Senate holds a hearing on examining irregularities in the 2020 election — 12/16/2020

all right good morning this hearing is called to order i want to first welcome and thank the witnesses for your time and your testimony let me start the hearing by saying this hearing should not be controversial it really shouldn't be this is something i think we all should want to restore the confidence in our election system a week ago when i gave notice to this hearing there were more standing issues and court cases than there are today but even though courts have handed down decisions and the elector coral college has awarded joe biden 306 electoral votes a large percentage of the american public does not believe the november election results are legitimate this is not a sustainable state of affairs in our democratic republic there are many reasons for this high level of skepticism it starts with today's climate of hyper partisanship which was only exacerbated by the persistent efforts to delegitimize the results of the 2016 election the corrupt investigation and media coverage of the russian collusion hoax reduced faith in our institutions and the ongoing suppression and censorship of conservative perspective by bias media and social media adds fuel to the flames senator grassley's in my investigation and report on the conflicts of interest in foreign financial entanglements of the biden family is just one example of how media suppression can and does affect the outcome of an election is both amazing and galling that all of a sudden post-election this has become a news story and a scandal worthy of investigation with less than a month left in my chairmanship of this committee the examination of irregularities in the 2020 election will obviously be my last investigation and last hearing as chairman but oversight into election security should continue into the next congress because we must restore confidence in the integrity of our voting system as i said at the start this effort should be bipartisan in my statement announcing this hearing i say its goal was to quote resolve suspicions with full transparency and public awareness what's wrong with that that is what good oversight can accomplish unfortunately senator schumer and peters ignored my statement and instead chose to politically attack me in this hearing as i commented in last thursday's hearing on early treatment of kovid closed-mindedness is a root cause of many problems we face and just a quick aside about that hearing about seven days ago it was attacked unfortunately boycotted by a democrat members of this committee except for a rather politically charged opening statement by senator peters uh two of those witnesses to those doctors who who have the courage to treat covert patients uh told me i think told one of one of them told the committee they're democrats and they were very disappointed by that boycotting by democrats that closed mindedness that politically charged opening statement but to prove the the worthiness and the value of that hearing dr corey one of those democrats a person shown immense courage in treating successfully covered patients his 10-minute opening statement has received more than 4.4 million views in just the last seven or eight days obviously americans need that information they have the right to know about early treatment and they have the right to try early treatment so my last pitch before i return to this hearing if you or somebody you know gets coveted seek a doctor again you need doctor participation in this but find a doctor who will at least consider and talk to you about early treatment on with this hearing in preparation for this hearing i ask my staff to find out as much as they could about basic election mechanics controls and data flow much of the suspicion comes from a lack of understanding how everything works and how much variety there is in the way each precinct county and state conducts their elections even though decentralization makes it more difficult to understand the full process it also dramatically enhances the security of our national elections in addition to the witnesses testifying today we spoke to state and local officials as well as suppliers of election machinery equipment and data i believe the alleged irregularities can be organized into three basic categories number one lax lacks enforcement or violations of elected election laws and controls two allegations of fraudulent votes and ballot stuffing and three corruption of voting machines and software that might be programmed to add or switch votes in the time we had it was impossible to fully identify and examine every allegation but many of these irregularities raise legitimate concerns and they do need to be taken seriously so here's a brief summary of what we did learn and a lot of this should provide american public comfort in the integrity of our election system first multiple controls do exist to help ensure election integrity voter registration rules and election logs for both in-person absentee vote balloting are used to verify eligible voters and help prevent fraudulent voting but is not a perfect system as we will hear in testimony today we have increased the percentage of votes using paper ballots from 82 percent in 2016 to 95 percent in 2020 and a lot of that had to do with the efforts of cisa and kris krebs recognizing that was a vulnerability in our system not having that audit trail so this is a significant improvement in providing a backup audit trail but only if full or statistically valid recounts occur optical scanners ballot marking machines and tabulators should not be connected to the internet during voting but we found some do have the capability being connected and there are allegations that some were once voting ends these those machines print out a paper report and also transfer transmit voting data in digital form in two separate data streams from precinct to the county level and then the state level the first data stream this is the official stream is sent to the official state election management systems and the second unofficial stream is to the unofficial media reporting system through companies like edison research and the associated press there is no uniform method of transmission it is not fully automated and thousands of human beings are involved in the process so human error does occur but that is what paper backups and post-election canvassing is designed to catch today we will hear testimony on how election law laws in some cases were not enforced and how fraudulent voting did occur as it always does the question that fouls is whether the level of fraud would alter the outcome of the election this year in dozens of court cases through the service process in each state and by the electoral college vote the conclusion has collectively been reached that it would not however lack enforcement denying effective bipartisan observation of the complete election process and feel failure to be fully transparent or conduct reasonable audits has led to heightened suspicion the most difficult allegations to assess involve vulnerabilities in voting machines and the software used in order to effectively determine the extent to which voting machines were subject to nefarious intrusion or other vulnerabilities computer science experts must be given the opportunity to examine examine these allegations this is a complex issue that has been under congressional scrutiny for years since 2018 i'm aware of three oversight letters requesting information from the main suppliers of voting machines this oversight is focused on election systems and software llc dominion voting systems inc and heart inner civic inc today we have a witness from the election assistance commission which certifies voting machines to describe what has been done and what more can be done to address any vulnerabilities on march 7 2018 it was reported that senators klobuchar and shaheen asked quote major vendors of u.s voting equipment whether they had allowed russian entities to scrutinize their software saying the practice could allow moscow to hack into american election infrastructure then last year on march 26 2019 senators klobuchar warner reed and ranking member peters wrote quote the integrity of our elections the integrity of our elections remain under serious threat our nation's intelligence agencies continue to raise the alarm that foreign adversaries are actively trying to undermine our system of democracy and will target the 2020 elections as they did in 2026 in 2016 and 2018 elections a combination of older legacy machines and newer systems vulnerabilities in each pres present a problem for the security of our democracy and they must be addressed and then on december 6 2019 sanders warren klobuchar wyden and congressman pocan wrote quote we are particularly concerned that secretive and troubled plague companies owned by private equity firms and responsible for manufacturing and maintaining voting machines and other election administration equipment quote have long skimped on security in favor of convenience leading voting systems across the country prone to security problems moreover again this is a quote from that letter moreover when state and local officials work on replacing antiquated machines many continue to run an old software that will soon be outdated and more vulnerable to hackers the letter continues in 2018 alone voters in south carolina were reporting machines that switched their votes after they had inputted them scanners were rejecting paper ballots in missouri and busted machines were causing long lines in indiana in addition these senators write researchers recently uncovered previously undisclosed vulnerabilities in nearly three dozen back end election systems in ten states and just this year after the democratic candidate's electronic tally showed he received an improbable 146 votes out of 55 000 cast in a pennsylvania state judicial election 2019 the county's republican chairwoman said nothing went right on election day everything went wrong that's a problem these problems threatened the integrity of our election now again those were three letters from democrat members of congress now maybe i missed it but i don't recall the media or anyone else accusing these eight congressional democrats of indulging in quote quackery and conspiracy theories on court quote or their letters of being a quote ridiculous charade unquote as senator schumer did when he used those exact same words attacking me in this hearing on the senate floor the fact that our last two presidential elections have not been accepted as legitimate by large percentages of the american public is a serious problem that threatens our republic i do not say that lightly this hearing is part of what should be ongoing congressional oversight that is meant to transparently address that serious problem so before i turn it over to senator peters i do want to remark that this is my last hearing uh as chairman i want to express the fact that i think it's been an honor and privilege to serve i think our track record even though a couple last last hearing some of these invest investigations have grown to be a little rancorous i regret that but i think we really have an excellent track record of achievement over 100 bills passed and signed the law in this committee 200 others passed by the committee maybe not signing love that can act as a foundation for future legislation and so again i just want to thank everybody for working together staff it's really been an honor and privilege and and looking ahead i want to acknowledge senator carper had a very kind phone call to me just an hour ago uh we'll probably be working in some capacity there's chairman ranking member in in the committee on the permanent subcommittee investigations and i look forward to trying to find those areas of agreement of things we can look into together to give the american people the information they need to know as it relates to government other issues so senator carpenter thanks for calling it without turn it over to senator senator peters thank you mr chairman and uh thanks to our witnesses uh for being uh here today you know mr chairman um if we have learned anything over the past few years it's that we cannot take our democracy for granted our institutions and our democratic norms have been under assault and when elected leaders fail to stand up to protect them we just see how quickly things can erode for generations americans have been a shining example for budding democracies around the world we have shown the world that strong governments and free societies can thrive when political power is entrusted to the people we have demonstrated that the will of people is above any one individual and when voters choose their new leaders power can be transferred peacefully the president and many of his supporters are unfortunately continuing their efforts to undermine the will of the people disenfranchise voters and sow the seeds of mistrust and discontent to further their partisan desire for power whether intended or not this hearing gives a platform to conspiracy theories and lies and it's a destructive exercise that has no place in the united states senate joe biden won the election more than five weeks ago with 306 electoral votes and received the most popular votes for a presidential candidate in american history all 50 states and the district of columbia have certified those results the electoral college met monday and all affirmed that joe biden will be the president on january 20th 2021. it's a result that the majority of the american people recognize along with the leaders of more than 150 countries around the world yet even after all of that significant numbers of republican elected officials have been slow to publicly acknowledge that joe biden will be the next president of the united states i appreciate i appreciate that yesterday several of my republican colleagues made their first public comments acknowledging this fact and i appreciate that even the chairman's rhetoric around this election has evolved over the last 24 hours but let me be clear deciding to move forward with this hearing is still dangerous elected leaders who were chosen by the voters to help uphold our institutions and democratic values spent weeks either turning a blind eye or parroting a provocative rhetoric and false claims about this election by not speaking out earlier even though they knew it was wrong that there was no evidence to support these claims and that this inflammatory rhetoric is harmful to our democracy many elected officials gave the president and his supporters license to spread damaging lies about the election we have known for weeks that there was no widespread voter fraud a fact that president trump's own department of justice has confirmed there was no election interference and the election wasn't rigged in fact independent election security officials and the department of homeland security have called this election quote the most secure in american history end of quote we're going to hear directly from the former director of cisa who will testify today about that fact in the face of intimidation from the president and his supporters including threats of violence and even death election officials in states across the country certified their results as accurate more than 50 50 post-election lawsuits filed by the trump campaign have been dismissed or withdrawn including by the united states supreme court because there is simply no evidence to support these claims in a court of law and despite the title of today's hearing there were no widespread election irregularities that affected the final outcome these claims are false and giving them more oxygen is a grave threat to the future of our democracy now i understand the chairman's desire to ensure our elections run smoothly and i agree that we need to restore faith and trust in our election process but i'm concerned that today's hearing will do more harm than good by confusing a few anecdotes about human error with the insidious claims the president has aired mistakes do happen in elections but there's a difference between a clerk making an error that gets caught and corrected during routine audits and calling the entire election fraudulent or stolen when there is no evidence just because you do not like the outcome amplifying these obviously false narratives about fraud or irregularities corrodes public trust it threatens national security and it weakens our democracy and our standing around the world every time the president or his followers make these false claims they destabilize our relationships with our allies and allow authoritarian adversaries to undercut american democratic leadership around the globe democracy and a free society are not guaranteed we have seen democracies around the world crumble because of similar words and actions when executives abuse their power when political leaders work to stifle the free press and when they delegitimize the principle of one person one vote it puts our country on a dangerous path towards authoritarianism i have faith that our democracy is strong and that it can withstand these attacks but we need all of our leaders to speak up and condemn these harmful this harmful rhetoric preserving our democracy takes hard work and i'm deeply troubled that we're at the edge of a crisis point now is the time for american patriots who love this country to say enough is enough now is the time for patriots to put our nation's founding ideals first during a time when american democracy needs the strongest defense that we can give mr chairman uh to date the trump campaign has filed about 50 or 60 excuse me 60 legal challenges to the election in eight states across this country i ask that this document highlighting those cases and their failed attempts be entered into the record without objection about objection i'd also like to include in the record a non-exhaustive list of incidents of violence aimed at election officials as well as a statement from our nation's top law enforcement and associations condemning the threats of violence harassment and intimidation leveled at election officials across the country since election day i move without objection thought objection i also asked that op-eds from our nation's foremost voices on election integrity democratic institutions and national security including madeleine albright michael chertoff ben ginsburg and steven brill be entered into the record without objection without objection because i'm not afraid of information that's great and lastly i would like to uh enter into the record a statement from freedom house president michael abramovitz freedom house is a non-profit nonpartisan organization dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy across the world without objection mr chairman objection thank you mr chairman again i i don't see anything dangerous about evaluating information about doing legitimate congressional oversight nothing dangerous about that whatsoever as i said in my last hearing closed-mindedness is a real problem for a lot of of the issues we face today uh i won't need to should have entered in the record uh the reuters article from march 7 2018 describing in the letter from senators klobuchar and shaheen also into the record the march 27 2019 press release and letter from senators klobuchar warner reed and peters which let me just read a segment from that letter again the integrity this is senator peters joining in writing this letter the integrity of our elections remain under serious threat our nation's intelligence agencies continue to raise the alarm that foreign adversaries are actively trying to undermine our system and democracy and will target the 2020 elections as they did in 2016 and the 2018 elections a combination of older legacy machines and newer systems vulnerabilities and each present a problem with the security of our democracy and they must be addressed until i guess right now let's let's move on let's not worry about this because if we look at this it's dangerous to our democracy okay also the december 6 9 2019 letters letters written by senators warren klobuchar wyden and congressman pocan to those same equipment manufacturers i would also like to enter the responses from dominion and hart to the march 27 letter but the ranking members staff had objection do you object to that the responses okay so we'll end those in the record and finally there's a really interesting article recently written by matt taibi uh who again i i don't know his political affiliation seems to be a pretty straight up reporter the things i read of him but if i were to guess and no offense mr tabi i think he might be a little bit left to center but the the the title is the youtube band is un-american wrong and will backfire silicon valley couldn't have designed a better way to further radicalize trump voters and the reason i want to enter this in the this article in the in the record i really hope people read it because it really speaks to an awful lot that i covered in my opening statement of why we're in this unsustainable state of affairs in this country where after 2016 four years of resistance failing to recognize you're refusing to recognize the legitimacy of that election and here we are again this is not sustainable but anyway again i want to welcome the witnesses it is the tradition of this committee to swear in witnesses so those via webex if you raise your right hand you here in person please rise raise your right hand do you solemnly swear that the testimony you would give before this committee would be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you god please be seated so our first witness is coming via webex judge kenneth starr judge starr served as a judge on the d.c circuit court of appeals from 1983 to 1989. mr stars argued 36 cases before the supreme court including 25 cases during his service as solicitor general of the united states from 1989 to 1993. from 1994 to 1999 he was appointed to serve as independent council for five investigations mr starr has had distinguished career in academia and continues to write articles and serve as a guest commentator on a variety of media programs judge starr well thank you mr chairman and ranking member peters and members of the committee it's an honor to be with you even remotely over a century ago the supreme court of the united states wrote this the right to vote is a fundamental political right preservative of all rights and over our 231 years as a constitutional democracy the story of our american experiment is in no small part a story of expansion and inclusion and that policy has been undergirded by a desire to achieve human dignity and equality of all persons in the wake of the civil war very briefly our constitutional history in terms of amendments governing voting the 15th amendment served as the capstone of the three post-civil war amendments which taken together abolished slavery guaranteed due process and equal protection to all persons and then expanding the right to participate to all persons with the franchise expanding came 100 years ago the inclusion of women in 1920 as a federal constitutional right the the 19th amendment the elimination of financial impediments to vote the 24th amendment in 1964. and finally in the wake of the vietnam war the expansion of the vote in federal elections to include 18 year olds the 26th amendment in 1971 and of course along the way a congress acted to foster the values of the 15th amendment through the passage of the voting rights act of 1964 with its extensions over time now underlying this story of ever-expanding voting rights was an assumption that is one of integrity in the process recall the scene in the wonderful movie selma as the would-be voter portrayed by oprah winfrey was unconsciously stymied in her effort simply to register to vote dishonesty couldn't cause disenchant disenfranchisement and enormous moral outrage the flip side of racially motivated disenfranchisement is the bedrock concept of treat everyone fairly and be honest in the process and this beer's repeating honesty in the electoral process is fundamental to the social bonds that unite us as a free people echoing the chairman's opening statement and not surprisingly the supreme court the united states has severely warned about the dangers and the corrosive effects of dishonesty here's what a unanimous supreme court wrote in and 2006 confidence in the integrity of our electoral processes is essential to the functioning of our participatory democracy and the court went on to say voter fraud drives honest citizens out of the democratic process and breeds distrust of our form of government so so how do we achieve honesty and integrity in elections it's a challenge for the reason the chairman suggested decentralization we have national elections but we do not have a nationalized election with one set of uh rules indeed both article one and article two point out the approach of our decentralized government and that is we look to the states but specifically state legislatures both article 1 section 4 of the constitution and article 2 section 1 clause to and so as in much of life the guard rails of integrity are needed and time and again courts have warned in the strongest terms that assuring honesty and integrity is a compellingly important governmental interest justice sandra day o'connor now retired who herself had been elected to state office in arizona specifically warned that judicial intervention may be required in order to protect the integrity of the election process and so as will be destroying in this hearing the presidential election 2020 with its unprecedented feature of the use of mail-in ballots has given rise to a number of questions that deserve to be answered i was instead of pointing to examples such as in pennsylvania where there was a clear violation of the law and then the statement is justice samuel alito since my time has now expired i want to close just by a reminder that in history there was in fact a campaign an illicit campaign to deprive abraham lincoln of the presidency and that was through the use of mail on balance so i think in the spirit of the carter baker commission it's wise for us since of the warning that they had with respect to male imbalance to pause and reflect on how we can in fact better assure that bedrock factor and feature of integrity in the election process i thank the chairman and i thank the committee i look forward to your questions thank you judge starr our next witness is commissioner donald palmer commissioner palmer was confirmed to the election assistance commission in january 2019 mr palmer is the former secretary of the virginia state board of elections and served as virginia's chief election official from 2011 to 2014 he also serves as served as an intelligence officer and a judge advocate general commissioner palmer good morning chairman johnson and members of the committee and ranking the ranking member i'm thankful for the opportunity to testify before you this morning on the 2020 general election in the efforts of the election assistance commission to secure the nations of voting systems election officials the commissioners and the staff of the eac have a duty to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the voting systems used throughout the nation our mission is to support the chief election officials the directors of elections and administrators in all localities across the country as the only federal agency commit completely dedicated to election administration the agency is charged with facilitating secure lawful and accessible elections under the help of america vote act the eac has focused on assisting state and local election officials we are a bipartisan agency that recognizes the authority of states to conduct federal elections and that is a cornerstone of our representative democracy the 2020 general election has underscored the vital importance of comprehensive oversight of voting technology and the companies who manufacture these systems that oversight is an overlapping process of voluntary federal standards state certification or approval and local logic and accuracy testing prior to each election we work to bolster confidence in democracy by adopting voluntary voting system guidelines periodically we test voting systems we accredit test laboratories and serve as a national clearinghouse of