[Senate Hearing 116-405]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]




                                                        S. Hrg. 116-405
 
                    EXAMINING IRREGULARITIES IN THE
                             2020 ELECTION

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               before the

                              COMMITTEE ON
               HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
                          UNITED STATES SENATE

                     ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS


                             SECOND SESSION

                               __________

                           DECEMBER 16, 2020

                               __________

        Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.govinfo.gov

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        Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
        
        
        
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        COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

                    RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin, Chairman
ROB PORTMAN, Ohio                    GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
RAND PAUL, Kentucky                  THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware
JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma             MAGGIE HASSAN, New Hampshire
MITT ROMNEY, Utah                    KAMALA D. HARRIS, California
RICK SCOTT, Florida                  KYRSTEN SINEMA, Arizona
MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming             JACKY ROSEN, Nevada
JOSH HAWLEY, Missouri

                Gabrielle D'Adamo Singer, Staff Director
                   Joseph C. Folio III, Chief Counsel
                  Brian M. Downey, Senior Investigator
          Scott D. Wittmann, Senior Professional Staff Member
               David M. Weinberg, Minority Staff Director
               Zachary I. Schram, Minority Chief Counsel
         Alexa E. Noruk, Minority Director of Homeland Security
            Alan Kahn, Minority Chief Investigative Counsel
                     Laura W. Kilbride, Chief Clerk
                     Thomas J. Spino, Hearing Clerk

                            C O N T E N T S

                                 ------                                
Opening statements:
                                                                   Page
    Senator Johnson..............................................     1
    Senator Peters...............................................     5
    Senator Paul.................................................    25
    Senator Carper...............................................    27
    Senator Lankford.............................................    30
    Senator Hassan...............................................    33
    Senator Rosen................................................    36
    Senator Scott................................................    41
    Senator Portman..............................................    43
    Senator Hawley...............................................    47
    Senator Sinema...............................................    50
Prepared statements:
    Senator Johnson..............................................    67
    Senator Peters...............................................    71

                               WITNESSES
                      Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Hon. Kenneth W. Starr, Testifying in His Personal Capacity.......     8
Hon. Donald Palmer, Commissioner, U.S. Election Assistance 
  Commission.....................................................    10
James R. Troupis, Attorney, Troupis Law Firm.....................    12
Hon. Francis X. Ryan, State Representative, Commonwealth of 
  Pennsylvania...................................................    14
Jesse Binnall, Partner, Harvey & Binnall, PLLC...................    16
Hon. Christopher C. Krebs, Former Director (2018-20) 
  Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, U.S. 
  Department of Homeland Security................................    18

                     Alphabetical List of Witnesses

Binnall, Jesse:
    Testimony....................................................    16
    Prepared statement...........................................    88
Krebs, Hon. Christopher C.:
    Testimony....................................................    18
    Prepared statement...........................................    90
Palmer, Hon. Donald:
    Testimony....................................................    10
    Prepared statement...........................................    78
Ryan, Hon. Francis X.:
    Testimony....................................................    14
    Prepared statement...........................................    86
Starr, Hon. Kenneth W.:
    Testimony....................................................     8
    Prepared statement...........................................    74
Troupis, James R.:
    Testimony....................................................    12
    Prepared statement...........................................    81

                                APPENDIX

Senator Peters letter to Senator Johnson.........................   101
Statements submitted for the Record from Senator Johnson.........   105
Statements submitted for the Record from Senator Peters..........   145


                    EXAMINING IRREGULARITIES IN THE



                             2020 ELECTION

                              ----------                              


                      WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2020

                                     U.S. Senate,  
                           Committee on Homeland Security  
                                  and Governmental Affairs,
                                                    Washington, DC.
    The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:01 a.m., in 
room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, and via Webex, 
Hon. Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
    Present: Senators Johnson, Portman, Paul, Lankford, Scott, 
Hawley, Peters, Carper, Hassan, Sinema, and Rosen.

            OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN JOHNSON\1\

    Chairman Johnson. Good morning. This hearing is called to 
order. I want to welcome and thank the witnesses for your time 
and your testimony.
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    \1\ The prepared statement of Senator Johnson appears in the 
Appendix on page 67.
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    Let me start the hearing by saying this hearing should not 
be controversial. It really should not 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 of this hearing, there were 
more standing issues and court cases than there are today. But 
even though courts have handed down decisions and the Electoral 
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 is 
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 
the conservative perspective by biased media and social media 
adds fuel to the flames.
    Senator Grassley's and my investigation and report on the 
conflicts of interest and foreign financial entanglements of 
the Biden family is just one example of how media suppression 
can and does affect the outcome of an election. It 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 stated its goal was 
to ``resolve suspicions with full transparency and public 
awareness.'' What is wrong with that? That is what good 
oversight can accomplish.
    Unfortunately, Senators Schumer and Peters ignored my 
statement and instead chose to politically attack me and this 
hearing. As I commented in last Thursday's hearing on early 
treatment of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19), close-mindedness 
is a root cause of many problems we face.
    Just a quick aside about that hearing held 7 days ago. It 
was attacked, unfortunately boycotted by Democrat Members of 
this Committee except for a rather politically charged opening 
statement by Senator Peters. Two of those witnesses, two of 
those doctors who had the courage to treat COVID patients, I 
think one of them told the Committee they are Democrats, and 
they were very disappointed by that boycotting by Democrats, 
that close-mindedness, that politically charged opening 
statement. But to prove the worthiness and the value of that 
hearing, Dr. Kory, one of those Democrats, a person who showed 
immense courage in treating successfully COVID patients, his 
10-minute opening statement has received more than 4.4 million 
views in just the last 7 or 8 days. Obviously, Americans need 
that information. They have the right to know about early 
treatment, and they have the right to try early treatment.
    My last pitch before I return to this hearing, if you or 
somebody you know gets COVID, 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 
asked 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: 
one, lax enforcement or violations of 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.
    Here is a brief summary of what we did learn, and a lot of 
this should provide the 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 and absentee vote balloting are used to verify 
eligible voters and help prevent fraudulent voting. But it 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 Cybersecurity and 
Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Chris 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 of being connected, and there are allegations that 
some were.
    Once voting ends, those machines print out a paper report 
and also 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 (AP). 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 laws in some 
cases were not enforced and how fraudulent voting did occur, as 
it always does. The question that follows is whether the level 
of fraud would alter the outcome of the election. This year, in 
dozens of court cases through the certification process in each 
State and by the Electoral College votes, the conclusion has 
collectively been reached that it would not. However, lax 
enforcement, denying effective bipartisan observation of the 
complete election process, and 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 these allegations. This is a complex 
issue that has been under congressional scrutiny for years.
    Since 2018, I am aware of three oversight letters 
requesting information from the main suppliers of voting 
machines. This oversight is focused on Election Systems & 
Software LLC, Dominion Voting Systems Inc., and Hart 
InterCivic, Inc. Today we have a witness from the Election 
Assistance Commission (EAC), 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 Senator Klobuchar 
and Senator Shaheen asked, ``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, ``The integrity of our 
elections remains 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 the 
2016 and 2018 elections. . . . a combination of older legacy 
machines and newer systems, vulnerabilities in each present a 
problem for the security of our democracy and they must be 
addressed.''
    On December 6, 2019, Senators Warren, Klobuchar, Wyden, and 
Congressman Pocan wrote, ``We are particularly concerned that 
secretive and `trouble-plagued companies,' owned by private 
equity firms and responsible for manufacturing and maintaining 
voting machines and other election administration equipment, 
`have long skimped on security in favor of convenience,' 
leaving voting systems across the country `prone to security 
problems.'"
    Again, this is a quote from that letter: ``Moreover, even 
when State and local officials work on replacing antiquated 
machines, many continue to `run on 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 backend election systems 
in 10 States.' Just this year, after the Democratic candidate's 
electronic tally showed he received an improbable 164 votes out 
of 55,000 cast in a Pennsylvania State judicial election in 
2019, the county's Republican Chairwoman said, `nothing went 
right on Election Day. Everything went wrong. That is a 
problem.' These problems threaten the integrity of our 
elections.''
    Now, again, those were three letters from Democrat Members 
of Congress. Now, maybe I missed it, but I do not recall the 
media or anyone else accusing these eight congressional 
Democrats of indulging in ``quackery and conspiracy theories'' 
or their letters of being a ``ridiculous charade,'' as Senator 
Schumer did when he used those exact same words attacking me 
and 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.
    Before I turn it over to Senator Peters, I do want to 
remark this is my last hearing as Chairman. I want to express 
the fact that I think it has been an honor and privilege to 
serve. I think our track record--even though a couple of the 
last hearings and some of these investigations have grown to be 
a little rancorous, I regret that. I think we really have an 
excellent track record of achievement, over 100 bills passed 
and signed into law in this Committee, 200 others passed by the 
Committee maybe not signed into law, but they can act as a 
foundation for future legislation.
    Again, I just want to thank everybody for working together, 
and staff. It really has been an honor and privilege. Looking 
ahead, I want to acknowledge that Senator Carper had a very 
kind phone call to me just an hour ago. We will probably be 
working in some capacity as Chairman and Ranking Member in the 
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), 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 and 
other issues. So, Senator Carper, thanks for calling.
    With that, I will turn it over to Senator Peters.

             OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PETERS\1\

    Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to our 
witnesses for being here today.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The prepared statement of Senator Peters appear in the Appendix 
on page 71.
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    Mr. Chairman, if we have learned anything over the past 2 
years, it is 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 the 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 is a destructive exercise that has no 
place in the U.S. Senate.
    Joe Biden won the election more than 5 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 20, 2021.
    It is 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 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 are chosen by 
the voters to help uphold our institutions and democratic 
values spent weeks either turning a blind eye or parroting 
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 
(DOJ) has confirmed. There was no election interference, and 
the election was not rigged. In fact, independent election 
security officials in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 
have called this election ``the most secure in American 
history.'' We are 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 post-election lawsuits file 
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. 
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 am 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 is 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 toward 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 this harmful rhetoric. Preserving our 
democracy takes hard work, and I am deeply troubled that we are 
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, to date the Trump campaign has filed about 60 
legal challenges to the election in 8 States across this 
country. I ask that this document highlighting those cases and 
their failed attempts be entered into the record without 
objection.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The document referenced by Senator Peters appears in the 
Appendix on page 145.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Chairman Johnson. Without objection.
    Senator Peters. I would also like to include in the record 
a non-exhaustive list of incidents of violence\2\ aimed at 
election officials as well as a statement from our Nation's top 
law enforcement associations condemning the threats of 
violence, harassment, and intimidation leveled at election 
official across the country since election day.\3\ I move 
without objection.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \2\ The document referenced by Senator Peters appears in the 
Appendix on page 290.
    \3\ The statement referenced by Senator Peters appears in the 
Appendix on page 288.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Chairman Johnson. Without objection.
    Senator Peters. I also will ask that op-eds from our 
Nation's foremost voices on election integrity, democratic 
institutions, and national security, including Madeleine 
Albright, Michael Chertoff, Ben Ginsberg, and Steven Brill, be 
entered into the record, without objection.\4\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \4\ The statement referenced by Senator Peters appears in the 
Appendix on page 272.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Chairman Johnson. Without objection, because I am not 
afraid of information, but go ahead.
    Senator Peters. That is great.
    Last, I would like to enter into the record a statement 
from Freedom House President Michael Abramowitz.\5\ Freedom 
House is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to the 
expansion of freedom and democracy across the world. Without 
objection, Mr. Chairman.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \5\ The statement referenced by Senator Peters appears in the 
Appendix on page 286.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Chairman Johnson. Without objection.
    Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Johnson. Again, I do not see anything dangerous 
about evaluating information, about doing legitimate 
congressional oversight. Nothing dangerous about that 
whatsoever. As I said in my last hearing, close-mindedness is a 
real problem for a lot of the issues we face today.
    I should have entered into the record the Reuters article 
from March 7, 2018, describing the letter from Senators 
Klobuchar and Shaheen.\6\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \6\ The article referenced by Senator Johnson appears in the 
Appendix on page 126.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    I will also enter 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.\7\ This is Senator Peters joining in writing this 
letter. ``The integrity of our elections remains 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 the 2016 and 2018 elections. . . . a 
combination of older legacy machines and newer systems, 
vulnerabilities in each present a problem for the security of 
our democracy and they must be addressed''--until, I guess, 
right now let us move on, let us not worry about this, because 
if we look at this, it is dangerous to our democracy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \7\ The letter referenced by Senator Johnson appears in the 
