Public officials provided false assurances about the legitimacy of Trump’s poll-defying win in 2016.

By Jennifer Cohn @jennycohn1 on Twitter
7/26/21

People sometimes ask me why I became an advocate of election security and transparency. One of the main reasons is that, in the wake of reports of Russian interference in 2016, I learned that public officials and others in leadership positions had provided false assurances about the security of our election system. Regardless of intent, these false assurances served to legitimize Donald Trump’s questionable victory in the 2016 election. I could not bear the possibility of a repeat performance at any level of government. I feel the same way today.

I’m painfully aware that now former President Trump has directed a fire hose of falsehoods at the 2020 election, which unseated him. I did a presentation debunking many of those lies for No Lies Radio. But Trump’s election lies do not justify ignoring legitimate concerns about election security. Nor do they provide a free pass to others who have spread misinformation, including false assurances about election security and Trump’s suspicious ascent to power in 2016. The truth matters now more than ever. Without it, the Democrats may yet concede their way into a permanent Republican majority without bothering to confirm that the GOP didn’t cheat.

1. The “no internet connectivity” myth.

The following is an account of what Jim Comey, James Clapper, Jeh Johnson, David Becker, Thomas Hicks and others told the American public about the possibility of remote attack on U.S. voting systems and how sharply it diverged from the truth. I do not know if they intended to lie or if they were conned themselves. They have never explained how they got it so wrong.

An accounting matters because our systems remain vulnerable to remote attack, and officials are unlikely to take appropriate measures to mitigate this and other risks if they and their surrogates are allowed to bury the problem or to deny that it exists. Voters must be told that they were misled so that they will understand the importance of election transparency, rather than continuing to blindly trust that public officials have taken adequate precautions to secure voting…