(HorizonPost.com) – According to documents obtained by America First Legal, DHS and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) were aware that mail-in voting during the 2020 presidential election had risks but continued to flag social media posts as “disinformation” for voicing such concerns, the Washington Examiner reported.
In 2022, America First Legal filed a lawsuit to compel CISA to release all records that would shed light on the federal government’s involvement in shaping public opinion and censoring content on social media platforms.
The CISA documents obtained indicate that officials knew in September 2020 that mail-in voting posed risks to election security and no evidence supported the belief that in-person voting would “increase the spread of COVID-19.”
Government officials were also aware of the challenges mass mail-in voting would present to election officials.
In an interview with Just the News, America First Legal senior counselor Reed Rubinstein said the documents obtained demonstrated that federal officials were aware that “there was no credible evidence” to support the assertion that COVID would be spread by in-person voting.
Rubinstein said these officials knew that mail-in ballots were not as secure as in-person voting, just as then-President Donald Trump and others had warned before the election.
Despite knowing the risks posed by mass mail-in voting, CISA hired the consulting firm Deloitte to monitor social media posts for the spread of so-called election disinformation.
Some of the posts flagged by Deloitte included a conservative activist who accused Twitter of censoring her posts complaining about Twitter’s practice of adding disclaimers to tweets that stated mail-in voting was secure, according to America First Legal.
Deloitte also flagged tweets from another conservative user who claimed that Twitter was suppressing a report about Joe Biden’s son to help Biden win the election.
In a statement announcing the 2022 lawsuit, Reed Rubinstein alleged that words like “disinformation” and “misinformation” invited “bureaucratic abuse” because they are “dangerously vague.” He accused the federal government of using the terms “as the pretext for domestic propaganda operations.”
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