information on election administration let me be clear the eoc has confidence in the voting systems we certify and in the state and local election administrators who ran the election first and foremost that's due to the process the voting system manufacturers must undergo to receive federal certification before voting machines and election management systems are used in elections the systems undergo rigorous hardware and software testing by laboratories accredited by the eac and the national institute of standards and technology or nist there are currently two accredited voting system laboratories pro v and b and sli currently the eac's quality monitoring program includes auditing voting system test laboratories and manufacturing facilities conducting field reviews of eac certified voting systems and gathering information on voting system enormous on eac certified voting systems i strongly support additional auditing additional field reviews and resolutions of any anomalies discovered to apply for eac certification of a voting system a company must first apply to register with the agency as a registered manufacturer registration requires manufacturers to provide details on their ownership structure names of officers and members of the board of directors and any individual or organization with a controlling interest in the company additionally a list of all manufacturing or assembly facilities used by the manufacturer in the name and contact information of the person at each facility responsible for quality management must be provided there are currently eight active manufacturers registered with the eac's testing program please note it is not a requirement to be an eac registered manufacturer to develop and sell voting systems to jurisdictions in the united states it's a voluntary program joining the program requires the manufacturers voluntarily agree to the program's requirements as outlined in the program annual requirements include complying with all eac inquirers and investigations into the uses and status of fielded eac certified systems under our quality monitoring program these investigations may arise due to technical failures experience in the field by election administrators misrepresented misrepresentations made in regard to the certification status of a voting system and any deviations in quality in regard to those systems submitted to testing versus what is actually fielded the ac stopped an election day war room to gather information on issues reported by the media and election officials five of the eight manufacturers participated in those calls additionally the program is following up with election officials and voting session system manufacturers to obtain any information on claims of irregular irregularities reported in media during the general election this effort is ongoing jurisdictions across the united states also perform a series of logic and act regards prior to operating those voting machines in polling places we support those efforts through technical assistance and best practices and our grant monies election officials conduct post-election audits to verify the completeness and accuracy of the tabulated votes i'm going to conclude with stating that we recognize the need to do more than ever to strengthen the confidence in the integrity of our elections all of us set forth an ambitious agenda for eac one rooted in protecting the foundation of our democracy despite the challenges in recent years the eac has faithfully fulfilled its obligation and even expanded support it provides to election administrators and to voters we look forward to working with congress in a bipartisan manner as we continue our efforts to help america vote i'm happy to answer any questions following this testimony thank you thank you commissioner palmer our next witness is here in person mr james troopas mr troopas serves as the lead attorney for the trump campaign in wisconsin from 2015 to 2016 mr trooper served as the circuit court judge in dane county wisconsin he is currently a partner at the troopas law office mr troopas honored to be here senator thank you for the invitation i've submitted written testimony which i'd asked to be in the record and i'm going to provide additional remarks at this point by the way without objection every everybody's submitted testimony is automatically entered into the record so thank you thank you so the absentee voting in wisconsin is treated quite differently i believe in other parts of the country let me read for you what the legislature found it's in our statutes it says that the legislature finds that the privilege of voting by absentee ballot must be carefully regulated to prevent the potential for fraud or abuse to prevent overzealous solicitation of absent electors who may prefer not to participate in an election to prevent undue influence on an absent elector to vote for or against a candidate as a consequence our laws are strictly construed and even more so let me read again from the law they results which do not comply with those regulations quote may not be included in the certified result of any election so it's very straightforward that the state of wisconsin has taken a very different view of in-person voting with all the protections and absentee voting that has been repeatedly including in the carter commission report thought to be a source of significant potential for fraud in wisconsin we just completed it we just completed a recount we had more than 2 500 volunteers or probably more than a thousand volunteers for the biden campaign as well uniquely we are able to examine actual envelopes that contain the ballots that are submitted by absentee voters this allowed us to identify by person by address by ward it's not conspiracy the real names are in the record and here's what we found we found that there were incomplete and altered certificates these are the certificates on the front of the envelopes that have to be exactly done correctly under our law if not those results may not be counted how many of those more than 3 000 of those identified by person were nonetheless counted even though they are clearly invalid under the law a second category initials of clerks are placed on all of those envelopes why because the clerk identifies it having been properly received and identification is provided that's the check in advance of the election what did we find more than 2 000 of those ballots in dane and milwaukee county had no initials at all but nonetheless they got counted we also have special laws in wisconsin with regard to voting in advance we do not allow advanced voting we allow in-person ended and other voting as absentees so anything before election day is under our absentee rules what did the city of madison do they created a system where people could arrive at a park hand in their ballots in envelopes five weeks before the election they also created boxes no controls at all just boxes on corners that you could throw the ballot in no attempt at all and our statutes explicitly say there are only two ways to submit an absentee ballot in person or delivery to the clerk's office that's it nothing else is allowed and yet the city of madison we had 28 000 395 i'm sorry 17 271 ballots in this category that we identified there are tens of thousands more because they co-mingled the ballots afterwards so we couldn't identify each one that may have been properly cast then we have an interesting category called indefinitely confined these are people which the statute i read from the statute by age physical illness or infirmity or are disabled indefinitely among those claiming this status so they don't have to provide any identification among those claiming this status is one of the electors for joe biden he's who said i can't get to the polls we have poll workers who claimed it we have people who went to protests people who had weddings people who had vacations all claimed this status i can't get to the polls so they were able to vote without identification there were 28 395 people we explicitly identified finally there are other categories in which as much as 170 000 other ballots were submitted without any application in fact they considered the certification envelope the application though a separate application is required by law three million people properly voted in the state of wisconsin more than two 200 000 identified during this recount did not but those votes got counted and our statute says they should not have been that in our view is a is a taint on our election in wisconsin thank you thank you mr troopas and i believe joe biden won our state by about 20 000 votes correct and you're talking about over 200 000 that were outside of our our law that probably probably if the law would have been followed probably should have been counted correct should not have been accepted shouldn't have been put you know put in the ballot pool and of course the remedy is not you know particularly pleasing which is one of the reasons the decision went its way i'll come back to you our next witness is via webex representative francis ryan representative ryan has served in the pennsylvania pennsylvania house of representatives since 2016. mr ryan is a certified public accountant and prior to his election ran a practice that focused on corporate restructuring and management mr ryan is a retired marine reserve colonel who served in the central command special operations officer in operation enduring freedom representative ryan thank you so much for the chance to be with you today the mailing ballot system for the general election in 2020 in pennsylvania was so fraught with inconsistencies and irregularities that the reliability of the mailing votes in the commonwealth of pennsylvania is almost impossible to rely upon the evidence of these violations of the pennsylvania election laws has enacted the election security safeguards and the process laws include things such as actions by the pennsylvania supreme court which undermined the controls inherent in acts 77 of 2019. the controls which were undermined included on september 17th 2020 the supreme court unilaterally extended the deadline for mail-in balance to be received to three days after the election they mandated that the ballots mailed without a postmark would be presumed to be received and allow the use of drop boxes for collection votes and then on october 23rd 2020 upon a petition from the secretary of the commonwealth ruled that mail and ballots need not authenticate signature for the mail imbalance thereby treating in-person and mail-in voters dissimilarly and eliminating a critical safeguard against a potential election fraud and this is one of my main reasons for believing that it's difficult to believe that the maryland voting process can be relied upon then there were also actions and candidly inactions by the secretary of state which undermined the consistency and controls of the election process on november 2nd the night before the november third election and prior to the prescribed time for pre-canvassing mail and balance the office of the secretary of the commonwealth encouraged certain counties to notify party and candidate representatives of mail-in voters whose ballots contain defects in certain counties watchers were not allowed to meaningfully observe the pre-canvassing and canvassing activities relating to the absentee and mail endowment process those are at the what i would call the strategic level at the operational level there were a significant number of issues that resulted from those issues uh the pennsylvania election system is the sure system and some of the issues that took place actually called into question the consistency for example in the case of an overvote in case of philadelphia county on november 4th 11 30 the department of state posted updated maryland vote counts for philadelphia county showing 508 112 ballots despite the fact that only 432 800 432 873 ballots were in fact issued to voters this data was later corrected but the question becomes who had the authorization to change and correct that information and who had access to the system any type of system control would ask for that additionally on a data file on november 4th 2020 the commonwealth pennsylvania's open data record site reported 3.1 million ballots sent out in a prior discussion that was had the day before the election it was indicated that there were 2.7 million that were sent out and efforts to attempt to reconcile those numbers have not yet been successful and still need to be resolved upon recently a newly available data voter set from data.pada.gov which has been it offline for weeks indicated the latest update had been done on november 16 the download of november 16 2020 shows 75 505 more ballots returned on 11 16 than the comparable download on november 15th so that basically means an additional 75 505 ballots were added to the data set again without any explanation without the ability to have a hearing to determine that it becomes almost impossible to track in the system of internal controls additionally there were mail date irregularities that were identified in the 3.1 million ballots relative to the dates that the ballots were finalized ballots mailed late and ballots mailed inconsistent with enacted legislation that was 154 800 584 votes for ballots vote date of birth irregularities meaning voters over 100 years of age 1573 ballots these apparent discrepancies can only be evaluated by reviewing the transaction logs and to determine the access the authority for the entry the verification of the data entered as well as the authentication anytime you have this type of system of internal controls as a cpa you would want to ensure that the system of internal controls is reasonably designed to deter wrongdoing before and after the election of november 3rd 2020 the efforts by the state government committee and other members of pennsylvania legislature to obtain oversight information and relevant data to confirm and deny claims of improprieties were stymied throughout even an effort to have a hearing with on november 20 2020 with dominion systems was cancelled after dominion systems indicated they were concerned about litigation concerns generally without knowing the answer to these questions and due to the magnitude of the potential discrepancies and closeness to the elections the results of the 2020 presidential election in pennsylvania would just be completely difficult if not impossible to determine with conclusiveness and mr chairman and ranking member thank you so much for your time and i look forward to your questions thank you representative ryan our next witness is mr jesse benall they get that right yeah wow um mr bernal is an attorney for the trump campaign and his lead counsel for the campaign in nevada he is currently a partner at the law firm of harvey harvey in banal mr bernal thank you mr chairman ranking member there we go thank you mr chairman ranking member peters and members of the committee this year thousands upon thousands of nevada voters had their voices canceled out by election fraud and invalid ballots here's how it happened on august 3rd 2020 after a rushed special session nevada legislators made drastic changes to the state's election law by adopting a bill known as ab4 the vulnerabilities of this statute were obvious it provided for universal mail voting without sufficient safeguards to authenticate voters or ensure the fundamental requirement that only one ballot was sent to each legally qualified voter this was aggravated by election officials failure to clean known deficiencies in their voter rolls because of ab4 the number of mail ballots rocketed from about 70 000 in 2016 to over 609 000 this year the election was inevitably riddled with fraud and our hotline never stopped ringing while the media and democrats accused us of making it all up our team began chasing down every lead our evidence came both from data scientists and from brave whistleblowers here's what we found over 42 000 42 000 people voted more than once our experts were able to make this determination by reviewing the list of actual voters and comparing it to other voters with the same name address and date of birth this method was also able to catch people using different variations of their first name such as william and bell and individuals who were registered both under a married name and a maiden name at least 1500 dead people are recorded as voting as shown by comparing the list of male voters with the social security death records more than 19 000 people voted even though they didn't live in nevada this does not include military voters or students these voters were identified by comparing the list of voters with the u.s postal service's national change of address database among other sources about 8 000 people voted from non-existent addresses here we cross-reference voters with the coding accuracy support system which allowed our experts to identify undeliverable addresses over 15 000 votes were cast from commercial or vacant addresses our experts found these voters by analyzing official u.s postal service records that flag non-residential addresses and addresses vacant for more than 90 days incredibly almost 4 000 non-citizens also voted as determined by comparing official dmv records of non-citizens to the list of actual voters in the 2020 election the list goes on all in all our experts identified 130 000 unique instances of voter fraud in nevada but the actual number is almost certainly higher our data scientists made these calculations not by estimations or statistical sampling but by analyzing and comparing the list of actual voters with other lists most of which are publicly available to put it simply they explain their methods so others could check their work our evidence has never been refuted only ignored two clark county technical employees came forward completely independent of each other and explained that they discovered that the number of votes recorded by voting machines and stored on usb drives would change between the time the polls were closed at night and when they were reopened the next morning in other words votes were literally appearing and disappearing in the dead of night when we attempted to verify the integrity of these voting machines we were allowed only a useless visual inspection of the outside of a usb drive we were denied a forensic examination finally our investigation also uncovered a campaign to illegally incentivize votes from mar for marginalized populations by requiring people to prove that they voted to receive raffle tickets for gift cards televisions and more our determined team verified these irregularities without any of the tools of law enforcement such as grand jury subpoenas or fbi agents instead we had less than a month to use critical thinking and elbow grease to compile our evidence we tried to obtain testimony or documents from clark county officials but they obstructed and stonewalled when we filed suit state officials and even courts delayed proceedings for days but then offered us merely hours to brief and argue our cases in wrapping up mr chairman these findings are disturbing alarming unacceptable and free society our free and fair election tradition is a precious treasure that we are charged with protecting government by the consent of the government is hard to win and easy to lose every single time a fraudulent or illegal vote is cast the vote of an honest citizen is canceled out thank you thank you mr bernal our final witness is also here in person mr christopher krebs he's testified before this committee number times mr krebs served as the first director of the department of homeland security cyber security and infrastructure security agency orcissa mr krebs also served in various roles the department responsible for a range of cyber security critical information and national resilience issues prior to coming to dhs he directed u.s cyber security policy for microsoft mr kribs als mr krebs also served in the bush administration advising dhs leadership on domestic and international risk management as well as on public-private partnership initiatives mr krebs welcome back chairman johnson ranking member peters and members of the committee uh as you know i previously served as the director of the cyber security and infrastructure security agency or cisa this was a job of a lifetime for me and a tremendous opportunity to serve the nation when i sat before this committee in 2018 for my confirmation hearing i cannot have imagined how challenging and rewarding this job would be that's why it's such an honor to appear before this committee today to testify about the extraordinary efforts to the election security community to protect the 2020 election a difficult task complicated by the ongoing global pandemic but before i get into the substance of my remarks i'm grateful to this committee and your leadership and your guidance over the last several years first in shepherding what's probably the best of the hundred bills that came through the the committee uh your efforts to the for the cisa the cis authorizing statute uh and uh your support of sis's efforts securing our elections the nation should also thank the many federal state and local government election partners for the crucial work that's been done that would give our citizens the confidence that their vote was counted as cast we should also be taking a victory lap celebrating a job well done consider where we started when i rejoined the department of homeland security in 2017 america had just endured a broad attack on democracy owing to the now well-documented interference campaign by the russian federation whatever their other motivations this campaign sought to undermine confidence in our democratic institutions building on the universal agreement across the national security community that we could not allow that to happen again the sisa team started with what needed to be improved based on the 2016 elections first we needed to improve our relationships with our state and local election officials the individuals that actually run our elections second we need to improve the security and resilience of election systems particularly by phasing out voting machines without paper ballots third federal agencies needed to move faster work better together with each other and our state and local counterparts and be more proactive in order to detect and prevent attacks on our democracy over the course of the last few years we met these challenges we improved sis relationships with key partners through constant engagement in building an election security community of practice this improvement is best perhaps best represented by an election specific information sharing and analysis center made up of all 50 states and thousands of jurisdictions we improved the security of systems scanning for vulnerabilities in election systems providing intelligence briefings and rapidly alerting to emerging threats and deploying security system sensors among other measures and while we also printed while we were principally focused on stopping actual hacks we also had to contend with perception hacks a form of disinformation which we countered with our rumor control website we contributed to the cross-agency effort to protect the 2020 election by surging coordination and collaboration with our partners across the national security space in conclusion because of these and other efforts on november 12 200 2020 government and industry representatives from the election security community issued a joint statement reflecting a consensus perspective that the 2020 election was the most secure in u.s history that statement reflects the confidence these officials gained based on years of work poured into improving the security and resilience of our elections it was based on the strong operational relationships developed across the election security community it was based on the tremendous partnership between cisa under the thoughtful guidance of this committee the fbi the election assistance commission the department of defense and the intelligence community it was based on an intimate understanding of how our elections work here in the u.s it was based on the increase in paper ballots and audits across the nation and probably most importantly it was based on the professionals the heroes that conduct elections in this country while elections are sometimes messy this was a secure election of that i have no doubt chairman johnson ranking member peters and members of this committee thank you again for the opportunity to be here today for your leadership and for your support of cisa i look forward to answering your questions and sharing more about our efforts to protect 2020 thank you mr krebs for your past service and by the way i i think under both the obama administration and the trump administration under m you know while i've been chairman i think dhs now in the pharmacist has done very good job as we talked about the you know from 82 to 95 paper ballots and that's that's improving our uh election integrity so i appreciate all all your efforts and really all the men and women who work within dhs and cisa to to do that uh mr troopas um the decision by the wisconsin supreme court obviously went against you maybe not totally against you i did read the rather scathing dissent from the chief judge can you just describe exactly what in summary fashion what the wisconsin supreme court's decision was based on your lawsuit uh talking about all the areas that you have concerned with certainly certainly so the wisconsin supreme court um was urged by the biden campaign not to address any substantive issues and that's exactly what happened the the the the biden campaign argued to the court that we're not going to talk about any of the substantive things we're not even going to dispute the things i just brought up to you but instead you just shouldn't hear them because a state agency the wisconsin election commission had authorized some of these activities and candidly as the as chief justice rogensack and other dissenters held one the claims are substantive they are substantial and they needed to be addressed second the wisconsin election commission is a bureaucratic organization explicitly that the same court just four months ago said has no meaning it is not law it is some advice given and that the statute search control we were disappointed not so much in the decision but in the fact that the decision itself is premised not on an analysis of the law nor the analysis of the claims it's it's an idea that we should not have a transparent system that you're not going to address these things and that's what they argued so it's disappointing especially in wisconsin and senator johnson as you know we have a long history in wisconsin unlike other states i know unlike other states of high transparency our recounts were conducted with utmost integrity by both milwaukee and dane county with thousands of volunteers able to look at those items and it's really a sad day frankly when the oppo opposition doesn't argue we're wrong it argues we shouldn't be heard that's a strange thing in a state that is so transparent is ours just real quick uh i know former director krebs talked about the the men and women who run these elections i had about a at least a half hour phone conversation with the county clerk of my town of oshkosh voting precinct and gave me all kinds of good information i will tell you if if every county clerk ran their elections like jeanette murders mertens does we'd have a completely secure election so i think that's i think that's true the vast majority of elections in different precincts uh mr bernal uh mr troop is talking about his his the law that he was arguing before the wisconsin supreme court was basically ignored you had a similar statement that it wasn't that the information that you just presented the committee it was never rebutted it was simply ignored can you talk about that uh yes mr chairman it was extremely disappointing that rather than address our issues and the data that we presented head-on they simply tried to use technicalities and limiting our evidence limiting the amount of witnesses we could bring forward saying that we couldn't introduce any live testimony but only 15 depositions only used 15 depositions to show 130 000 instances of voter fraud and then when it went to the supreme court of nevada they gave us two hours