Ex-Trump election chief knocks down Antrim report

A former Trump administration official who oversaw election security and was ousted after saying there were no widespread problems on Wednesday pointed out problems with a report claiming irregularities in Antrim County and cited as proof of corruption by President Donald Trump and others.

Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Chris Krebs, the former chief of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, called the report by Allied Security Operations Group throwing doubts on the election systems used in Antrim County “factually inaccurate.”

“It implies those systems are undependable,” said Krebs, who explained that he went over the report the group issued as part of a lawsuit questioning the vote results in the county that has been used by Trump and his allies to widely suggest corruption. He said he could find nothing in it to support those claims.

The Free Press, which has been following the Antrim County case, has looked closely at the Allied Security Operations Group report, which claims the county’s equipment supplied by Dominion Voting Systems was “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.” In those reports, the Free Press has concluded that some of its claims — including one that suggested machines had a 68% error rate as if that percentage of the county votes had been misread, left untallied or changed — were false or misleading.

Krebs said when he went over the report he was thrown by that claim of a 68% error rate and he saw it “repeated in social media by the (Trump) campaign, by the president.” But as he looked more closely, he concluded that the number cited by the group is the number of alerts reported by the voting machines or tabulators, not necessarily errors or changes in the actual ballots as they were counted.

“That’s being used to spin that the machine itself is not reliable,” Krebs said.

The tabulators used in Antrim County were certified by the Election Assistance Commission, which requires that voting systems meet certain error thresholds for the computer code that runs the systems.

The former acting director of the EAC’s Voting System Testing and Certification Program, Ryan Macias, said the report showed “a grave misunderstanding” of the voting system used in Antrim County as well as “a lack of knowledge of election technology and process.” The report, as a result, “has come to a preposterous conclusion,” Macias said.

Krebs also said that a photo he inspected from the report, which purported to show vote tampering and an effort to “zero out election results,” appeared to him as nothing more than a “placeholder” in a line of code in Dominion’s programming system. He noted that these are Windows-based machines and he worked at Microsoft.

“It’s a placeholder for a parameter,” Krebs said. “It may be that it’s just not good coding. But it certainly doesn’t mean that someone tried to get in there and hit 0.

“They misinterpreted the language … and that’s just one example,” Krebs said.

Krebs said efforts to try to undermine the integrity of the election could have a longterm effect and need to stop, given that no evidence of widespread problems has been found despite allegations by Trump and his supporters.