Appendix on page 120.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Also the December 6, 2019, letters written by Senators 
Warren, Klobuchar, Wyden, and Congressman Pocan to those 
equipment manufacturers.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The letter referenced by Senator Johnson appears in the 
Appendix on page 105.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    I would also like to enter the responses from Dominion and 
Hart to the March 27th letter, but the Ranking Member's staff 
had an objection. Do you object to that, the responses? OK. So 
we will enter those in the record.\2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \2\ The responses from Dominion and Hart referenced by Senator 
Johnson appears in the Appendix on page 126.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Finally, there is a really interesting article recently 
written by Matt Taibbi who, again, I do not 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. Taibbi. I think he might be a little bit left of center. 
But the title is, ``The YouTube Ban Is Un-American, Wrong, and 
Will Backfire. Silicon Valley could not have designed a better 
way to further radicalize Trump voters.'' The reason I want to 
enter this article into the record,\3\ I really hope people 
will read it because it really speaks to an awful lot that I 
covered in my opening statement of why we are in this 
unsustainable state of affairs in this country where, after 
2016, 4 years of resistance, refusing to recognize the 
legitimacy of that election, and here we are again. This is not 
sustainable.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \3\ The article referenced by Senator Johnson appears in the 
Appendix on page 128.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    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 will raise your right hand. You here in 
person, please rise and raise your right hand. Do you solemnly 
swear that the testimony you will give before this Committee 
will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, 
so help you, God?
    Mr. Starr. I do.
    Mr. Palmer. I do.
    Mr. Troupis. I do.
    Mr. Ryan. I do.
    Mr. Binnall. I do.
    Mr. Krebs. I do.
    Our first witness is coming via Webex, Judge Ken Starr. 
Judge Starr served as a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of 
Appeals from 1983 to 1989. Mr. Starr has 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 Counsel 
for five investigations. Mr. Starr has had a distinguished 
career in academia and continues to write articles and serve as 
a guest commentator on a variety of media programs. Judge 
Starr.

 TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE KENNETH W. STARR,\4\ TESTIFYING IN 
                     HIS PERSONAL CAPACITY

    Mr. Starr. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member 
Peters and Members of the Committee. It is an honor to be with 
you, even remotely.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \4\ The prepared statement of Mr. Starr appears in the Appendix on 
page 74.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    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.'' 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 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). Of 
course, along the way, Congress acted to foster the values of 
the 15th Amendment through passage of the Voting Rights Act of 
1965 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 unconscionably 
stymied in her effort simply to register to vote. Dishonesty 
caused 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 bears 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.
    Not surprisingly, the Supreme Court of the United States 
has severely warned about the dangers and the corrosive effects 
of dishonesty. Here is what a unanimous Supreme Court wrote in 
2006: ``Confidence in the integrity of our electoral process is 
essential to the functioning of our participatory democracy.'' 
The Court went on to say: ``Voter fraud drives honest citizens 
out of the democratic process and breeds distrust of our form 
of government.''
    How do we achieve honesty and integrity in elections? It is 
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 rules. Indeed, 
both Article I and Article II point out the approach of our 
decentralized government, and that is, we look to the States 
but specifically State legislatures--both Article I, Section 4 
of the Constitution and Article II, Section 1, Clause 2.
    And so as in much of life, the guardrails 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.
    As we will be exploring in this hearing, the Presidential 
election of 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.
    Instead of pointing to examples such as in Pennsylvania 
where there was a clear violation of the law and then the 
statement of 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-in ballots.
    I think in the spirit of the Carter-Baker Commission, it is 
wise for us, since the warning that they had with respect to 
mail-in ballots, 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.
    Chairman Johnson. 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 
served as an intelligence officer and a judge advocate general. 
Commissioner Palmer.

TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE DONALD PALMER,\1\ COMMISSIONER, U.S. 
                 ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMMISSION

    Mr. Palmer. Good morning, Chairman Johnson and Members of 
the Committee, and Ranking Member. I am thankful for the 
opportunity to testify before you this morning on the 2020 
general election and the efforts of the Election Assistance 
Commission to secure the Nation's 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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Palmer appears in the Appendix on 
page 78.
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    As the only Federal agency completely dedicated to election 
administration, the EAC is charged with facilitating secure, 
lawful, and accessible elections. Under the Help America Vote 
Act (HAVA), the EAC is 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 EAC has confidence in the voting 
systems we certify and in the State and local election 
administrators who ran the election; first and foremost, that 
is 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 (NIST). There 
are currently two accredited voting system laboratories: Pro 
Verification and Validation (Pro V&V) 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 anomalies 
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 and 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 election jurisdictions in the United 
States. It is a voluntary program. Joining the program requires 
that manufacturers voluntarily agree to the program's 
requirements as outlined in the program manual.
    Requirements include complying with all EAC inquiries and 
investigations into the usage and status of fielded EAC-
certified voting systems. Under our quality monitoring program, 
these investigations may arise due to technical failures 
experienced in the field by election administrators, 
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 EAC staffed 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 system manufacturers to obtain 
any information on claims of irregularities reported in the 
media during the general election. This effort is ongoing.
    Jurisdictions across the United States also perform a 
series of logic and accuracy tests prior to operating those 
voting machines in polling places. We supports 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 am going to conclude with stating that we recognize the 
need to do more than ever to strengthen confidence in the 
integrity of our elections. HAVA set forth an ambitious agenda 
for the EAC, one rooted in protecting the foundation of our 
democracy. Despite the challenges in recent years, the EAC has 
faithfully fulfilled its obligations and even expanded the 
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 am happy to answer any questions following this 
testimony. Thank you.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Commissioner Palmer.
    Our next witness is here in person, James Troupis. Mr. 
Troupis serves as the lead attorney for the Trump campaign in 
Wisconsin. From 2015 to 2016, Mr. Troupis served as the circuit 
court judge in Dane County, Wisconsin. He is currently a 
partner at the Troupis Law Office. Mr. Troupis.

