Hours after US President Donald Trump repeated a report claiming that a voting machine system had deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide, he was directly contradicted by a group of federal, state and local election officials, who issued a statement on Thursday saying that the election was the most secure in American history and there was no evidence of any voting system getting compromised.
In a statement by a coordinating council overseeing the voting systems used around the country, the rebuke never mentioned Trump by name, but it amounted to remarkable corrective to a wave of disinformation that Trump has been pushing across his Twitter feed, reported New York Times.
"While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should, too....When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections," the officials said in their statement.
New York Times reported the group that issued the statement was the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, which includes top officials from the cybersecurity agency, the US Election Assistance Commission and secretaries of state and state election directors from around the country.
The statement was distributed by the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for helping states secure the voting process.
Across the country, election officials have said the vote came off smoothly, with no reports of systemic fraud in any state, no sign of foreign interference in the voting infrastructure, and no hardware or software failures beyond the episodic glitches that can happen in any election.
Earlier, the US President had quoted a report, which claimed that Dominion Voting Systems deleted his votes nationwide, and that several votes were switched from Trump to US President-elect Joe Biden.
""REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE. DATA ANALYSIS FINDS 221,000 PENNSYLVA VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN. 941,000 TRUMP VOTES DELETED. STATES USING DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS SWITCHED 435,000 VOTES FROM TRUMP TO BIDEN." @ChanelRion @OANN," tweeted Trump.
Twitter has flagged Trump's tweet, stating that the claim about election fraud was disputed.
After Biden was projected the winner of the presidential elections and declared President-elect, Trump refused to concede defeat, saying that the election was "far from over", and promised legal challenges by his re-election campaign.
Trump's campaign has filed several lawsuits to challenge the results in a few battleground states after the president spent months spreading unsubstantiated claims that mail-in ballots could open the election up to fraud, reported The Hill.
( With inputs from ANI )
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