A legal group has claimed that it had uncovered documents that prove that federal officials knew there were legitimate concerns about the risks inherent in voting by mail in the 2020 presidential elections.
America First Legal, which previously sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for its alleged censoring of criticism pertaining to mass mail-in voting, announced in a post on X on January 22 that it had obtained documents proving that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was aware that “vote-by-mail” posed “major challenges.” According to documents obtained by America First Legal, CISA, an arm of DHS, acknowledged issues ranging from improperly completed ballots to logistical problems in tallying the votes.
Publicly, however, CISA not only supported last-minute mail-in voting policy changes across the country but also touted the security of mail-in ballots while systematically suppressing critics, according to America First Legal.
CISA contracted with the consulting firm Deloitte to track and report on “‘Daily Social Media Trends’ relating to the U.S. Election — including narratives relating to ‘Vote-By-Mail’ — and to flag specific social media posts for CISA’s awareness and attention,” per America First Legal. The purpose of the Deloitte reports, America First Legal alleges, was so that CISA could gauge whether its “social media monitoring and censorship apparatus was working.”
America First Legal cited the 2023 Missouri v. Biden case, which The Dallas Express reported on at the time, in which a court found substantial evidence that CISA had pressured social media platforms to censor posts in violation of the First Amendment. In granting an injunction against the Biden administration, the court found that CISA formed the Election Integrity Partnership program to censor speech that should have been protected.
America First Legal’s claims about the known risks of mail-in voting echo those expressed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton when he was interviewed in September by Tucker Carlson. Paxton told Carlson that Georgia stopped the counting of ballots in the middle of the night in order to “figure out … how many real votes there were so they could figure out how many mail-in ballots to apply to the election.”
Still, CISA’s defenders claim that the agency is critical for ensuring national security.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), a ranking member of the House Oversight Committee’s cyber panel, told Politico in the wake of the Missouri v. Biden injunction that “any cuts to the agency, whether targeted or across-the-board, will do measurable damage to our ability to protect our critical infrastructure and maintain system security across the federal government.”