   TESTIMONY OF JAMES R. TROUPIS, ATTORNEY, TROUPIS LAW FIRM

    Mr. Troupis. I am honored to be here, Senator. Thank you 
for the invitation.
    I have submitted written testimony, which I would ask be in 
the record,\1\ and I am going to provide additional remarks at 
this point.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Troupis appears in the Appendix 
on page 81.
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    Chairman Johnson. By the way, without objection, 
everybody's submitted testimony is automatically entered into 
the record. So go ahead.
    Mr. Troupis. Thank you. Absentee voting in Wisconsin is 
treated quite differently, I believe, than other parts of the 
country. Let me read for you what the legislature found. It is 
in our statute. 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. Results which do not 
comply with those regulations ``may not be included in the 
certified result of any election.'' So it is 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 a recount. We had more than 
2,500 volunteers, or probably more than 1,000 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 is not conspiracy. The real names are in 
the record. Here is 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 is 
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 advance voting. We allow in-
person and other voting as absentee. 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, 5 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 is it. Nothing else is allowed. And 
yet the city of Madison, we had 17,271 ballots in this category 
that we identify. There are tens of thousands more because they 
commingled the ballots afterwards so we could not identify each 
one that may have been improperly cast.
    Then we have an interesting category called ``indefinitely 
confined.'' These are people which the statute--I will read 
from the statute--``by age, physical illness, or infirmity or 
are disabled indefinitely.'' Among those claiming this status--
so they do not have to provide any identification. Among those 
claiming this status is one of the electors for Joe Biden, who 
said, ``I cannot 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 cannot 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 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 taint on our 
election in Wisconsin.
    Thank you.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Troupis. I believe Joe 
Biden won our State by about 20,000 votes?
    Mr. Troupis. Correct.
    Chairman Johnson. You are talking about over 200,000 that 
were outside of our law that probably, if the law would have 
been followed, should not have been counted.
    Mr. Troupis. Correct.
    Chairman Johnson. Should not have been accepted and should 
not have been put in the ballot pool. Of course, the remedy is 
not particularly pleasing, which is one of the reasons the 
decision went its way. I will come back to you.
    Our next witness is via Webex, Representative Francis Ryan. 
Representative Ryan has served in the Pennsylvania House of 
Representatives since 2016. Mr. Ryan is a certified public 
accountant (CPA) and, prior to his election, ran a practice 
that focused on corporate restructurings and management. Mr. 
Ryan is a retired Marine Reserve Colonel who served as the 
Central Command special operations officer in Operation 
Enduring Freedom. Representative Ryan.

     TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE FRANCIS X. RYAN,\1\ STATE 
          REPRESENTATIVE, COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA

    Mr. Ryan. Thank you so much for the chance to be with you 
today.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Ryan appears in the Appendix on 
page 86.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The mail in-ballots system for the general election in 2020 
in Pennsylvania was so fraught with inconsistencies and 
irregularities that the reliability of the mail-in votes in the 
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is almost impossible to rely upon.
    The evidence of these violations of the Pennsylvania 
election laws as enacted, the election security safeguards, and 
the process flaws include things such as:
    Actions by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court which undermined 
the controls inherent in Act 77 of 2019. The controls which 
were undermined included: on September 17, 2020, the Supreme 
Court unilaterally extended the deadline for mail-in ballots to 
be received to 3 days after the election; they mandated that 
the ballots mailed without a postmark would be presumed to be 
received, and allowed the use of drop boxes for collection 
votes.
    Then, on October 23, 2020, upon a petition from the 
Secretary of the Commonwealth, ruled that mail-in ballots need 
not authenticate signatures for the mail-in ballots, thereby 
treating in-person and mail-in voters dissimilarly and 
eliminating a critical safeguard against potential election 
fraud. This is one of my main reasons for believing that it is 
difficult to believe that the mail-in 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 2, the night before the November 3 election and 
prior to the prescribed time for pre-canvassing mail-in 
ballots, the office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth 
encouraged certain counties to notify party and candidate 
representatives of mail-in voters whose ballots contained 
defects.
    In certain counties, watchers were not allowed to 
meaningfully observe the pre-canvassing and canvassing 
activities related to the absentee and the mail-in ballot 
process.
    Those were at what I would call the strategic level. At the 
operational level, there were a significant number of issues 
that resulted from those issues.
    The Pennsylvania election system is the Statewide Uniform 
Registry of Electors (SURE) system, and some of the issues that 
took place actually called into question the consistency. For 
example, in the case of an over-vote in the case of 
Philadelphia County, on November 4th at 11:30, the Department 
of State posted updated mail-in vote counts for Philadelphia 
County, showing 508,112 ballots despite the fact that only 
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 4, 2020, the 
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Open Data record site reported 
3.1 million mail-in 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.
    Recently, a newly available data voter set from 
data.pa.gov, which had been offline for weeks, indicated that 
the last update had been done on November 16, 2020. The 
download of November 16, 2020, shows 75,505 more ballots 
returned on November 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, or 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 
154,584 ballots.
    Voter date of birth irregularities, meaning voters over 100 
years of age: 1,573 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 3, 2020, the 
efforts by the State Government Committee and other members of 
the Pennsylvania Legislature to obtain oversight information 
and relevant data to confirm or deny claims of improprieties 
were stymied. Even an effort to have a hearing on November 20, 
2020, with Dominion Systems was canceled after Dominion Systems 
indicated they were concerned about litigation concerns.
    Candidly, without knowing the answers to these questions 
and due to the magnitude of the potential discrepancies and 
closeness of the election, the results of the 2020 Presidential 
election in Pennsylvania would just be completely difficult, if 
not impossible, to determine with conclusiveness.
    Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member, thank you so much for your 
time, and I look forward to your questions.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Representative Ryan.
    Our next witness is Jesse Binnall--did I get that right?
    Mr. Binnall. You did.
    Chairman Johnson. Wow. Mr. Binnall is an attorney for the 
Trump campaign and is lead counsel for the campaign in Nevada. 
He is currently a partner at the law firm of Harvey & Binnall. 
Mr. Binnall.

