“Election Security Experts Contradict Trump’s Voting Claims; In a public letter, 59 top specialists called the president’s fraud assertions ‘unsubstantiated’ and ‘technically incoherent.'”

NYT:

Fifty-nine of the country’s top computer scientists and election security experts rebuked President Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud and hacking on Monday, writing that such assertions are “unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.”

The rebuttal, in a letter to be published on various websites, did not mention Mr. Trump by name but amounted to another forceful corrective to the torrents of disinformation that he has posted on Twitter.

“Anyone asserting that a U.S. election was ‘rigged’ is making an extraordinary claim, one that must be supported by persuasive and verifiable evidence,” the scientists wrote. In the absence of evidence, they added, it is “simply speculation.”

“To our collective knowledge, no credible evidence has been put forth that supports a conclusion that the 2020 election outcome in any state has been altered through technical compromise,” they wrote…

“It has been extremely frustrating that the existence of serious vulnerabilities is now being confused with the actual exploitation to tamper with elections, which is something that we’ve never seen any evidence for,” said Matt Blaze, a computer science professor at Georgetown University who signed the letter.

The group has persuaded some states to strengthen security. It helped get Colorado to put in place rigorous audits that examine samples of ballots for evidence of incorrect tallying, for example, but has been unsuccessful in pushing those measures at the federal level.

Other signers of the letter include Ronald Rivest, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a pioneer in cryptography; Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University; Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the senior vice president at the nonprofit Internet Society; J. Alex Halderman, an election security expert; and Harri Hursti, an election security expert who was in Georgia during the election.

This letter is signed by the very top people in this field.

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