusations largely emanating from the president and his supporters have sown confusion about how voting machines function.

In Michigan, Krebs noted, a forensic audit was recently completed on voting machines in Antrim County by the partisan organization Allied Security Operations Group.

The group baselessly claimed Dominion Voting Systems intentionally designed its machines to create errors and its debunked report said 68% of votes cast had errors.

“Those are claims that are repeated on social media by the president. I wanted to understand so I looked at it and it was not that 68% of votes were in error. It was that the election management system logs had records of the logs themselves that had some sort of alert rate"

“That is being used to spin that the machine is not trustworthy. The report itself doesn’t actually specify any of those errors except for one," Krebs said.
One entry in the log displayed as “no permission to [0].”

That, Krebs said, is being claimed to mean that someone tried to get in the machine and manipulate the records. But when he reviewed the Antrim report more closely, he realized what had happened.

“It was a Windows-based machine and the election management system is coded with a programming language called C-Sharp,” he said.

Krebs: "The ‘no permission to [0]’ is a placeholder for a parameter. So, it may be that it’s just not good coding but it certainly doesn’t mean someone tried to zero out votes. They misinterpreted language in what they saw in their forensic audit.”
@CourthouseNews

The Allied Security report was also denounced by Michigan election officials earlier this week.

My coverage: courthousenews.com/fired-cybersec…

https://twitter.com/BBuchman_CNS/status/1339309538286166018?s=20

Additonally, Peters represents Michigan not Indiana. My sincere apologies. Extremely long days and lots of moving parts, folks