to brief the issues before immediately coming down with a decision a record was over 8 000 pages long we were never fully considered by those courts they never took a good hard list at hard evidence so mr krebs you know i've obviously we've had you've testified here on this specific issue uh the potential for foreign interference to have an impact on our elections um we've had private conversations i've always categorized the ability to for foreign foreigners to interfere with the election kind of three three buckets you know one is changing the vote tallies on the machine secondly is hacking into voter registration files which cause all kinds of problems but quite honestly it'd probably be detected on election day when there's chaos and then third what i think is a more serious problem the one more difficult to detect is uh you know basically the use of social media um you quoted the you know which i can't remember is that sysa group that uh declared this the most secure election in our history yes sir that was the joint uh government coordinating council and sector coordinating council statement okay one of the reasons i've always stated based on our discussions your testimony that yeah to my knowledge it's almost impossible to change the vote tally by hacking these computers was based on the fact that well these things are not connected and most of them don't even have the capability of being connected to the internet you know based on all these allegations people are talking to it sounds like some of these machines are showing the tabulators can and are connected the internet so can you just kind of explain to me what again i just the the whole voting machine tabulation internet connections is just a huge confusing mess can you speak to that so i think it's important to step back and and actually look at how votes are cast in the country particularly with paper ballots and that regardless of any internet connections regardless of any foreign hacking as long as you've got the paper received but let me let me stop you there i i acknowledge that yes the paper backup is the is the control if it's used that was going to be my next question so set aside the control of the machine process what is capable you know again i kind of want to know on what basis you know what aspects of this is the most secure because when you listen to mr troopers and mr bernal i mean there were there was there was fraud in this election there i don't have any doubt about that there was fraud we just don't know the extent and we don't know what the remedy would be when identified okay so again just speak to the computer aspect of this the connection the internet the possibility if these machines are connected the internet or if in the certification process because i think mr palmer in our discussions you were talking a little bit about the fact that you know people attempted to change the the controls or the the program in these computers inside that certification process but you know mr krebs just talk to the computer aspect of this because again it's the most difficult and confusing aspect of these allegations yeah there are a number of different systems and machines and computers involved in the entirety of the election process from registration through ballot design through ballot printing to actual voting uh into the tabulation and post-election process throughout you're going to particularly where a vote is cast on election day those machines tend to and should not be connected to the internet certainly as a best practice but some have the capability don't they uh some may have modems that are typically disabled but in certain states i believe in wisconsin some are temporarily activated to transmate uh transmit some counts but again when you have paper and you can conduct a post-election office right again if they're if they're exactly important security control that oh absolutely technology and elections are used to facilitate access and increase accuracy of the process but election officials are very careful that technology is not a single point of failure and that there are security controls before during and after the vote process so yeah finish just asking the computer thing we'll come back my time's already expired but we'll come back to the you know how many audits the statistics sampling that type of thing to use those paper backups to the electronic voting but you know finish this right in there you know as you move out from election day there will be tabulators that uh that may have internet connections to transmit the vote from the precinct to the county level to the state against security controls in place and as long as you have the paper can't hack paper right right you can run that process but those tabulators are connected on the election day because that's how they transmit the data to the counties and also into the unofficial uh in some cases yes sir yeah that's right okay yeah okay i'll follow up senator peters thank you mr uh chairman um questions uh for uh mr krebs but before i get to that i just want to be clear we've heard a number of statements made by other witnesses we've heard those statements before we're continuing to hear those statements and i would just say anybody who's watching this hearing look at the 60 court cases that have been brought before the judiciary in this country and how the argument sorry i should say the statements they're not really arguments or statements that have been made have all been rejected by courts of law including in wisconsin which was a republican judge that rejected the arguments made by this administration so just take a look at all this that we're putting into the record mr krebs sysa has the primary responsibility for working with state and local election officials and the private sector to secure our election infrastructure i think it's important for folks to realize where you sat and what your responsibilities and in essence you were tasked with coordinating with thousands of your partners across the country to ensure the integrity of the 2020 election that was your job and by all accounts you were very successful at that president trump's own department of justice concluded and i'm going to quote the department of justice in the trump administration we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election ending the election infrastructure government coordinating council executive committee and the election infrastructure sector coordinating council comprising of federal state and local government officials and numerous private sector organizations from all around the country jointly call this quote the most secure in american history end of quote you also echoed this statement and when you echo that statement you were fired uh by president trump he didn't want to hear that clearly so my question to you do you stand by that statement have you seen anything in the week since november 4th that would lead you to change your mind and have you identified any credible claim of widespread election irregularities stand by the claim i said it in my opening statement it's in my written testimony i'm yet to see anything from a security perspective a security perspective that would change my opinion on that fraud is a different matter it's a criminal matter uh but again bolstered by the attorney general's statement from last week or recently again nothing to change my opinion of that matter so yet despite this after five more than five weeks now that the president has lost and numerous public officials have continued to uh pressure state and local elected officials to push what our demonstrably uh false narrative that election irregularities should somehow make him a winner in this race you have willingly in fact these folks are willingly fanning the flames of discontent and they're in the process of weakening institutions that are essential for our representative democracy my question to you is what is the danger in your estimation to the democratic process to challenge the legitimacy of an election and deny its results in the absence of any critical uh credible evidence so i think generally from a timing perspective particularly with the seating of the electoral college and 306 electoral votes for president-elect biden you know i think we're past the point where we need to be having conversations about the outcome of this election i think that continued assaults on democracy and the outcome of this election that only serves to undermine confidence in the process is ultimately as as you both have said you know ultimately corrosive to the institutions that support elections and going forward it will be that much harder the the trick about elections is that you know you're not so much trying to convince the winner they won it's the loser that they lost and you need willing participants on both sides and i think we've got to get back to that point otherwise we're going to have a very difficult time going forward maintaining confidence in this american experiment during the 2016 election we saw foreign disinformation campaigns trying to sow doubt about the integrity of of our election we've seen that before and very clearly in 2016 and certainly all the intelligence community in this country back that up uh and so in fact uh sisa's rumor control page was actually created within your agency you mentioned it in your testimony to address foreign disinformation having an impact on the election yet rather than creating fake news it seems as if russia has simply used state-controlled news outlets to basically push president trump's own statements and lies about a rigged election our adversaries don't don't don't have to be technologically advanced our adversaries don't have to be creative to so that doubt all they have to do is air the words of american elected officials on their state-owned news networks as clint watts said he's a former fbi agent and a dis information expert put it which i think is very strong and he said quote nothing that russia or iran or china could say is anywhere near as wild as what the president is saying end of quote so how my question is how are our foreign adversaries taking advantage of false claims of broad election fraud by the president and his supporters or hearings like we're hearing here we're hearing these statements again that are broadly claiming systemic irregularities where we're not exist how damaging is that so i talking about rumor control very briefly i think that that was an innovation in government that we created on the fly to address some emerging threats the point though that i'd like to highlight with rumor control is that it was intended to identify and debunk issues as they were emerging and we saw domestic disinformation campaigns of a cyber security nature that were emerging in the days and weeks following the election i'll specifically talk about the hammer and scorecard claims that there was a cia supercomputer and program that were flipping votes throughout the the the country in in georgia specifically but but again i and you know chairman johnson i i'm going to keep coming back to it that's why it's so important to have a paper trail that's why it's so important to have paper ballots so even if there was foreign interference of a you know malicious algorithm nature you can always go back to the receipts you can check your math and georgia did that three times and the outcomes were consistent over and over and over again which by the way is precisely why i brought that up in my opening statement that should pride provide comfort that we have that paper backup but i just have to talk about russian disinformation because the people peddling it are not on my side of the aisle senior democrat leaders including ranking member peters you know were involved in a process of creating a false intelligence product that was supposedly classified they leaked to the media that accused senator grassley the president pro tem of the senate and myself of accepting and disseminating russian disinformation from andre kur durkash i'd never heard of the person until they brought it up senator peters introduced that direct that false information russian disinformation into our investigation record 50 people associated with the intelligence community during the our after our hunter biden investigation and the revelations of the hunter binding computer said oh this is you know this is russian disinformation now we find out well it's a real investigation by the justice department so it's just galling and i just have to point out that the purveyors of russian disinformation hillary clinton's campaign the dnc the steele dossier the ranking member peters accusing senator grassley and i of disseminating russian disinformation that's where the disinformation is coming that's where the false information the the lies the false allegations i can't sit by here and listen to this and say that this is this is not disinformation this hearing today this is getting information we have to take a look at to restore confidence in our election integrity we're not going to be able to just move on without bringing up these irregularities examining them and providing an explanation and see where there really are problems so we can correct it moving forward senator paul mr mr chairman i got to respond to that i mean you're saying i'm putting out right nation well one i did had nothing to do with this report you lied repeatedly you lied repeatedly in the press when i was spreading just russian disinformation and that was an outright lie and i told you to stop lying and you continue to do it mr chairman this is not about airing your grievances i know what i don't know what rabbit hole you're running down you talked about russian rabbit holes senator paul this is simply not what we're dealing with well mr chairman you can't make your good start obligations and then dropping it there that is why this senator paul needs to return back to the start of your party this is this is this is terrible what you're doing to this committee and all the great work that you talked about it is what you have done to this community falsely using the chairman of spreading disinformation nothing could have been further from the truth and you're spouting it again which is why i had to respond senator paul mr judge star judge starm it's been alleged that 60 courts have refused to hear these cases therefore there was no fraud in the election um i guess another way of looking at this is that the court cases have been refused for procedural and technical reasons when you see the 60 court cases rejected do you think that's a conclusion by our court system that there is no fraud or do you think that the court cases were primarily rejected for procedural reasons right senator paul it is my understanding that the vast majority of these cases were rejected for rightly stated procedural reasons as opposed to a merits based or substantive based evaluations and of course we saw that very recently and i think most dramatically by the supreme court's unanimous rejection of the bill of complaint filed by the texas attorney general my home state here and the entirety of the decision was based upon the legal concept of standing you just don't texas have standing to object to what happened in wisconsin or pennsylvania or whatever and that is a reasonable ruling there are those who would quarrel with it in that we are a united states of america and if something bad happens in one state that ends up having an effect on another state we have such respect for our states as sovereign entities within uh our union that you know the argument uh is i think quite reasonable and i think others think it's quite reasonable that at least the matter should have been heard under the original jurisdiction i think that's a key key example yeah and i think it's important though that we look at this and understand what courts are saying and not saying the courts have not said there wasn't fraud the courts just simply didn't rule on or hear from the fraud i do think there's an important issue here though the fraud is one aspect of this and i think courts have historically been reticent to get involved in elections and to look at fraud but moving forward we've got to change the rules or re-evaluate our state rules in order that this doesn't happen again we can't just sit by and say oh you know we're going to let it happen again there is another important aspect to this though that is a legal aspect that i think does need to be heard by the courts and i don't know if it can be heard beyond the election but i think should and this is the question of whether or not people who are non-legislators can change the election law and this happened in many many states probably two dozen states decided to accept ballots after the election two dozen states decided they could mail out applications or mail out ballots all without the will of the legislature do you think there's any hope for any of this being heard uh judge starr outside of the concept of changing the election is there any possibility any court's going to ever hear this and say that it was wrong that secretaries of state changed the law in the middle of this pandemic without the approval of the legislature or do you think there's no hope because it's mixed up in electoral politics judge starr i think there is a possibility because this issue may return in light of the use this unprecedented use of mail-in ballots and the concern that is a bipartisan concern again the carter baker commission that we need to look at these issues and so i think there is a doctrine senator paul to essentially say this issue may recur again so it should not be washed out as being moot because there's a very important principle here as i made in my opening statement and my written statement the constitution is very clear that it is the prerogative of state legislatures to determine what these rules and laws are and that was i must say flagrantly violated in pennsylvania and perhaps elsewhere as well yeah see i think the legal question there is a very easy one to decide i think even as a physician i can figure out that the secretary of state cannot create law i do think though that many of us who wanted this to be heard by the supreme court and are disappointed actually also might be disappointed by the precedent of bush versus gore in the sense that i think bush versus gore's precedent is shutting down elections that have been certified they weren't going to continue to count the hanging chads the secretary of state had certified it so i actually think that the bush versus gore precedent actually argues against the supreme court overturning certified elections do you have an opinion on that i don't have an opinion on that specifically i think that bush v gore stands for this basic proposition you cannot have changes in election laws after the fact you must in fact be faithful to what the state legislature has done that's also what justice alito said in his opinion i think essentially condemning but certainly identifying as a huge issue what had happened in pennsylvania so i think all in all bush v gore is just a reiteration of our constitutional structure thank you mr chairman as we go on with this i think it's important that we not stop here a lot of the laws that have to be confirmed and i think reaffirmed are state laws so it's not in our purview but the state laws are set and then we have federal elections so what we've heard about what happened in wisconsin what happened in nevada i think is absolutely true we have to prevent it from happening again i think state legislators legislatures will need to reaffirm that election law can only be chained by a state legislature so i think there's a lot of work to be done while we will not dictate it to the states i think we should have hearings going into the next year hearing from state legislatures and what they're going to do to make sure election law is upheld not changed by people who are not legislators and we do have an interest in that i don't want it to be federalized many on the other side of the aisle we're just soon federalize it and mail everybody a ballot and we'll have this universal corruption throughout the land but what i think we need to do is keep it at the state level but we can't just say it didn't happen we can't just say oh 4 000 people voted in nevada that were non-citizens and we're just going to ignore it we're going to sweep it under the rug so the courts have decided the facts the courts have not decided the facts the courts never looked at the facts the courts don't like elections and so they stayed out of it by finding an excuse standing or otherwise to stay out of it but the fraud happened the election in many ways was stolen and the only way it'll be fixed is by in the future reinforcing the laws and the only last comment i would say on what mr krebs he can speak for himself but i think his job was keeping the foreigners out of the election it was the most secure election based on security of the internet and technology but he never has voiced an opinion he's welcome to today on whether or not dead people voted i don't think he examined that did he examine non-citizens voting so to say it was the safest election sure i agree with your statement if you're referring to foreign intervention but if you're saying it's the safest election based on no dead people voted no signed citizens voted no people broke the absentee rules i think that's false and i think that's what's upset a lot of people on our side is that they're taking your statement to mean oh well there was no problem in the elections i don't think you examined any of the problems that we've heard here so really you're just referring to something differently is what i the way i look at it thank you mr chairman sarah carper thank uh thanks mr chairman to uh to our witnesses those that are here uh those that are afar uh we welcome you senator say to chris krebs on behalf of uh many many of us on both sides of the hill thank you for your leadership for a job well done thank you for your courage to speak truth to power mr chairman um and colleagues president lincoln once said these words he said if given the truth the people can be dependent upon to meet any national crisis the great uh point is to bring them the real facts those are his words that's what we in the navy call uh the straight skinny the straight skinny and uh with all due respect the american people have had the facts with respect to uh the outcome of this election for some time now the truth the straight skinny if you will is staring us in the face it may not be what president trump and his supporters wanted but joe biden and kamala harris receive more votes than any ticket in american history that's a success for for our democracy it's something we're ought to be celebrating a success made possible in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic thanks to ordinary citizens who volunteered as poll poll workers across the country many of them risk their own health to oversee a fair count while hundreds of thousands of postal workers work tirelessly to deliver absentee ballots u.s cyber security infrastructure agency labelly led by kris krebs has called this election the most secure in american history he's called it that again here today and throughout this country courts have flat out rejected claims of elected irregularities conservative conservatives trump appointed judges it's state after stave have dismissed the trump campaign's claims calling them baseless and worse and let me just cite a couple of examples in response to the legal challenge from trial of the trump campaign in pennsylvania a federal judge appointed by president trump and a longtime member of the conservative federalist society wrote that quote charges of unfairness are serious but calling an election unfair does not make it so charges require specific allegations and then proof you went on to say we have neither here neither here one of the most strongly worded opinions came from a wisconsin state justice who served as president with chapter of the federal society and his chief legal counsel the former republican governor scott walker here's what he said something far more fundamental than the winner of wisconsin's electoral votes is implicated in this case he wrote and you know he wrote that in in declining to hear a case asking the court to overturn the election results this and they went on to say this at stake is faith in our system of free and fair elections a feature central to the enduring strength of our constitutional republic close quote and i to to that i think we should all just say amen we learned uh this week that uh the arguments from the trump legal team thus far been defeated 59 times in out of 61 in state and federal courts 59 times including 9-0 by the supreme court the u.s supreme court just last week i'm wearing my mask here for my alma mater an undergraduate alma mater ohio state where i was in navy watson midshipman but if the football coach at ohio state where to go uh 2 and 59 over a period of four years he would be fired he would be fired and in fact that's what the voters of this country have done with our president like it or not those 61 cases at least 59 of them were not close calls in suit after suit across red and blue states and opinions written by liberal and ultra-conservative judges the trump campaign's largely contrived allegations have been rejected four years after donald trump lost the popular vote by three million votes joe biden and kamala harris wanted by a whopping seven million votes and they received 306 votes in the electoral college just earlier this week a margin described four years ago by candidate trump as a landslide but what if the the outcome uh is not as definitive four years from now or eight years from now what if and with different judges on the bench different candidates and a lot less integrity and courage from state and local officials a defeated party might somehow be able to to steal an election it's been alleged here falsely think about that it somehow might be able to steal an election friends that ought to scale that scared the hell out of all of us meanwhile many of the president's supporters across the country continue to spread misinformation and four false allegations about the presidential election the truth of the matter is in a lot of states many of the voters who voted for joe biden for president turned around on their ballots and they voted on down ballot races to our chagrin as delaware as the democrats they voted republicans they voted for republican and congressional races in state legislative races and more you know what we call that in delaware we call it ticket splitting it's as old as our democracy it's not a conspiracy it's plain and simple ticket splitting we've done it before and we're going to do it again let me go on to say that what we say in in this committee and in this body matters and if we continue to push what the courts have over time overwhelmingly called baseless claims of fraud we not only risk permanent damage to our democracy we also become complicit in threats and attacks against election officials and ordinary citizens in georgia nonpartisan election technicians have faced death threats simply for doing their jobs the georgia secretary of state and his family have received death threats mr krabs our witness here today a trump appointee has been bombarded with threats ever since an attorney for president trump's campaign said on national tv what did he say he said krebs should be taken out at dawn in shock and just this week quote credible threats of violence closed the michigan state capitol and electors in pennsylvania needed law enforcement escorts when they went to cast their votes this is not the america that our founding fathers dreamed of this is shameful enough already we have work to do to get america back on track starting right here right here in this congress in this house all of us democrats and republicans here in this body need to do our jobs and that's just the beginning there are over 250 million americans who need to be vaccinated there are millions of businesses that need a helping hand tens of millions of students who need to be back in school getting an education hundreds of thousands of hospital and nursing workers who just need a break but it's going to be hard to move forward as a country with