 TESTIMONY OF JESSE BINNALL,\1\ PARTNER, HARVEY & BINNALL, PLLC

    Mr. Binnall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member 
Peters, and Members of the Committee.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Binnal appears in the Appendix on 
page 88.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    This year, thousands upon thousands of Nevada voters had 
their voices canceled out by election fraud and invalid 
ballots. Here is how it happened.
    On August 3, 2020, after a rushed special session, Nevada 
legislators made drastic changes to the State's election law by 
adopting a bill known as Assembly Bill No. 4 (AB 4). 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 AB 4, the number 
of mail ballots rocketed from about 70,000 in 2016 to over 
690,000 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 is what we found. Over 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 Bill, and individuals 
who were registered both under a married name and a maiden 
name.
    At least 1,500 dead people are recorded as voting, as shown 
by comparing the list of mail voters with the Social Security 
death records.
    More than 19,000 people voted even though they did not live 
in Nevada. This does not include military voters or students. 
These voters were identified by comparing the lists of voters 
with the U.S. Postal Service's (USPS) National Change of 
Address database, among other sources.
    About 8,000 people voted from nonexistent addresses. Here 
we cross-referenced 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 nonresidential addresses 
and addresses vacant for more than 90 days.
    Incredibly, almost 4,000 noncitizens also voted, as 
determined by comparing official Department of Motor Vehicles 
(DMV) records of noncitizens 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 explained 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 Universal Serial Bus (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 marginalized populations, by 
requiring people to prove 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 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (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.
    And wrapping up, Mr. Chairman, these findings are 
disturbing, alarming, and unacceptable in a free society. Our 
free and fair election tradition is a precious treasure that we 
are charged with protecting. Government by the consent of the 
governed 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.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Binnall.
    Our final witness is also here in person, Christopher 
Krebs. He has testified before this Committee a number of 
times. Mr. Krebs served as the first Director of the Department 
of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure 
Security Agency. Mr. Krebs also served in various roles at the 
Department, responsible for a range of cybersecurity, critical 
information, and national resilience issues. Prior to coming to 
DHS, he directed U.S. cybersecurity policy for Microsoft. 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.

  TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE CHRISTOPHER C. KREBS,\1\ FORMER 
 DIRECTOR (2018-20) CYBERSECURITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY 
          AGENCY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

