Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call
- Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said almost all of the ballots cast in the 2020 election had a paper trail and that there was no evidence that the machines were hacked or manipulated.
- In a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday on CBS News, Krebs reiterated previous statements he made about the election being the “most secure in American history.”
- “The proof is in the ballots. The recounts are consistent with the initial count,” he said. “If there was an algorithm that was flipping votes or changing votes, it didn’t work.”
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The former top US cybersecurity official ousted by President Donald Trump said Sunday that there was no evidence that the machines were hacked or manipulated.
In a “60 Minutes” interview that aired on CBS News on Sunday, Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), reiterated previous statements he made about the election being secure, saying almost all of the ballots cast in the 2020 election had a paper trail.
He also said, “95% of the ballots cast in the 2020 election had a paper record associated with it. Compared to 2016, about 82%.”
Krebs, who previously called the 2020 election the “most secure in American history,” said paper ballots are key to a secure election, as they allow the votes to be recounted to ensure an accurate result.
“That gives you the ability to prove that there was no malicious algorithm or hacked software that adjusted the tally of the vote,” he said.
Krebs, who was appointed by Trump, was fired by the president after his comments about the election being secure.
—60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 30, 2020
Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed without evidence that voting software "flipped" millions of votes from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden. Dominion Voting Systems has been the focus of many of the unsubstantiated claims.
Krebs pointed out Georgia, where the state's hand recount confirmed the results initially tabulated by machines. He said he believes those consistent results debunk sensational claims that the election was hacked.
"That tells you that there was no manipulation of the vote on the machine count side," he said.
When asked by "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley about many of the claims — including that votes were counted abroad or that foreign actors interfered — Krebs called them all "farcical."
"The proof is in the ballots. The recounts are consistent with the initial count," he said. "If there was an algorithm that was flipping votes or changing votes, it didn't work."
In a tweet on Sunday, Trump wrote, "60 Minutes never asked us for a comment about their ridiculous, one sided story on election security, which is an international joke."