dispatch or as a congress until we accept the clear results of this election and turn the page in 1787 colleagues delegates from 13 colonies convened in philadelphia to debate the future of our country you know they disagreed on a lot of things but they all agreed on this they didn't want a king in responding to arguments for the trump legal team in wisconsin a member of the state supreme court there echoed these sentiments recently when she said to them quote you want us to overturn this election so that your king can stay in power that's un-american close quote and you know what she was right it is un-american so mr chairman and colleagues when when mr chairman is not sitting here he's about voting but when chairman johnson when he became the leader of this committee in 2015 he pledged to run this committee and i quote with a spirit of bipartisan teamwork respect integrity and professionalism you know that's been the hallmark of this committee for years for decades and those words were reassuring to me i know they were to our colleagues on this committee to the staffs that we lead and a few years later when the chairman and i worked together to introduce and enact the bipartisan presidential transition improvement act he said i quote the peaceful transition to power from one administration to the next is the hallmark of our democracy close quote those are words we hope and expect to hear from our leaders words that appeal to our better angels words that unite us not divide us and sadly i fear that today's hearing may not be truly reflective of those words i hope i'm wrong but if i'm not today's hearing could prove deeply disappointing to me and to 330 million people that we serve across this nation let's not disappoint them and as we continue with this hearing today i would just say to our chairman you ask our witness to stand and take an oath to tell the truth it's only fair for all of us to hold ourselves to the same standard if our nation's leaders don't embrace the truth in our daily discourse then we no longer have a democracy that we'll endure calling an election on fire does not make it so it's spreading this information in this committee or any committee does it just stay inside these four laws i'll conclude with this i began my statement today with the words of abraham lincoln i want to conclude it with the words attributed to thomas jefferson here's what he said if the people know the truth they won't make a mistake if the people know the truth they won't make a mistake so let's tell them the truth let's tell them the truth today tomorrow and for generations to come the truth will keep us free the truth will keep us free it always has and it always will thank you i think the chairman ran down to vote uh quickly and uh we are in the middle of a vote series and so we're going to maintain the hearing and continue to be able to move through this hearing process though there's two votes and so you'll see us switching back and forth while he is running to vote i'm going to sit in for a moment for the chairman and i'm going to recognize myself for the next about of questions i happen to be next in line so i'm not actually pulling time here but i want to be able to recognize myself and be able to do that when he returns we'll switch out and i'll run to vote and then we'll run back and forth december 2016 there was a poll that was done on if the american people believed that the russians interfered and changed our election at that time 32 percent of the people believed that the russians had influenced the outcome of the election in december of 2016. based on that belief and what was going on there was launched a whole series of hearings certainly the russians were trying to interfere in our elections but we spent millions and millions of dollars investigating it going through it ramping up entities like cisa and others to be able to go engage to be able to make sure we protect our next election senator klobuchar and i work for years on election security legislation and work to be able to get that implemented we did six different public hearings on russian interference just on that one topic to make sure that we were paying attention to it when it all started with 32 percent of americans in december of 2016 believing the russians had interfered in our election a few days ago another poll asked the question do you believe there was election and voter fraud in the presidential election between joe biden and donald trump this december 46 percent of the voters in america have said yes 45 percent saying no interestingly enough trump voters say there was fraud 80 percent biden voters also said 16 that they believe that there was voter fraud the reason i bring that up is we watched what happened in 2016 and what the american people thought and saw and so we engaged with hearings we looked at the issues and determined do things need to change much of the work that's gone on the last several years to be able to get paper ballots into states happened because this congress engaged on issue where we saw an obvious problem and so we distributed federal dollars assistance and a constant drumbeat to say these states have got to fix the areas where they don't have paper ballots and we have the potential for problems that was the question is there a potential for a problem the answer was yes there's a potential and we ought to fix that now amazingly after this election all kinds of issues have come up and said there are potentials for problem and everyone seems to be saying move on the only reason i can think that that would be different was because the election outcome seemed to be different and one side is now saying let's just move on and ignore this in my state on election night like 27 other states in the country by that evening we were counting votes and all absentee ballots had been received there was much less opportunity for accusations of fraud because all of our ballots were in amazingly enough a week after the election was completed this november oklahomans were taught were listening to other states that were saying things like we don't know how many more ballots there are left to count we had been done for a week we in 27 other states had been completed for a week that gives opportunities for fraud and questions and problems that's a reasonable question to ask it's reasonable to be able to ask if people can drift around and gather ballots from other people and do ballot harvesting and in some states that's legal does that provide an opportunity for fraud i think the obvious answer is yes the obvious answer is if you mail a ballot to everyone in the state even if they didn't ask for it does it provide an opportunity for fraud especially when the state did not first purge or verify those addresses and they sent thousands of ballots to people that no longer live there i've talked to nevada residents that receive multiple ballots at their home for people that no longer live there that's a problem and we should at least admit that's a problem and for some reason the other side was very focused on we've got to fix the potential for problem from 2016 but in 2020 when there's potential for problem and things that have been shown everyone seems to say move along let's not discuss this there's a system called the eric system that's in place that 30 states cooperate with it helps them verify people have moved and they're registered in two different states or if they've moved into your state and they're registered somewhere else it helps them determine if they're voting in two different states only 30 states use that other states are not and even of the 30 states they use it not all of them are actually using it they literally are on the system but they're not actually purging their roles when they know there are people that have moved out of their states and have been informed of that just this last year in the eric system they identified 91 000 people that are registered voters that are dead 91 000 that that one system had recognized there are problems in the system and in this conversation that i've had with so many people and i've said is it a problem that people are voting in two states is it a problem that people are voting after are dead and this is what i hear over and over again this has been going on for years so why don't we fix it should be the next statement instead the statement seems to be well let's just move along mr bernal 42 000 people in nevada voted more than once according to your work in this 42 000 people 15 1500 people voted in nevada that were dead nineteen thousand people voted though they did not live in nevada and they weren't a college student eight thousand people voted from a non-existent address fifteen thousand people voted though they were registered to a commercial address or a vacant address and four thousand people voted in nevada that are non-citizens my question to you is in my state when someone votes twice and we do have that occasionally and about 50 times a year that that actually occurs in our state we prosecute individuals that vote twice of this hundred and thirty thousand instances that you have identified from the 2020 election in nevada do you know of any prosecutions currently going on in nevada for any voter fraud not yet senator and that's extremely important this has to be these laws have to be enforced we of course i represent the trump campaign and the campaign's electors i don't represent the government we can't bring prosecutions but if we are going to enforce voter integrity laws they must be enforced and we are confident that although it often takes a long time to put together a fraud case although it takes prosecutors months sometimes even years to go through subpoenas and warrants and using the the fbi to go investigate these things once a good hard look at these cases is examined an honest look if we do that there should be charges brought because the ranking member brought up in his remarks that when you lose the principle of one person one vote the end result is authoritarianism that's exactly what we're saying here today right and that's a major issue mr chairman could i ask for one additional moment judge starr you've raised twice this issue about pennsylvania and that the laws of pennsylvania were changed in oklahoma we did state bill 210 in state bill 1779 because we saw with the pandemic there were going to be problems so our legislature came into session made a change to be able to adjust for how we were going to do early ballots and early voting so because we knew that was the law that needed to be followed was that done in pennsylvania and does it matter who sets the law in the rules for elections no it was not done unfortunately in pennsylvania the governor sought to change the law the general assembly of pennsylvania had met reviewed and made various incendiary changes and reforms and then the pennsylvania supreme court building what the governor had done made additional changes and those in my judgment were complete violations of the united states constitution and flagged as such preliminarily by justice samuel alito so the oklahoma legislature did it the right way joshua thank you very much uh senator hassan well thank you very much just want to test that folks can hear me they can okay thank you very much mr chair and for our ranking member i want to also thank all our witnesses for being here today and i'd like to specifically acknowledge former assistant director chris krebs director krebs i want to thank you for your work in standing up the agency as cis's first director and in securing our elections i remain deeply troubled by your abrupt and unjustified dismissal which has made our country less safe now more than ever the challenges of this pandemic and our nation's increased reliance on online services requires the experience and steady leadership that you have displayed even so i want to express my deep thanks to you and to the men and women at cisa for the work that you have done and will continue to do to help make our country and our communities safer now i have three questions for you director krebs uh let's start with this one as the assistant director you attempted to tackle disinformation campaigns via the rumor control effort by cisa that's the name hugo all gave it rumor control is a resource featured on cis's website to debunk common misinformation and disinformation narratives so first in your time as as a director will you ever asked by any administration official to refrain from debunking disinformation or misinformation yes ma'am thank you for the question i was never directly approached on any rumor control changes or alterations i understand my staff was i told them that if anyone had any problems with what was on rumor control i was the senate confirmed leader of the agency ultimately i approved content and they would need to come talk to me about that and i i never got that phone call or visit but you are saying that uh staff did report to you that there was outreach from um officials asking them to make changes yes ma'am were you ever asked to take down an entry that debunked a conspiracy theory not directly no ma'am was your staff they were asked about some of the content and again i reiterated and reinforced that i owned that content and if anybody had an issue with it they needed to come talk to me was it ever implied that your job was at stake if you didn't ease up on debunking disinformation i certainly never interpreted any any statements or anything along those lines no man well i would like to uh explore with you further um perhaps after this uh uh panel uh some of what you just said in in terms of your staff but i want to move on to a couple of other things just in the interest of time director krebs given your experience with tackling disinformation i want to talk about the post-election disinformation campaign that has been waged the president and many others have tweeted outlandish claims of massive voter fraud and truly wild conspiracy theories however the president's lawyers won't or don't usually bring these same claims when they go into court when they do the judges often conservative or republican appointed judges have dismissed them director krebs given your experience with disinformation campaigns why do you think there is such a gulf between rhetoric and reality what's the goal of this disinformation campaign i i think generally the disinformation now currently particularly domestically is being used to create confusion and and drive a certain narrative but our but our point with rumor control at cisa was about identifying uh you know initially foreign activities uh but it became more of a domestic or even uncertain uh origin and it was things again like hammer scorecard some of these claims of malicious algorithms and they were they were pretty straightforward to debunk in the early days but they continue to this day there's confusion being sown about how election machines are used how they fit into the process even even now in michigan right now with antrim county there was a a forensics audit done on uh some of the machines there and there was a group that released a report and it's a 22-page report i looked at it and others have looked at it and to me you know it implies that those systems are compromised and not dependable and you can't trust the votes and any other of the machines across the state so i was a little concerned about that and i looked at the report and it claims that there was a 60 error rate in the machines the elect election management systems and so again i dug into that and it makes the claim that then you know 68 of the votes cast uh are therefore uh not dependable and and i've seen those claims being repeated on social media by the campaign by the president and so i wanted to understand what that was all about so i looked at it and in fact it was it was not that there were 68 of the votes there were errors it was that the election management systems logs had uh recorded 68 of uh some sort of the logs themselves had some sort of alert rate and that is being used to spin the that machine is not trustworthy but the problem is is the mach the report itself doesn't actually specify any of those errors except for one and it's on page 19. i actually it's on page 20. and it says there is no permission to bracket zero bracket and that is being claimed to mean that somebody tried to get in in the machine and wipe the records and so i looked at that and i said okay i don't know if it actually says that and something jumped out at me having worked at microsoft um these are windows-based machines the election management system is a windows-based machine and the election management system is coded with the programming language called c sharp there is no permission to bracket zero bracket is a placeholder for a parameter so it may be that it's just not good coding but that certainly doesn't mean that somebody tried to get in there in zero they misinterpreted the language in what they saw in the in their forensic audit and that's just one example they misinterpret and don palmer commissioner palmer i'm sure can talk to us about whether there's a hava 90 day heart safe harbor rule or which of the vvsgs is applicable to those machines and whether that machine so i'm seeing these reports that are factually inaccurate continue to be promoted that's what rumor control is all about that's what i'm continuing to do today based on my experience and understanding and how these systems work we have to stop this it's undermining confidence in democracy well i and i thank you so much for that statement uh mr chair i'll note that a couple of other people have gone a little bit over their time and i have one more question for mr krebs and with your indulgence i'd like to ask it sure uh director krebs i thank you for that response i think it's a very important example of um the kind of disinformation and spinning that is happening that frankly puts confidence at risk and put some of our people at risk you have noted in the past that we have a very diffuse election system that is administered at the local level at individual polling locations there are often numerous non-partisan officials involved in administering a community's voting process that diffusion of responsibility also makes it extremely unlikely that there would be a single point of failure or fraud that could sway an election director krebs you have worked with the numerous election officials across state and local governments can you speak to how the diffuse nature of our election systems affects the security of our elections and just also in the interest of time um i want you to comment to sadly some of these non-partisan officials at the local level have been subjected to harassment and even death threats so can you speak to the impact of these threats and do you think the president and his allies have done enough to condemn the threats of violence i'm not aware of much in terms of condemning the threats of violence um having been a recipient of some of them i i think it's uh again an affront to democracy that the the citizens of the united states of america that are responsible for executing this sacred democratic institution of elections are being threatened on a daily basis i mean you you name it whether it's emails whether it's phone calls whether it's people showing up at your house it's just i don't this is not an america i recognize and it's got to stop we need everyone across the leadership ranks to stand up i i think i you know i would appreciate more support from my own party repub the republican party to call this stuff out and end it we got to move on we have a president-elect in uh president-elect biden we have to move on these officials that are republicans look at georgia brad raffensberger gabriel sterling jeff duncan these are republicans that are putting country over party they're being subjected to just horrific threats as a result this is not america well thank you mr krebs thank you uh mr chair for your indulgence and mr krebs thank you for your patriotism thanks thank you senator hassan senator scott went to vote so is senator rosen available yes i'm here thank you mr chairman uh good morning to all the witnesses here today i want to start out by saying as members of congress we take an oath to support and defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic we have responsibility to our constituents and our nation to defend our democratic process but that being said mr krebs we thank you for your service to our nation and for upholding your oath to defend the constitution from foreign and domestic threats your efforts to protect the integrity of our democratic process help ensure that the 2020 election was the most secure in american history as certified by the department of homeland security i'd also publicly like to thank nevada's election workers who despite mr binnell's comments in the media and here today worked long hours to ensure that nevada's elections were free fair and secure both our republican secretary of state and our democratic attorney general have stated there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud occurred in nevada and our highest court has said the same and i will not give this false narrative about my state any more attention than it is already unfortunately received however we do know that foreign adversaries like russia have peddled false narratives september 3rd the department of homeland security warned that russia has been spreading disinformation about the integrity of u.s elections since march this evidence is alarming according to althea group ahead of the election russian media sources like rt and sputnik were already pushing the narrative that the us would not conduct free and fair elections last month the election integrity partnership found that social media accounts tied to russian internet research agency amplified claims of election fraud leading up to the 2020 election mr krabs to reiterate were there any election systems successfully hacked by foreign adversaries in the 2020 election ma'am having been out of the job now for five weeks or so uh you know based on what i understood when i left i'm not aware of any voting machine involved in the casting or counting of uh votes in this election or the certification process that was accessed by a foreign adversary thank you so i want to just emphasize the difference between election interference and influence so we know our election infrastructure was secure from interference i want to turn to the issue of foreign influence campaigns in your view did adversaries succeed in amplifying the false perception our election process was fraudulent and really can you explain how domestic actors amplified foreign disinformation campaigns and how that undermines confidence in our democratic process um so i think what we saw i believe was october 22nd we did see some iranian efforts i've talked about this before where there were some emails that popped up on that day uh claiming to be purportedly from at least the proud boys that were talking about you know sent specifically to democratic voters that said you need to change your registration and vote for president trump if you don't we will find you and take care of business i guess um the issue there is that ballot secrecy is the law in all 50 states and so we identify that issue we isolated it uh and then put up a rumor control debunker um and you know in the meantime in the ensuing 27 hours we were able to determine that that was in fact an iranian operation and i think what was one of the true success stories of the protect 2020 effort and defending democracy this time around was the fact that rather than you know four months in 27 hours we went from detection to sharing that information with the american people there is one element that doesn't get a lot of play though is that prior to making that assessment following up on my commitment to our partners in the state and loc state and local election community we held a call with with the the election officials and said look this is what we're seeing you need to know this and then we went to the public uh mr krebs i just have about two and a half minutes left so i would like to yield the rest of my time uh to you because you did take enough to uphold the constitution when you were sworn in as director assista and so i want you to address anything that you feel we haven't already asked today and give you an opportunity to speak in the last two and a half minutes please thank you for that courtesy um look i uh i could not be more proud of the my team at cisa for the work they did not just um protecting the 2020 election but in in getting through the last nine months of the all the stresses that covet placed on the workforce and coming to work each day whether they're sitting at home out in the field or the limited folks that came into the office so that's point one point two was i firmly believe that this protect 2020 effort working with our partners in the federal government whether it was in the intelligence community of the department of defense was the single best representation of a unified government effort everybody got it there were no turf wars there was no parochialism everybody was on the same page so we were defending democracy the last thing i'll say is that the real heroes here are the state and local election workers out there across the country the hundreds of thousands of election workers that risk their lives and and that's not a joke right there's a global pandemic there's covid spreading across the country they went to work so that you and i could go vote and cast our decision here contribute to this process they had to deal with incredible adversity and then at the end of it risking their lives they get death threats for doing their jobs for standing up speaking truth to power putting country over party that's gotta end we're gonna have to move past this somehow you know i've said before that democracy yeah we survived this i think it was strong enough to survive but democracy in general is fragile it requires commitment and follow-through on both sides if a party fails to participate in the process and instead undermines the process we risk losing that democracy we have to come back together as a country again i thank you uh for being here i thank you for you and your teams your teams around the country for keeping us uh safe and working so hard in this past election thank you thank you senator rosen uh senator scott is not back yet to senator portman are you on webex senator hawley are you on webex i'll try sentiments center cinema well then i'll pick up the slack mr bernal i want to explore a little bit further in terms of what access you did not have to the information you requested to verify this again i value the the paper backups i value the controls but they're only as good as they're actually used and they only provide confidence to the extent that it's a transparent process so just speak a little bit to what you had access to what you did not have access to what you're denied and then go ahead thank you mr chairman the very sad fact is that we were denied access to almost anything meaningful that would allow us to verify can you be specific absolutely senator um let's talk about the paper backups on the electronic machines we were denied any access to those except for from one machine in the entire state of nevada we were denied that access that i wish i could have quoted mr krebs uh when we were fighting our discovery fights at the in in nevada saying how important it was to get access to these we couldn't see any paper backups and on top of that the printers on the machine were malfunctioning at such a high rate we doubt that the paper backups were actually giving us anything of use anyhow so these paper backups that are supposed to provide such transparency we couldn't use them we couldn't see them we couldn't use the they provided us zero transparency at all except in one machine in the entire state of nevada another example is the fact that we were denied any meaningful discovery in the case in order to to go and examine the the full extent of the voter fraud for instance we were even when we were able to subpoena the records that led us to discover those 4 000 non-citizens who voted we couldn't put that into evidence because we didn't get them until the end of the discovery period and then the