Thread by @jennycohn1

This article seems 2 blame the Big Lie in part on too much transparency re: election-system vulnerabilities. IMO, this is a bad take. Had the national media amplified these concerns b4 the election, TFG wld not have been in position 2 hijack the issue. 1/
nbcnews.com/tech/security/…

I don’t mean to imply that the media ignored election-system vulnerabilities entirely before the election. But attention was at best sporadic. 2/

Everyone should have been made aware BEFORE the election that ES&S is connecting ballot scanners to the internet & that the GOP blocked @RonWyden’s #SAFEAct, which wld have banned this & required robust manual audits for all federal races. 3/ axios.com/gop-senator-el…

Had that occurred, the GOP’s candidate, TFG, would have had a much more difficult time hijacking the issue and playing victim. 4/

Ditto re the inadequacy of most US election audits. Before the Big Lie, most election-security experts urged better audits bc, currently, most official audits are not sufficiently robust 2 detect outcome-changing fraud. But this received scant media attention at the time. 5/

Had the media reported these issues prominently & frequently, it wld have provided much needed leverage toward passing the #SAFEAct, which in turn wld have required robust manual audits for all federal races. The media did not do this, allowing TFG 2 hijack election auditing. 6/

Here is my own October 2020 piece for the New York Review of Books where I include my discussion w/ @philipbstark, America’s foremost election auditing expert about the inadequacy of most official election audits. 7/ nybooks.com/daily/2020/10/…

A screenshot from my piece. 8/

How many people know that @RonWyden’s #SAFEAct would have required robust manual audits for all federal races, but the GOP blocked it? If this had been common knowledge, TFG wld have had a much harder time weaponizing the issue. 9/ axios.com/gop-senator-el…

There has long been a debate between proponents of security by obscurity and proponents of election transparency. Security by obscurity breeds mistrust & can’t secure elections anyway bc it is impossible to eliminate the threat of corrupt or inept election insiders. 10/

The most recent example occurred in Colorado where a MAGA election clerk illegally obtained and leaked the software for Dominion’s election-management system, proving that security by obscurity is at best a naive concept. 11/ denverpost.com/2021/08/24/mes…

It is time to embrace election transparency by which I mean robust manual election audits conducted in public w/ a transparent chain of custody (or public hand counts) w/ #HandMarkedPaperBallots for most voters (exception 4 voters w/ disabilities). 12/

For the most part, we do not currently run transparent elections. Pretending that we do—and then blaming the Big Lie on transparency—is itself a lie that will make it harder to secure the next election against both fraud AND fraudulent claims that fraud occurred. 13/

Here is the CAP report from 2018 re election security in all 50 states. And screenshots from a few states. We must do better. But change requires acknowledging we have a problem. Right now, too many people are in denial bc Biden won the presidency. 14/ cdn.americanprogress.org/content/upload…

Too many of these people seem u aware that it was the GOP that defied polls to win races in 2020, including 27 out of 27 House races that were rated as tossups before the election. 15/

My strong advice to Democrats is to call the GOP’s bluff on audits. If Rs want better audits, then they should jump at the chance to pass a standalone bill requiring robust manual election audits across the board in 2022. 16/

If they turn it down, use it against them. Maybe that would wake up at least some of their constituents to the reality that the GOP leaders are not really interested in election security. 17/

.@kevincollier

.@NBCNews

BTW, I do not mean to completely eviscerate the article in post 1. Parts of it are more nuanced and it does credit election-security experts’ findings with improved security. 18/

But parts of the article (including the subtitle & a few quotes from the piece) imply that transparency about election-system vulnerabilities “paved the way for pro-Trump conspiracies.” It is this aspect with which I disagree. 19/

Instead, I believe it is the pre-election failure of national media 2 provide sufficient sustained attention to those voting-system vulnerabilities—& to GOP obstruction of an election-security bill that wld have substantially mitigated them—that paved the way for the Big Lie. 20/