American election security agencies said on Thursday that they had “no evidence” of a presidential hack, thus contradicting Donald Trump, whom the opposition accuses of poisoning democracy by refusing to acknowledge his defeat.
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“The November 3 election was the safest in US history,” several local and national election authorities, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said in a joint statement, which depends on the Ministry of Homeland Security.
“There is no evidence of a voting system having erased, lost or changed ballots, or having been hacked in any way,” they said.
“While we know that our electoral process is the subject of many baseless claims and disinformation campaigns, we can assure you that we have absolute confidence in the security and integrity of our elections,” they insist.
Outgoing President Donald Trump had relayed unfounded information on Twitter hours earlier that an electoral system called the Dominion had “erased” 2.7 million votes in his favor across the country and re-allocated hundreds of thousands. to his Democratic rival Joe Biden in Pennsylvania and other states.
According to US media, the Republican billionaire is considering sacking the boss of the government agency CISA, Chris Krebs, who has struggled in recent days to dismiss accusations of large-scale electoral fraud.
“Fear of Trump”
In Washington, only a handful of elected Republicans quickly recognized Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. But many others have remained silent or have publicly supported the outgoing president, who believes that the election was “stolen” from him, without concrete evidence to back it up.
“The Republicans in Congress are deliberately sowing doubt on our elections, simply because they are afraid of Donald Trump,” Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said at a press conference Thursday.
“We have just experienced a divisive and hard-won presidential election, but instead of bringing the country together so that we can fight our common enemy, Covid-19, Republicans in Congress are propagating conspiracy theories, denying reality and poison the foundations of our democracy, ”he said.
The Trump administration’s refusal to acknowledge its defeat – a historic break with traditional uses of American politics – constitutes “a serious risk to national security,” warned more than 150 former senior American officials Thursday in a letter unveiled by Politico.
Among the signatories, from both political sides, are notably former Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel, a Republican, or Michael Hayden, former head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA.
They call for Joe Biden to have access to information “necessary to deal with pressing national security issues, such as the daily report” the president receives on threats to the United States and to the world.
The president-elect admitted on Tuesday that he still does not have access to these reports. This would be “useful”, but not necessarily essential before his inauguration on January 20, 2021, he qualified.