court said well at that point it's too late our discovery period was essentially three days and we were denied any meaningful opportunity to even use in our case the information that we got and the court didn't even consider those things unfortunately we were um denied that we tried to be able to understand the code of these machines to be able to find out for instance as as the the chairman pointed out whether machines were hooked up to the internet whether any of that happened be able to do a forensic review we were we brought forensic experts all the way to nevada people that could have discovered this information people that could have told us what happened with these machines and we weren't allowed near we weren't allowed any forensic audit of it nothing that could have given us any transparency because transparency is not political that's what we've talked about here that's what we were denied in nevada is any attempt to actually find out what happened here's the troubling thing is one of the reasons that they said that we couldn't get transparency on this machines because they're proprietary proprietary the information the the coding was proprietary but we're talking about the countings of votes for the office of president united states and they're not going to let us see the code for how they actually coded the votes you got to pick one it's either open source and we exactly know the way that that these machines are counting the votes or you have to go back to a verifiable system to make sure that the results that are being reported are the results that we get from actual voters because that's that is where democracy breaks down that is really the fear that we have of losing democracy is when it's not the people's votes that are being counted but fraud that's being counted and we can't just pretend that the emperor has any clothes when when if he doesn't we can't pretend that we have a clean election when there's evidence to the contrary and the way that we get that is through transparency and we were denied that in nevada at every single turn we we had a a clerk who uh a register our voters who literally dodged our subpoenas we had the holiday weekend for thanksgiving in order to serve subpoenas they locked the doors of the offices he locked himself in his house he refused to accept a subpoena hit that same register of voters we have a whistleblower that says he was wearing a biden-harris pin to inspect voter sites this isn't something where we're trying to attack officials we're trying to say that we have to make sure that it's nonpartisan that we have to make sure that there's transparency and you can't deny transparency at every turn mr chairman mr krebs real quick mindful that again all this testimony is under oath uh so what you heard from mr bernal is testimony under earth does that trouble you and in in your assessment this is the most secure election again i'm all for paper backups i'm all for you know those controls i think you know if used it works you know we have an ab we have a system of advocacy uh in terms of a legal system you know you advocate for one side it's it's it's a it's a combative system but both sides have to have information does that trouble you in terms of lack of transparency that mr banal is testifying to under oath i think a couple things here one is that in commissioner palmer's opening statement he talked about the certification process the voluntary voting systems guides the certifications that happen at the state level the logic and accuracy testing of these machines the parallel testing that happens the day of or during the election process the sampling uh and forensic audits we saw georgia do that with a number of their machines to ensure that the hashes match what they expected um i do think that that yes we need to make sure that working with these vendors that we have the appropriate insight and transparency into the process certainly i would you know i think we need to have a conversation on what the appropriate auditing process looks like i have seen some auditing that is not necessarily up to snuff so we need to explore that a little bit more fully but again you know if you've got you're we're talking about paper backups but we're also talking about paper ballots but but again only if they have he just said they didn't have access to the balance that again well i'm not saying that i mean again all i'm asking does that trouble you that there wasn't that kind of a trans transparency or are you challenging his testimony oh of course not not okay so again th this system is we only have confidence if in it if it's completely transparent and somebody who's challenging results has access to the information the paper about ballot backup can have their forensic experts say look at the computer systems and that that wasn't afforded i'm just asking does that concern you i think that there are multiple controls in place throughout the system it you know if there is a legal mechanism at the back end that allows for independent third-party auditing but that's the problem the legal system didn't allow for the transparency okay you can talk about all these controls up front but then in the end where there are affidavits signed and people are making charges when you can't obtain the evidence to actually try it in court and your evidence is denied in court do you understand how that frustrates people and that's again that's the problem that's why there's suspicions because this was not in so many cases that we've heard about a transparent process but with that i'll turn to senator scott thank you chairman johnson and i want to thank chairman johnson for taking all the heat for here hosting a hearing like this um i think it's i think it's the right thing to do to um to get people to feel comfortable that elections are free and fair and if this one wasn't that the next one will be you know this is um two years ago i got elected um i won election night by 54 000 votes and chuck schumer sent a lawyer down and basically said i don't care what the votes are we're going to win through the courts and through we went through unbelievable number of of lawsuits we had i think something like a thousand lawyers uh working with us we went through two recounts and he would he didn't care what the votes are he his chuck schumer's goal was to uh win and his lawyer was just to win through the courts it didn't matter what the votes are it didn't let me um uh didn't let me come to um orientation and so when i listen i watch this stuff now i did not remember one democrat in this entire country say that's not right you shouldn't be doing it that way they were all in on this and nobody complained so the in sept we've got to figure out how to do this where people feel comfortable i can tell you i live in naples florida every time i go out and people come up to me and they're frustrated with the unfairness of the system um now of course these are people that you know wanted wanted to trump to win they think that he lost unfairly uh but they're they're mad they're they're mad that they this because they read they hear about what happened in wisconsin they hear about what happened in other states and then they um and then they they're furious that they think this this the whole system's rigged so one thing i did is in september um i put out a um a bill called the voter id we do absolutely ballots and it were actually works in florida you have to be right your voter you have we your signatures have to match um you have to get your vote in ask for your vote early you have to get your vote in on time it's your problem if you don't it's not somebody else's you don't get the vote um after the fact you don't your vote doesn't get to come in after the fact and somebody uh counted although two years ago the uh the democrat lawyer tried to do that uh the um and we know that we get the votes out on time we did it this time so it seems to me that if we want people to feel comfortable in this country that these elections are fair you have to show your id you can't be doing same same day registration because how can you tell if somebody is legal illegal uh i mean how would you how would you know do they live in that state we how would you know um you got to let people um be able to watch ballots being open we had two election supervisors that were removed because of what they did in my election and they were clear they completely violated the law and they found and tried to count 95 000 ballots after election night not my favor of course in the democrats favor so so judge start what do you think about the need to have local elections because i i think what i think what uh mr krebs said is right we one of the reasons why we have good systems here is we don't have a national system we have a local system but should we have national standards should you have to have id should your signatures have to match should you have to be you can't get registered on the same day that you vote all the things that we have like we do in florida where you have to get your ballots early and all these things and you you know how many by the way we have you have to you're supposed to announce how many ballots you have that night you should know right they did in my election and that's how they kept finding it so judge sir what do you think about this idea that we have to have some national standards but still have locally local elections i think national standards need to be seriously considered in light of these recurring issues we all have anecdotes one of my friends an academic leader in the commonwealth of virginia where i used to live as here's an anecdote one of his students a registered voter in vermont but she's studying in virginia and she receives appropriately an absentee ballot from vermont but she receives four unsolicited ballots from the commonwealth of virginia where she happens to not be registered vote but she's she's studying and everyone is hearing these anecdotes and they're saying well are there control mechanisms in place and so the issue of decentralization is you will continue to have these varieties and vagaries unless and until there is some in enormous reforms in state government or in congress using its powers under under article 2 under article 1 in this particular instance says we need to step in and have regulations to ensure integrity and a signature requirement is one of the basis i like to say senator scott you've got to show id if you want to check into a hotel or get a service of tsa security so don't we want to have those kinds of safeguards just to ensure yes this is going to be an honest uh election which i think is all we are all uh asking for so mr trooper said mr bernal would if we if we had done some of these things and they'd been enforced in your in your states would there have been would you would people feel comfortable that there was a fair election senator scott i think it would absolutely go miles to make sure that people were confident in the results of the election if we put in simple methods to make sure that the people who vote are who they purport to be that one person only gets one vote that the way that the ballots are counted leads to an accurate total these things shouldn't be partisan these things should be exactly what we do to protect our republic and make it so that people know that the results are accurate because otherwise you end up where we are today senator one of the fascinating things about wisconsin is as i said we have a long history of real transparency in our process in our recount process in all of our processes so it's particularly odd here and several of the justices on our court this last week called what the democrats had done in the majority of the court in the supreme court as absurd and bizarre and the reason they referred to it that way is they said the issue here is what confidence do people have in the election process so if that's that's what we hear and i've heard that i've been hearing that all day here confidence in the election process well then why when everything is teed up i mean you know i'm a former judge my co-counsel is a former president of the state bar we had teed up everything we absolutely knew the names addresses wards you had exact records and what the biden campaign did not want the court to do is to actually address the substantive question that's the holding of the court we won't address the substantive question and the chief justice i mean there's a great frustration in the chief justice when she said four members of this court throw the cloak of latches over numerous problems that will be repeated again and again until this court has the courage to correct them candidly it was all democrat talking points i mean they did this make the same thing i heard something about justice karofsky's comment it was just a talking point and i guess the frustration you hear from those of us who are serious lawyers who have taken this seriously is that when we pose these matters to courts we expect them to address them when they don't it undermines the integrity of our system that's what's going on here the frustration that you hear even in good democrat circles is if the courts don't address these who's going to aren't they the ultimate arbiters there's no there's no dispute that the election would have turned out differently in wisconsin if according to our allegations and according to our proofs the court accepted those that the election result would be different but instead of addressing the substantive claims the biden campaign argues don't talk about them don't address them and that's why i thanked senator johnson when he first called and asked if i would talk because if you don't inquire here in the senate and as as the ken starr said a minute ago if you don't do this inquiry there really isn't going to be any analysis and there isn't going to be an opportunity to get the very integrity that we all want i mean as i said as a former judge and this this is a serious matter to me and no one suggested at any point in the process that the allegations in wisconsin are anything but serious and substantive and documented and yet a court takes the biden line and says we're just not going to talk about it that's just wrong and that's the reason one of the reasons people don't trust this outcome yeah in florida we have uh you know we have a lot of people have moved from uh south america and so a lot of them have said to me houses different than what maduro's doing right so i mean there i mean and part of it is you know people don't have enough information but it's so simplistic when you hear about people that are dead their vote people that don't live in the state to vote all the and you hear all these things and there's no recourse so we've got to figure this out we got to be able to prevent this from be you know i don't know if nothing's if anything will happen with this election but clearly we can't let this go on for the next election certainly thank you chairman thank you senator scott and i completely agree this you have to air these people you have to have the information this is not a dangerous hearing this is an incredibly important and crucial hearing but thank you for participating in it senator portman are you available by webex i am mr chairman thank you i i've been uh moving around the capitol as we've had to vote but i was after hearing earlier and i appreciate the witnesses and all the information we've received and um you know as i look at this issue and even watch some of the back and forth today between our colleagues it seems to me that pulling this out of politics a little bit and having a bipartisan group that is more independent look at the issue is a good idea in part because most of us don't believe that this ought to be something that the federal government usurps from the states in fact we believe that the constitution got it right and that generally speaking it's better to have the states handle this but there are obviously many disparities between how the states do it so there was discussion earlier i think it was of the uh carter baker commission i would ask you mr star is this time for us to establish a commission i've been involved in some of these commissions i've been a commissioner and and coach shared some that have worked some that haven't worked but often they can be quite effective at sort of taking the partisan poison out of an issue and addressing it in a very straightforward way if you had a distinguished democrat and a distinguished republican and commissioners who are dedicated to increasing the confidence in our elections do you think now is the time for us to establish such a commission that could report uh with plenty of time before the next midterm election and help to give the states a a sense of direction and perhaps even a template of best practices the short answer is yes uh in light of the acrimony and the division with respect to the 2000 election bringing together jimmy carter and former secretary of state baker was i think very efficacious they made thoughtful recommendations uh but they bring attention and uh shed light on what the issues are and so yes i think taking it out of what is clearly continuing to be a highly bitter and acrimonious discussion and to say to the american people we're going to take a look at this and we're going to try to in fact improve in the great spirit of reform we want honest elections abraham lincoln the subject of the fraudulent mail-in campaign let's not lose sight even though i'm thankful that foreign interference and so forth and i very much admire mr krabs and all that but we're really talking about down in the boiler room so to speak of american elections and that's where i think these reforms need to be uh and safeguards need to be in put in place well thank you for that i'm looking forward to working with one of my democratic colleagues to try to promote this this idea we've had some discussions of it already and i think again today uh what we've heard is indicative of the of the degree of intensity on this issue and the need for free and fair elections i think everybody agrees with secure elections absolutely and uh you mentioned mr krebs chris thank you for your service at cisa uh i agree with what was said earlier about the fact that during your time there you were instrumental in building up our defenses on the cyber security side particularly thank you for working with ohio secretary of state frank larose so well uh frank larose and you i think we're able to provide some examples for other states as i understand it you can speak to that but we have in every county in ohio the so-called albert intrusion detection monitoring hardware which is designed to detect suspicious cyber activity can you comment briefly on the benefits of using this kind of detection and monitoring hardware and how it worked yes sir um first off i want to thank you for uh actually just the state of ohio for some reason uh in my senior staff in my front office my two of my top three advisors happened to be from ohio so you're doing something right there the albert systems are intrusion details i put on my mask after you you said that since carpenter had his ohio mask on earlier so um the the albert systems are intrusion detection systems that sit on effectively sit on the networks and on the wire that uh capture traffic that we can work with our intelligence community partners and develop what's known as signatures looking for known malicious activity or known interaction with suspicious ip addresses just looking for bad interaction and it gives us a good insight into what sort of behaviors um may be happening on those networks and they are actually pretty key after the 2016 election once we were able to get a sense of what was happening in illinois we could load up some of the those those signatures and then go do forensics it is a passive system it's a it's a forensic system where we need to go though is building on the trust we've developed through the albert centers and through the isac and through the coordinating councils to start deploying more advanced technologies and i'm specifically talking about some of the endpoint detection and response capabilities that'll actually sit on a on a computer in in a state local office and be more of a real-time monitoring and mitigation capability that's how we continue moving forward we need the same capability in the federal government we're not there yet uh we but we have to continue advancing and i think congress says i'll stop yeah chris let me let yeah and i again as you know you know i've talked about this i appreciate what you did for elections i also am very concerned that our federal government is not up to the task generally and that's another topic for another hearing perhaps uh one where you'll be back to testify but look what's happened just recently in the last week we found out that a very sophisticated group of hackers got into the computers some of our most sensitive agencies and and um so we obviously have a lot of work to do and and i'm not suggesting that cisa you know was at fault there but on the other hand i think we have not yet given even cisa adequate resources and authority to be able to handle all these issues not just the election issues uh but obviously we have a huge problem right now with cyber attacks and and we don't know all the details yet and i want to ask you to get into stuff you don't know about but it was a massive cyber attack on federal agencies that undercut our national security we know that by the way senator paul earlier talked about the fact that there has been some lack of understanding between what you testified to and what you stated as to the election being secure from cyber attacks and this notion that there were not instances of irregularity and fraud in this election which of course there have been in every election in the history of our country and there were in this election and we've heard about some of those today uh is senator paul correct and i guess i would slightly amend what he said he said that your focus was just on foreign adversaries my sense is your focus was not just on foreign adversaries although you feel fairly confident that that did not happen this time and obviously based on what happened in 2016 with the russians this is this is good news but also with regard to domestic cyber attacks is that what your report was about is he accurate in saying that yes sir so you know when you when you come into federal office you pledge the oath upholding defend the constitution from threats foreign and domestic and that's what we did the focus of the statement the joint statement was security it was secure i think terms have been conflated here uh you know alleging that that that we were speaking to the fraud aspect we absolutely were not we were talking about security hacking manipulation of these machines that was the thrust of the statement yeah i think that's very important to point out and i think a number of people were confused about that including perhaps some folks uh in in the administration um post-election uh there's been a lot of talk about signature matching and i'll end with this mr chairman i know we're getting over time here but in ohio what we do is uh and we've been doing this for 15 years quite successfully we send out an application for an absentee ballot it's then a no fault absentee i that's how i vote uh but you have to send in an application within including a signature those signatures are checked uh then the signature on the actual ballot once you receive the ballot you send that in yeah another signature that's checked and then of course the two are compared uh they also in ohio have access to other signatures uh if there is some confusion as to whether it might be the right person or not could you mr krebs or others perhaps comment on that system is that a good way to ensure that you have the protection that we all want to have that the person who requested the ballot is an eligible voter and that the return ballot was completed by that same person not an expert on the system seems reasonable to me anybody else want to comment on that sir this is uh frank state representative frank ryan i i would tell you that that is a good system and that would alleviate significant number of the concerns that i had in the election and based on some of the comments that were made by many of the senators and the testifiers i i would indicate that we saw a major problem with the dot-com bubble in 2001 which led to the dot the sarbanes-oxley bill much of which is the basis of my testimony today then we in 2008 2009 we had the crisis that happened in the banking industry with the no documentation loans we saw how that worked and led to the dodd-frank bill i would hope that would happen in 2000 elections and in the abraham lincoln election in this most recent one in 2016 and 2020 there will be similar legislation that could help us restore the confidence that people have that there's some degree of uniform perspective about the requirements that each of the states needs to be able to comply with what ohio was doing would have alleviated a major amount of the concerns i had when we had a supreme court that decided to legislate from the bench and mr chairman if i may say just a word and that is i think what senator portman you have identified is a best practice and it certainly qualifies as one of the things that perhaps a commission if one has found it can say we have canvassed the entire 50 states and here are the best practices the recommendations could be based on experience as opposed to simply theoretical constructs let's just see what has worked in the various states with reputations for honesty and integrity that would be the objective thank you mr thank you mr chairman for your indulgence uh thank you very much senator portman uh now on behalf of the chairman i'm going to recognize myself so thanks to the witnesses for being here i just want to say how important it is that we're having today's hearing let me just give you an example why yesterday i was talking i'm from the state of missouri yesterday i was talking with uh some of the constituents back at home group of about 30 people every single one of them every one of them told me that they felt they had been disenfranchised that their votes didn't matter that the election had been rigged these are normal reasonable people these are not crazy people these are reasonable people and who by the way have been involved in politics they've won they've lost they've seen it all these are normal folks living normal lives who firmly believe that they have been disenfranchised and to listen to the mainstream press and quite a few voices in this building tell them after four years of non-stop russia hoax it was a hoax it was based on the whole russian nonsense was based on we now know lies from a russian spy the steele dossier was based on a russian spy after four years of that being told that this that the last election was fake and that donald trump wasn't really elected and that russia intervened after four years of that now these same people are told you just sit down and shut up if you have any concerns about election integrity you're a nut case you should shut up well i'll tell you what 74 million americans are not going to shut up and telling them that their views don't matter and that their concerns don't matter and they should just be quiet is not a recipe for success in this country it's not a recipe for the unity that i hear now the other side is suddenly so interested in after years years of trying to delegitimize president donald trump so suffice it to say i'm not too keen on lectures about how missourians and others who voted for president trump and now have some concerns about fraud about integrity about compliance with the law should just be quiet and that they are somehow not patriotic if they raise these questions it's absolutely unbelievable let me talk about the first amendment judge sir i want to begin with you because i know that you have spent much of your life as a litigator defending the first amendment have you ever seen anything like we saw in the closing days of the election when you had the biggest corporations in the history of this country the most powerful corporations in the world facebook twitter working with the democrat campaign to suppress legitimate reporting on hunter biden who we now know is under federal investigation for criminal wire fraud tax evasion other things have you ever seen anything in your career like that judge star where we have these giant corporate conglomerates censoring and suppressing news directly bearing on an election weeks beforehand and doing it apparently in conjunction with one of the major political parties have you ever seen anything like that no i think we live in a new age and we need to go back to great lessons from constitutional law as you well know senator hawley and justice william brennan an icon of the warren court saying that our democracy is based upon robust and uninhibited debate and justice oliver wendell holmes saying let's test things in the marketplace of ideas you can't test places that ideas and theories unless you allow the marketplace of information communication to flourish well said i agree with that 100 and you know it's an extraordinary thing not to be able to get i've had jack dorsey mark zuckerberg under oath we've asked them did you coordinate with the democrat campaign how was it that that within minutes of this story breaking that both of those major corporate giants decided that they would suppress this story and exactly what the biden campaign wanted them to do they won't answer questions i've asked the fec to determine whether or not this was an illegal campaign contribution on the part of these corporate entities and i i can't i just can't fathom why anybody who cares about free speech in this country would be fine with these mega corporations controlling what people can and cannot say and trying to intervene in a presidential election let me ask you uh judge starr about uh about something else let's talk a little bit about mail and balloting uh in your written testimony you discussed the findings of the carter baker commission you've mentioned that again here today that commission commented on the use of mail-in ballots after the 2000 election can you tell us a little bit about that commission's finding on mail-in ballots as you recall it and talk about some of the warnings that that commission put into place yes the commission was referring to absentee ballots but of course in light of what has happened in this presidential election we're now talking about the unprecedented use of mail-in balance and their concern and their warning of former president carter and secretary of state baker is that this is a mechanism or a platform for fraud and abuse be careful about it have safeguards in place and i think that's at the bottom what some of these concerns are how did dead people vote accepting that allegation from nevada it is because of inadequate safeguards something the dead person didn't walk into the ballot into the voting booth and vote someone voted for him or her we have to have those safeguards in place and that's what the commission was saying and issuing that fervent warning that it may get worse in a deeply divided country in 26 states as i understand it when it comes to mail on voting judge 26 states now in this country allow third-party ballot harvesting of mail-in votes that's where you can pay a third party to go distribute the ballots and you can't do this in my home state of missouri because we have control similar to those in ohio that senator portman was talking about but in other states 26 states you can pay a third party to go distribute the ballots you can pay a third party to pick up the ballots there's no chain of custody there there's no verification this seems to me an invitation to fraud and abuse i've introduced legislation to end third party ballot harvesting nationwide to make it illegal nationwide would you would you agree judge starr that looking at something like third party ballot harvesting is a common sense approach by the way some house democrats even have endorsed this approach would you agree with me that that's a common sense place to start when we think about preventing fraud and addressing it in our elections yes because the opportunity for fraud and abuse is so ripe and omnipresent with that kind of if i may now call it that worse practice so so many states have best practices we heard from senator portman about ohio other states have these safeguards in place let's put safeguards in place but one of them is let's eliminate practices that are so prone to fraud and abuse and i think that's just the very beginning of what we should do we should also make sure that poll watchers from both parties can be present at all times that there are eyes on ballots cameras on ballots at all times at their signature verification requirements that are mandatory that there's mandatory reporting requirements about where we are in the count where the states are so the states just can't go dark for days at a time all of this stuff ought to be common sense there is no reason we should just shrug our shoulders and say well fraud happens all the time you know no big deal it is a big deal it's a very big deal and for millions and millions of americans in this election it's a very very big deal indeed thank you mr chairman thank you senator hawley for your questions and for standing in uh based on one question and the answer from a judge star i just want to read from my opening statement from last hearing in his reflections on progress peaceful coexistence and intellectual freedom russian dissident andre d sacharov wrote quote the second basic thesis is that intellectual freedom is essential to human society freedom to obtain and distribute information freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths which in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues can be transformed into bloody dictatorship freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics economics and culture i like to think of this hearing is a demonstration that freedom to obtain and distribute information to the public there's nothing dangerous about that it is essential to our freedom it's essential to our country to our democratic republic and is essential if we're going to restore confidence in this election system we have we have to do this we can't ignore the problem the first step in solving any problem is admitting you have one and then dealing with it honestly gathering the information this hearing is all my hearings have been have been a problem-solving process first gathering the information that's what we're trying to do here today center cinema thank you so much mr chairman you know the 2020 arizona election was a successful election not for any one party or individual but for our democracy and as a demonstration of the will of arizona voters a record 80 percent of registered voters participated arizonans are independent they vote for state and fell representatives they trust to be honest who they believe will fight for and uphold arizona values this record turnout number is also a testament to the work of arizona election officials who not only ensured our system worked and our laws were upheld but did so while ensuring that people could safely participate in the election during the pandemic as voters and volunteers arizona has had some sort of absentee voting by mail for over 100 years in 1992 the arizona legislature and governor in bipartisan fashion made it easier for arizonans to vote by mail by no longer requiring a reason to participate our vote by mail system has a number of safeguards to ensure safe elections ballots are mailed out 28 days prior to the election and each ballot has a tracking mechanism we use tamper resistant envelopes and ballot drop boxes have specific security requirements election staff are trained to authenticate signatures and a voter is contacted if the signature cannot be verified arizona also has severe criminal penalties for ballot tampering over throwing out someone's ballot in 2018 when i was elected to the united states senate nearly 80 percent of arizona voters voted early most of them by mail in 2020 that increased to 88 percent that's 22.9 million votes moving through the postal system in arizona arizona's postal workers put in long hours many working 65 hours a week for weeks on end to ensure that ballots got to voters and returned by state deadlines so they could be counted even though many postal facilities in arizona are short staffed right now these essential workers didn't shy away from the challenge or the need to protect our democracy arizonans know it takes time to count our votes and determine election winners when i was elected to the senate i was declared the winner six days but it took 12 days to finish counting the votes now that's not an indication of fraud it shows that election officials are following the law and counting all the votes that's how elections have worked in arizona since our state adopted widespread mail and voting and it's how things worked in arizona again in 2020 our elections this year produced bipartisan results where members of both parties won elections arizona statewide elected officials from both parties have also confirmed that our election was fair just and without fraud katie hobbs arizona's democratic secretary of state on december 9th said this about our election this election is one for the record books for a number of reasons participation was at a historic high as was interest in the inner workings of this civic process which is the kind of scrutiny that pushes the process to be better i have full confidence in this election that confidence has been affirmed by the courts on november 20th clint hickman the chairman of the maricopa county board of supervisors a republican said no matter how you voted this election was administered with integrity transparency and most importantly in accordance with arizona state laws and on december 4th the republican speaker of the arizona state house rusty bowers rejected calls for the state legislature to change the result of arizona's election here's his quote as a conservative republican i don't like the results of the presidential election i voted for president trump and i worked hard to reelect him but i cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election i and my fellow legislators swore an oath to support the us constitution and the constitution and laws of the state of arizona it would violate that oath the basic principles of republican government and the rule of law if we attempted to nullify the people's vote based on unsupported theories of fraud challenges contesting the arizona election were brought to the courts and dismissed including a unanimous ruling by the arizona supreme court confirming a lower court ruling upholding the results of the election challenge this is how our system works if there are concerns or fraud or abuse the courts consider the evidence and make a ruling now i have a few questions for mr krebs during your work at the cyber security and infrastructure security agency did you find any evidence that disputes the statements i shared from elected officials regarding the integrity and fairness of the 2020 election in arizona no ma'am or broadly what evidence can you offer to support the idea that the election across the country not just in arizona was fair and secure again it's those uh layered security controls that are in place before during and after an election uh the thing that i always like to point back to is that increase of paper ballots across the country and the ability to then conduct post-election audits in arizona i believe it was a two percent audit uh in georgia they did a risk limiting audit that then triggered a full hand tally uh the outcomes were consistent five percent audit in wisconsin two percent audit in uh pennsylvania you know those are the sorts of things that give you confidence in the process uh when you can go and recount uh the ballots over and over and over what lessons should we learn from the 2020 election as we plan for future elections um we need to invest in democracy first and foremost we need to fully eradicate those machines that don't have paper ballots so those direct recording electronic machines uh there's only one state that's statewide and that's louisiana but they are throughout uh texas indiana um tennessee and in a couple other states uh including new jersey we need to get those out of the system so congress needs to fully invest in a risk-based approach to eradicate those we need to also continue investing in post-election audit capabilities for the state that takes a little bit more time and then a steady stream of funding and grants on a regular basis not every 10 years or every four years but ever you know on a regular dependable basis to support elections and along the same lines we need to fully fund and support uh the election assistance commission they are a critical tool to helping uh the administration of elections and lastly and this is my uh you know pet pet project here we need to reinvest in civics education in k-12 throughout the country we have to continue educating you know our children on what it means uh to be an american and in the democracy that we're enjoying here thank you and my last question early in this election cycle saiza and the fbi highlighted the potential threat that foreign elements could pose to the u.s election system through disinformation campaigns looking back did the u.s do enough to prepare for this threat from both foreign and domestic actors ma'am i we we um we had the distinct advantage this time around of having about three and a half to four years to prepare for this election and that's in comparison to the prior administration they only had about four months we had four years i know my team we took every moment of the day to think through any number of scenarios i've talked about it often that that i was paranoid that we were looking for every angle that we possibly could and i think that ultimately benefited us from a preparation perspective when it came around and that we had a full range of scenarios we'd worked through that we'd improve security at the state level but but ultimately it came down to those perception hacks it came down to disinformation and i think rumor control was an incredibly valuable tool that we need to think about from a government-wide perspective how rumor control i've said rumor control as a service how can we use rumor control to help uh ensure we or will rather counter disinformation on the vaccine for covet as it rolls out those are the sorts of things we need to be thinking about thank you mr chairman i overextended my time i yield back and thank you for your indulgence well thank you sandra cinema for participating um i do want to just warn mr palmer and mr ryan first of all apologize for uh not having maybe any questions directed your way i will entail of this uh we have another quick round of questions here senator peters has some uh but i will ask you a couple questions then what i will tell all the witnesses as a final summary this actually got from this technique from senator carper is we'll give you each an opportunity to make kind of a final statement things that either you weren't asked that you wanted to be asked about or something that you just think needs to be said during this hearing so we'll do that but i'll first turn it over to senator peters for some extra questions thank you mr chairman uh uh question for uh for mr krebs um as you know you and i have spoken about the rise of uh domestic extremist uh violence in the country and how we need to be uh conscious of that rise and in august uh the fbi and department of homeland security memos reportedly warned of threats by domestic extremists to election-related targets in the run-up to the 2020 election unfortunately and sadly these warnings seem to have been well warranted since president trump's false claims of of widespread voter fraud local election officials across the nation have faced harassment some have faced death threats against themselves and their families in michigan our secretary of state uh had protesters surround her home while she was decorating it with her young child to get ready for for christmas according to local law enforcement many of those folks were armed they were repeating some of the president's false allegations of widespread fraud in an intimidating way and after speaking out defending the integrity of the 2020 election it's my understanding that you and your family also faced the threats in fact it required us to take some and make some arrangements so for your security to be here today to testify in person on december 1st of this year a top republican election official gabrielle sterling in the georgia secretary of state's office held a news conference urging president trump and republican lawmaker makers to stop attacking georgia's election system with baseless claims of voter fraud and in that news conference mr sterling said president trump was and i'm quoting mr sterling here quote inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence end of quote and that a new quote someone's going to get hurt someone's going to get shot someone's going to get killed end of quote now we saw a similar dangerous trend earlier this year when election officials questioned uh coveted public health safety protocols and also fueled extremists including in my home state the extremists that targeted the the governor of the state of michigan so my question for you mr krabs particularly given the fact that you've faced some of this do you believe mr sterling's statements are overstated or that unfortunately that real world violence stemming from dangerous claims can indeed be a realistic concern that we should be conscious of absolutely he had a uh he himself received a number of threats and he has continued to receive threats as i understand it the secretary raffensberger down there has i've continued to receive threats um you know in i think and it's not just the the the heads of you know the the the principal level people the you know the directors of the offices he was having i.t contractors that were receiving death threats um we're seeing stoking of fires that is completely unnecessary with uh with claims that are you know i'm not even talking about some of the court case court cases i'm talking about in my you know in in my case and in some in many of our cases is these fanciful claims of of um dead dictators and computer algorithms and we're debunking them because they're they're nonsense and we've said that from the beginning but they've taken root and you know some people just don't want to hear what how these systems actually work and what's actually capable across these systems and most importantly those i'm going to i'm going to say it again i'm going to say it again the paper ballots it's those those measure the root of trust in the process that that can dispense with these claims even if these algorithms were there they didn't work but they're probably not there so we've got to move past this in these cases of threats they need to be prosecuted people need to you know be held accountable for these uh the claims they're making yeah and just the last question and we've spoke about this earlier that if you look at the fact that we were able to conduct this election in a fair uh way during the middle of a pandemic which is an extraordinary time to try to conduct fair elections and do it as efficiently as possible and the fact that you have thousands of election officials and volunteers that are working i think of the men and women who went to the polling places to process voting did it with concerns about their health people who went to vote or to their health or folks who chose to vote absentee in order to to minimize the the risk to their families to the health of their families this is really in my mind a time to celebrate a very successful election that was done fairly and it was done in the midst of an extraordinary time that we're living in and it's the result of folks in cisa your folks others with homeland security folks of the fbi and others would you just comment on that as to how we should look at what we just went through and that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be looking at ways to improve the system to make sure that we minimize clerical errors to make sure that if they're isolated incidents of fraud that they're dealt with and they're caught but we should be also celebrating what just was pulled off in this country which is an example of how a democratic system can work efficiently fairly and even do it under extraordinary pressure i i absolutely agree with with the the earlier conversation about the need for a national conversation about how to improve trust in uh the elections i i think you know things i've even recommended about eliminating the dres and having more audits available after the election and and that's going to require again that that policy conversation is going to require investing in democracy but we do need to recognize the fact that this was a historic election we had 100 million voters by november 3rd that shows that that people wanted to get out there and vote they wanted to participate in this process and all along we have um you know hundreds of thousands of election workers out there that as you pointed out as i said in my opening statement that that risked their lives and a global pandemic to make sure that that we could all get out there and uh vote so we need to support them i have significant concerns that the targeted violence against these election workers is going to have a chilling effect on turnout of election workers in the future there's no election workers it's really hard to do an election so we need to be we need to think about that and how to uh counter that going forward thank you thank you senator peterson this is a number of times we've talked about threatened violence against election workers which obviously nobody on this committee condones at all at all i certainly hope there's not our inference in all this discussion that this hearing is going to spawn some of that anybody listening to this hearing do not engage in that okay i wish senator paul were actually here to talk about his scrape with threats and violence in the political realm we're in they're in terrible position this country where you have this level of threat across the political spectrum nobody nobody should condone it certainly not this committee certainly not this chairman but that's what i think this hearing is about is to provide the information talk honestly about it take a look at allegations if they can be explained take them off the take them off the table there's plenty that as we were doing our preparation for this hearing we were able to take off the table but that's what this is about this about information obtaining it the freedom to obtain it and disseminate it in formation with alternative senator harper thanks mr chairman again our thanks to our witnesses you've been patient been here for a long time those of you that are here personally and those that are connected uh from from afar um i uh i mentioned earlier i gone to ohio state uh fortunately nobody in my family ever graduated from college i won this navy rozzi scholarship i got to go to college and the person in my family i think to to graduate from college and the uh when i got to ohio state i i found out there's a little town just north of colum columbus called uh delaware and so my four years at ohio state i'm thinking of delaware i'm thinking you know it's a little town just north of columbus and and then i found out later on it's a state and uh i want to finish up my active duty at the end of vietnam war and moved from california to uh to delaware to get an mba i i learned it on december 7 1787 december 7 1787 delaware became the first state to ratify first colony to ratify the constitution and then 12 others followed suit and we ended up with a country that prevails to this day uh a little bit of a student of the history i know we all are but one thing's i learned about the framers the constitutional convention up in philadelphia just north of where my wife and i live in our family lived just north of wilmington is um they they disagreed on a bunch of stuff they disagreed on about probably the hardest thing for them to agree on as it turns out was uh should there be a judiciary article two i think it is but it should be a judiciary and if so uh how would uh who's going to pick the judges and they argued and argued for days weeks trying to figure it out and somebody came up with the ideas and finally said it shouldn't just be the senate it shouldn't just be the house the uh it ought to be the president or president to appoint with the advice and consent of the senate and so they voted on it and they voted it down and they uh whenever they'd run into an impasse at the up in philadelphia they would bring in uh faith leaders to come in and pray for wisdom for our framers and they did that again and they debated some more for days and finally somebody said why don't we just go back to that earlier idea and vote on it again and they did and they adopted the clause that says the president shall nominate with the advice and consent of the senate those who will serve lifetimes lifetime terms are extraordinary uh and uh is our our judges they is it a perfect solution no we've been wrestling for what 200 some years figuring out what is the advice and consent of the senate what's that really mean and we just in recent months we've been wrestling again with with that but it's a an imperfect solution to a very real uh challenge and that is that we're going to have disagreements and going up disputes that need to be resolved we need something this is before i weren't i was talking about football earlier in baseball they called balls and strikes but the framers they didn't have baseball to talk about but they knew they needed somebody to call balls and strikes and they have a system that most people say well that's fair and reasonable well we've needed folks to judicious judges federal judges and others to be able to call balls and strikes and all these litigation 61 instances around the country 61 and uh they've done that and some people like uh the results and and other other people don't and i think what i what i want to uh two points to make in in closing is before i have to go to another meeting but one of those is uh at some point in time we have to say uh enough's enough it's time to turn the page and let's get about our nation's work here this week and we're just voting on the floor and people are talking to me about negotiations are going on on this covet package on uh digesting the climate change in ways that create jobs um all kind of stuff that's in play literally right now it's an exciting time to be in the senate and i'm encouraged by by by by that the other thing i'd say was a in the navy i was a naval flight officer later a p3 aircraft nation commander for a long time active and reserve it uh and um in naval aviation especially in the p3 community uh you have a job in the airplane on the crew they have a job on the ground and for a while my job was i was a scotland's intelligence officer when we're in southeast asia and um because i have a huge respect for intelligence agencies and we got a bunch of them they're really good ones one of our friends one of our former colleagues uh was a former senator from from indiana and uh he ended up as a dni director of national intelligence and a good friend of uh i think all of us and and dan i was i talked to him when he stopped uh stepped down as uh had a dni and i asked him um i said just talk to me as a friend and author off the record i guess i'm going on the record but but i said uh whether are you convinced that the republican republic are you convinced that the russians were involved in in trying to you know put their hands and fingers on the the scales on the president of the presidential elections in 2016. he said without a doubt without a doubt they were and i said uh well how do there's like 17 or so intelligence agents they say does does some of them feel that way and he said all of us do is unanimous everybody feels that the the russians were interfering in our election in 2016 and they wanted to change the outcome and they said they weren't trying to help hillary clinton they were trying to help donald trump and i'm i'm not asserting that he was they were doing that at his request or but but in a way they maybe they were come to think of it but there's there's no question they were involved and with the purpose was a single purpose the russians and um we caught him red-handed and and we've been dwelling on that for four years now uh we need to get over it we need to get over it i respect enormously the work of our intelligence agencies i think we all do but that's we need to put that independent uh we need to put that in our rearview mirror and if we're ever going to put this pandemic in the rearview mirror we've got to figure out how to provide vaccinations timely properly correctly to about 250 million americans if we don't vaccinate kids under the age of seven there's 250 million americans we got to get vaccinated at once but twice in the right sequence good record keeping got to convince about 30 of people in this country that it's safe to do this we have to set an example for that we've got a lot of work to do if we do that if we do that we'll be on the way coming out of this recession and on a way to better better days ahead for our country and for the people who are really counting on us so i'd ask to to us to keep our eye on on the ball let me close with mr chairman if i could there are we only have three counties in delaware the southernmost county is called sussex county and the uh there's a town in sussex county called seaford which is famous for being the first nylon plant in the world was built in seaford delaware and they had like 4 000 people working there from world war ii up until about 10 years ago and uh there's a church close to the plant there at the methodist church and the minister used to be there is an old guy uh reverend uh reynolds reverend reynolds who son was a republican state rep and a football coach and a great guy and the reverend reynolds when i got elected governor he said to me um he wanted to come and sit and talk to me and visit with me and share some thoughts and i said sure and everybody's known in our lives i'm sure a chairman of ranking members people that we've noticed they're just wise they just have a lot of wisdom and for every now and then every now and then they share it with us and he came to meet with me and and he said these words we had a lovely conversation actually had lunch together and he said to me said just remember this time he said the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing that's what he said the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing i sat there and i said what in the world are you talking about it took me a while to figure it out but i finally did and i would just say the main thing here is to keep the main thing the main thing and that is we have this gift the constitution that's not perfect but it actually puts us on a course to for a more more perfect union a more perfect union hopefully we're going to learn from these uh what we did well in this election and while we didn't and uh years from now people look back and said well they kept their eye on the ball and kept their eye on the main thing if we do that our history will look well on our efforts so thank you mr chairman thank you very much senator peters thank you and to our witnesses again thank you all thank you senator carpenter again appreciate your outreach this morning i would say the main thing of this hearing is the fact that we need to have confidence in the integrity of our election and we have to recognize the reality that right now and quite honestly for the last four years that hasn't existed you know 2016 illegitimate result resistant you remember the famous uh tweet by mark zaid you know i can't remember off top of my head but something like you know who's begun impeachment will follow um that's we've been living with with four years different election different result different side and the reality is people have concerns and i'm just saying there these are legitimate concerns you mentioned the courts i've acknowledged the process has worked its way to a conclusion um i've got some like 50 59 court cases now many of these as as mr troop has talked about uh some were not decided on the facts they're just decided and dismissed based on standing which is again that's our process that's a legitimate decision by a court but it's not very satisfying for people who have some facts that want to be considered by a court or mr bernal the same thing in nevada so to deny the reality that we have a problem a very serious problem it's not is that's not the main the main thing is we have to acknowledge that problem and we have to work together to fix it to restore the confidence so let me just see if i can wake up uh mr ryan and mr palmer make sure they're there uh ask a couple a question of each of you and then i'll give all of you the opportunity to kind of make a relatively brief i mean this this is actually a long hearing for us i know the judiciary committee sometimes goes on long but this is a long hearing for for our committee and i really do appreciate the involvement of as many as many members who who took this thing seriously but mr ryan are you there yes sir i am thank you senator sorry about that i hope you had lunch or something in the in the interim um representative ryan in our conversations uh you were talking about as mr binal talked about your inability to get access to certain things that you know i would hope director krebs would agree should be transparent and that you know those of you having questions about or even challenging results should have access to in order to mount an effector challenge can you talk a little bit about that absolutely senator as a former chair of an audit committee of publicly traded companies and currently the chair of the auditor committee the public school employee retirement system the control environment is a critical component of it mr krebs is referring to as an example the security systems and i don't dispute his comments on that at all and i applaud the great work that's been done at cisa but until the entire control environment that's the tone at the top has been a properly evaluated and documented to where you can have a six sigma or lean systems approach that allows you to be able to have this transparent auditable result it violates one of the basic principles of any systems of internal controls one of the things that we tried to deal with with the soybeans oxley bill that i think that was done effectively was this concept of controlled efficiency significant deficiencies and material weaknesses the absence of the ability to provide a timely audit of that information is problematic and i would just like to just make this comment i spent a lifetime as a reserve officer and so i was also on active duty either in operation uphold democracy in haiti operation iraqi freedom i helped supervise some of the elections results in iraq in 2005 after i was called out of retirement and i would pray that all those sacrifices made by the millions upon millions of people who served in our military to support and defend the constitution of the united states against enemies foreign and domestic would be upheld as well on our shores so we can ensure the same type of election integrity that we're asking for with transparent fair and accurate results can be assured within the united states we know 44 of the states apparently went off without a hitch so we have six states that we're dealing with that's a pretty good track record but unfortunately when you consider the fact that the four of the states were that razor thin margin close the results of the election could have been in question i concur senator that most of the results they've already been looked at from a challenge from a legal perspective so it's probably a moot point for the current election but i pray that the senate will take up this battle standard and say we need to really reaffirm to make sure that people have the faith and confidence in our election systems i try to live by a triangle of faith the faith is to believe to believe is to have faith and to have faith is to have trust whenever that trust triangle is broken we will have difficulties and discord will follow and i pray to god that every person listening to this testimony hears your words and says let's have a peaceful resolution of all these concerns we have so we can get on with business issues well thank you representative ryan and thank you for your service and we will come back to you for your closing comment uh mr palmer um in our discussion uh prior to this hearing uh and again i appreciate your service and in your membership of the commission you talked about some things that troubled you with this election can you just kind of uh review those with the committee well a few of the things that that i was concerned about um i think that raised the emotions um from the political campaigns some of it was the treatment of poll watchers um i believe transparency is a very important thing and one of the concerns i had was that people need to be treated with respect i understand as an election administrator but often we are doing our job and we don't believe anybody needs to be watching the process but some of the reports it gets back to sort of this the way we treat each other in this country you know and if a poll watcher is observing the process they have a right to be there to observe the process they need to be respectful the election official um there were some significant reports that that process was um you know was interfered with and people were treated very poorly and it's not the first time i worked at the department of justice and the civil rights division and one of the things that i saw a lot often was based on party or race you know citizens treat each other poorly and even in the context of elections and so i think that you need to make a commitment uh of respect toward each other and to each political campaign um you know i think that that was the major issue i think that hearing a lot of the reports about the inaccuracy of the voter rolls i've been talking about this for a long time it's because there's just not the focus or the resources provided at the state or local level in my opinion to maintain the accuracy of the voter rolls i think that a lot can be done in a non-partisan way in a very smart way with technology election officials don't often have the latest technology and so upgrades to voter registration systems and to resources of data can help them clean and make sure their roles are as accurate as could be and frankly i just think that this has become somewhat of a partisan issue and therefore any attempt to maintain the accuracy the roles can be seen as a negative this is what happens is that if you have highly inaccurate roles then there's perception of fraud sometimes there's actual fraud we actually see that and it may not change an election except in a close race but our job as administrators to make sure that there is no fraud and mitigate and minimize any irregularities that's the goal only with technology and resources and a commitment to doing it well we see those instances decrease and that's why i believe technology and resources are some bipartisan ways to decrease that sir if you could also because your commission does uh act to certify some of these voting machines not all of them but in some states you do can you just quickly and i mean quickly go through kind of what that certification process is and i think that that was one of the issues you did see is you know somebody trying to get back into those machines in inside that certification process well we have a certification process for voting systems one of the vulnerabilities that we have and i believe says it would agree is that the non-voting systems that are tied to the internet they perform important functions like voter registration electronic pullbacks there is no standards or testing and what's one of the things that we're trying to do with the ac with adequate funding we could do but it's a big it's a big gap in our defenses and it's one that we may not have been burned this time but it is a vulnerability and we need to take care of it okay well thank you well now now we'll move to uh uh closing statements here and we'll go in reverse order so again uh former director krebs again i appreciate uh your service the country i appreciate what you accomplished i mean as you know i've acknowledged that repeatedly i think the fact that we've gone from uh 82 to 95 paper backup that that's all great stuff um and i certainly appreciate you coming here and testifying today so i'll let you uh with any closing comments thank you uh chairman johnson i'm gonna keep this short because i think this is a historic uh hearing for me this may be the longest hearing that i've had in this chamber so i will try to wrap this one up quickly first is thank you to you for your ongoing and constant support of cisa you know you were key in getting us across the finish line in the senate and ultimately in november of 2018. so thank you for your leadership there supporting other key initiatives for the agency including the administrative subpoena uh bill so thank you for that uh just a quick comment to the team at cisa if they're watching you know it was an honor to lead uh thank you for that opportunity legit uh you've got a great future ahead of you uh keep at it and then lastly thank you to the other witnesses for uh showing up today and thank you for what they do but again thank you to your leadership here and good luck well maybe based on the retention issue you might encourage him to stay a little bit longer but i'll do that mr burnell thank you mr chairman we cannot ignore voter fraud away we can't just wish it away unfortunately that's what the media these past weeks has been trying to do in the most biased reporting i think i've ever seen or even in headlines they they try to claim that the evidence i've seen with my own eyes is somehow not there we can't wish it away it's it is just simply right now a gaslighting attempt on america this is real this happened we have to address it we cannot intimidate the problem away rightfully much testimony today has talked about why it's so important that government officials election officials not be intimidated but myself the lawyers on my team volunteers whistleblowers there's a number of people who have stood up for this fraud that have faced similar death threats similar uh intimidation similar harassment we don't pay it i don't pay it a lot of attention because no one is ever going to intimidate me away from pursuing the truth pursuing the law representing my client but we need to make sure that other groups that are out there that are encouraging the intimidation of lawyers even you know from threatening to go after their bar cards on one side going after their clients or going after their safety or their lies that cannot stand either we cannot stonewall it away i talked briefly about some stonewalling attempts one other that we ran across in nevada is that we had we had postal service employees that we knew of that were directly told to deliver ballots to undeliverable addresses that is what resulted in ballots being littered all across apartment mail rooms and trash cans everywhere and they were they were told in many instances to to to deliver ballots to undeliverable addresses and the united states postal service they obstructed our ability to get that evidence in our case we lost one of our 15 depositions because the united states postal service actually obstructed that it raises the question with all this stonewalling that we that we encountered what do you have to hide and i think we know in this case what there is to to hide i said in my opening statement the government by consent of the governed is hard to win and easy to lose that's why it's so important that we take this so incredibly seriously senator hawley told a very important story about his constituents and i ask all senators to think about their constituents to think about how you're supposed to tell that your constituents to turn out to vote if they don't know that it's their vote that's going to matter that they don't know that their vote is going to be cancelled out by the fraud of somebody else their vote is going to be diluted by these irregularities we can't pretend that this problem didn't happen it did this is the united states of america we don't run from that we fix it we have to use every arrow in our quiver to fix it because it did happen and it's now on all of us to make sure that we fix it i really appreciate the committee's time in the chairman's time thank you thank you mr bernal uh representative ryan senator thank you very much for the uh your courage in having this hearing uh if i could just uh conclude with these comments our nation is at a crossroads no matter what happens with any of the work that is being done right after looking at this since probably about the year 2000 and apparently even went back as far as 1787 although i wasn't there for that particular meeting shortly thereafter but not that one the consent of the governed will determine whether or not they believe in the results of any election it has gotten significantly worse it's one of the reasons i ran for office i was elected in 2016 obviously later in my life we have to examine the processes from start to finish sysa has done a phenomenal job in so many different respects and under the concerns robert of takovic 19 i actually recommend using the assistant standards and for all the po watchers all the poll workers the directors of election uh god bless them for the great work that they've done by the same token there's a point in time now where we as a nation have to sit back and say we have to solve these problems we have to take a look at the entire process from start to finish and the ability of people to interfere with those election results the ability of the person to be able to change the system of control so that we can no longer rely on i've heard some of the comments today and i go back to what i heard in 2007 and 2008 when i was a practicing cpa keeping companies out of bankruptcy and meredith whitney was bringing up the concerns she had about the strength and stability of the banking industry and she was vilified michael lewis when he wrote the big short was vilified the assumption was that no documentation loans were not dangerous ignore that concern that both of them had nothing to be concerned about shortly thereafter there was a triggering event and the housing bubble burst and the united states was thrust into one of the worst issues that we've had to deal with financially in a long time many states are still recovering i would tell you we are at that seminal moment today relative to the sanctity of our elections i've probably been building since 1787 but now is the time for all of us to sit back and say we need to not vilify one another and senator i applaud you for your willingness to open to get to an open transparent basis here but we need to sit down and do these types of hearings as much as the band-aid being pulled off may be painful we need to expose these concerns so that people the 150 million people who voted can once again feel with confidence that the election process works and their vote mattered senator thank you for your time and for the great work of your entire staff well thank you representative ryan for your testimony and your services country uh mr troopas senator thank you very much the i heard i want to say that right off the bat that i'm honored to represent the president i was honored to get the call but i'm not naive one of the reasons i was called is because virtually every major law firm in this country and in this city refused to represent the president not because of the lack of merit of his claims we've certainly demonstrated there's merit but because of the canceled culture because of the environment that has been created by the left that has intimidated lawyers so they can't be here they're not here because from the giant law firms precisely because they were ordered by their management committees and others that you cannot take those cases and the reason you cannot take those cases is because our clients or the democrat party or the incoming administration will remember that and they will hold it against you that's a sad state of affairs as a former judge i was so incensed by that that i took the representation that was the ultimate reason i took that representation and i've heard a lot today about what went on afterwards as if as if these latest threats are coming from the right remember why and how this started after the election we need to have faith in our court system we have to acknowledge that the court system has been deeply intimidated by the left just as the lawyers have been intimidated and that is a sad sad state of affairs and i so much appreciate senator that you're holding these hearings because otherwise as we're finding out all over the country these items just disappear number two i wanted to say as i said throughout my testimony that one of the reasons people are doubting the election is because the other side here the biden campaign's primary defense is don't hear the evidence don't let them litigate don't have a court rule on the substance let's be honest that's what's going on and and so that's why the public doesn't trust this outcome it's not about the president it's about what the other side is doing to intimidate and force people not to listen not to take the evidence i've heard lots of fancy words here today but if you give transparency if you let the issues come out and i've represented republicans and i've represented democrats and at the end of the day lawyers do their job when it is in the open and we are able to present the evidence and i so appreciate the fact that you a non-lawyer is taking on this task here but finally i have to say this we had 4 000 people volunteer from everywhere in the country to come to wisconsin to participate in the process we had over twenty five hundred volunteers over a ten day period take their own time their own money come from all over the country and they came and they and and they attended the recount and they participated and i said to the recount on the floor the democrats and the republicans i said if you are losing your faith in the greatness of this republic look at this recount look at the number of people on the from the trump campaign and from the biden campaign that would give of their time and effort to be here in that case in madison wisconsin it was humbling truly humbling for me and everyone our legal team and everyone who was there we have a great system and people want to participate let's make it transparent and again i can't thank those volunteers enough they're the ones who make this democracy work thank you mr troops and i noticed mr binal shaking his head when you're talking about the the fact that lawyers from large law firms were more than discouraged they were actually prevented from from uh representing the president which is kind of established in fact affairs i'll also say you know storefronts in big cities didn't board up their windows in anticipation of a vice president biden victory commissioner palmer thank you for the opportunity to testify today i will make a few comments you know the eac is looking at holding a series of hearings uh and issue a report on some non-partisan recommendations there's going to be a lot of policy disputes around the country and state legislatures and you know that could be debated back and forth about what the best policies on certain areas but we as the election administration community want to do better we understand that oftentimes there are flaws in the way we administer elections it happens in every election we could always do better the way we respond in the election administration community just like the military is more education and more training in more resources when available and that is really the recipe i believe moving forward is if you want to improve the performance of election officials and their election workers within a you know within an office and our poll workers it will take a commitment of time resources and training to do so and eac is prepared to do that three two localities if with appropriate funding i think that that is really my solution thinking back to my military days whenever there was an issue more education more funding more training thank you commissioner palmer uh judge starr you are lead off hitter now you're banning cleanup here so thank you for hanging in there you have some closing comments i think about the bottom of the order of mr chairman but thank you thank you for your leadership in a real sense today's hearing has been a tribute to the constitution i love senator carper's comments about december 7 1787 and the idea to form a more perfect union and this hearing has been in that spirit i'm also reminded of one of president lyndon johnson's favorite quotes from the prophet isaiah tom let us reason together that i think this has been a time of freezing together and listening and the great traditions of the united states senate so let me close with words that i heard with my own ears from united senator alan simpson now the tender age of 89 in retirement and what he was addressing in his valedictory at the kennedy institute of politics which he headed for two years uh he told the audience and it was in very hush jones tones because whatever your politics were alan simpson was a great man and recognized to be that and he closed with these words in politics if you don't have integrity you don't have anything and what this hearing is trying to do is to how can we in fact promote not just confidence in government but how can we in fact promote the integrity and honesty which is at the bedrock of the kind of government in whom we can trust so thank you for the honor of appearing before the committee well thank you judge star for your participation for your service this country um i i do want to make a comment we spoke to and we were very appreciative of the fact that dominion systems uh uh edison research ap a number of people we spoke to prior to this hearing now they didn't they didn't all participate but we we will leave the record open and i encourage everybody we spoke to and people we didn't if you want to input information into this record you've got a couple weeks to do it and i encourage you and our staff will look at that and we will vet it we'll call you we'll ask questions this is this is this hearing is not dangerous what would be dangerous is not discussing this openly and frankly with transparency this is a problem that we have to acknowledge and recognize and solve together and we're only going to do that with information so i'm soliciting information okay this this is only part of the process there was oversight before this hearing there needs to be oversight after this in the next congress i hope that i can work with senator carper who i i think we all recognize has done a pretty good job of outreach here and and some pretty bipartisan words here so i'm hoping that's how we can move forward because i truly think as americans we share the same goal we all want a safe prosperous secure country state you miss you know community that that's what we want we want to be able to raise our children in safety and freedom and the way it works in this country is through participation in the democratic process so i think everybody in this panel wants to make sure that we have good participation we encourage citizens to participate we also want every legitimate vote to count but we should be every bit in favor of making sure that every vote is legitimate and that's what this is all about if we can put the controls in place and actually act on them it's great having paper ballots but you have to have access to look at it to give yourself confidence in the current election and moving forward that okay this this all worked out you know wisconsin's recount totally honest our account was almost 100 accurate other issues but again i think wisconsin we got a pretty pretty good level of confidence so we run our elections right now i'll just give another shout out to jeanette mertens you know my county clerk my clerk courts in the town of oshkosh if and i'm sure the vast majority are just like jeanette we're in really good hands so conclude this is my last hearing it has been an honor and privilege to chair this committee hearings adjourned

Channel: CNBC Television

Views: 262,381

Rating: 4.1186442 out of 5

Keywords: CNBC, business news, finance stock, stock market, news channel, news station, breaking news, us news, cable news, finance news, coronavirus, economic relief, stimulus package, senate, senate hearing, trump administration, covid-19, pandemic, coronavirus pandemic, pandemic response, senate homeland security, kenneth star, 2020 election, election irregularities, christopher kerbs

Id: xHtobbugTJU

Length: 219min 7sec (13147 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/-Mediocrates-]

Lol senator peters : “trump Russia!”

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https://youtu.be/xHtobbugTJU?t=4435

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Hahaha !!!!! This fuckin chode ... cmon man... cmon man....that shits been debunked for over 4 years.

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When democrats say shit like this ... we know 10,000% they are lying to our fucking faces.

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Give it up man. Not helping your ratfuck shitlib election-fraud-definitely-didnt-happen narrative at all

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Isn’t it fucking gross how hard the democrats don’t want to audit the vote? It just makes them look guilty as fuck

[u/-Mediocrates-]

Holy fuck!

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Biden campaign doesn’t deny claims of election fraud in Wisconsin.

https://youtu.be/xHtobbugTJU?t=3669

[u/FThumb]

The need to pretend we have real elections is deep on both sides.

They're both going to protect the narrative. I expect this to be the electronic voting version of the Warren Commission.

[u/veganmark]

Gee, wonder whether Facebook will allow this SENATE HEARING to be shared?!

[u/-Mediocrates-]

Just so ya know.... google fucking buried this ... hard! Spent a while digging this gem up. Kind of weird considering how important this is

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Also, this is how I like to break it down:

1. I fully expect the democrats to defend democrats and republicans to defend republicans ... and you can for sure tell who’s full of shit and who’s not. lol it blows my mind how some these people keep a straight face.

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1. But usually the most amusing parts for me is when there’s a turn coat; when a democrat backs the Republican point of view and vice versa... you know it’s about to get spicy

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1. Pay close close attention to body language and voice tonality. Some obvious stuff... arms crossed is closed off body language and means leagalese incoming and legalese is typically means bullshit. Another obvious one is voice tonality. Tonality from high to low is authorative. Voice tonality from low to high is asking for rapport.