    Mr. Krebs. Chairman Johnson, Ranking Member Peters, and 
Members of the Committee, as you know, I previously served as 
the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security 
Agency. This was the job of a lifetime for me and a tremendous 
opportunity to serve the Nation.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Krebs appear in the Appendix on 
page 90.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    When I sat before this Committee in 2018 for my 
confirmation hearing, I could not have imagined how challenging 
and rewarding this job would be. That is why it is such an 
honor to appear before this Committee today to testify about 
the extraordinary efforts of the election security community to 
protect the 2020 election, a difficult task complicated by the 
ongoing global pandemic.
    Before I get into the substance of my remarks, I am 
grateful to this Committee and your leadership and your 
guidance over the last several years, first in shepherding what 
is probably the best of the 100 bills that came through the 
Committee, your efforts for the CISA authorizing statute, and 
your support of CISA's efforts securing our elections.
    The Nation should also thank the many Federal, State, and 
local government election partners for the crucial work that 
has 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 cannot allow that to happen again, 
the CISA 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 needed 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 CISA's relationships with key partners 
through constant engagement and building an election security 
community of practice. This improvement is 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 sensors, among other measures. While we were 
principally focused on stopping actual hacks, we also had to 
content 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, 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 
Commitment, the Department of Defense (DOD), and the 
intelligence community (IC). It was based on an intimate 
understanding of how our elections work here in the United 
States. 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.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Krebs, for your past 
service. By the way, I think under both the Obama 
Administration and the Trump administration, while I have been 
Chairman, I think DHS, now in the form of CISA, has done a very 
good job. As you talked about, from 82 to 95 percent paper 
ballots, that is improving our election integrity. I appreciate 
all your efforts and really all the men and women who work 
within DHS and CISA to do that.
    Mr. Troupis, 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 describe exactly, in summary fashion, what the Wisconsin 
Supreme Court decision was based on your lawsuit talking about 
all the areas that you have a concern with?
    Mr. Troupis. Certainly. The Wisconsin Supreme Court was 
urged by the Biden campaign not to address any substantive 
issues, and that is exactly what happened. The Biden campaign 
argued to the court that we are not going to talk about any of 
the substantive things; we are not even going to dispute the 
things I just brought up to you; but instead you just should 
not hear them because a State agency, the Wisconsin Election 
Commission, had authorized some of these activities. Candidly, 
as Chief Justice Roggensack 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 4 months ago 
has no meaning. It is not law. It is some advice given and that 
the statute should 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 an analysis of the 
claims. It is an idea that we should not have a transparent 
system that you are not going to address these things, and that 
is what they argued.
    So it is disappointing, especially in Wisconsin. 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 is really a sad day, 
frankly, when the opposition does not argue we are wrong; it 
argues we should not be heard. That is a strange thing in a 
State that is so transparent as ours.
    Chairman Johnson. Just real quick, I know former Director 
Krebs talked about the men and women who run these elections. I 
had about at least a half-hour phone conversation with the 
county clerk of my town of Oshkosh voting precinct who gave me 
all kinds of good information. I will tell you, if every county 
clerk ran their elections like Jeanette Merten does, we would 
have a completely secure election. I think that is true of the 
vast majority of elections in different precincts.
    Mr. Binnall, Mr. Troupis is talking about the law that he 
was arguing before the Wisconsin Supreme Court was basically 
ignored. You had a similar statement, that it was not that the 
information that you just presented to the Committee--it was 
never rebutted; it was simply ignored. Can you talk about that?
    Mr. Binnall. 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 could not 
introduce any live testimony but only 15 depositions--we could 
only use 15 depositions to show 130,000 instances of voter 
fraud. And then when it went to the Supreme Court of Nevada, 
they gave us 2 hours to brief the issues before immediately 
coming down with a decision. Our 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.
    Chairman Johnson. Mr. Krebs, you have testified here on 
this specific issue, the potential for foreign interference to 
have an impact on our elections. We have had private 
conversations. I have always categorized the ability for 
foreigners to interfere with an election in kind of three 
buckets: one is changing the vote tallies on the machines; 
second is hacking into voter registration files, which could 
cause all kinds of problems, but quite honestly, probably would 
be detected on election day when there is chaos; and then, 
third, what I think is a more serious problem, the one more 
difficult to detect, is basically the use of social media.
    You quoted the CISA group that declared this the most 
secure election in our history?
    Mr. Krebs. Yes, sir, that was the joint Government 
Coordinating Council (GCC) and Sector Coordinating Councils' 
(SCC) statement.
    Chairman Johnson. OK. One of the reasons I have always 
stated based on our discussions of your testimony, to my 
knowledge it is almost impossible to change the vote tally by 
hacking into these computers was based on the fact that these 
things are not connected and most of them do not even have the 
capability of being connected to the Internet. Based on all 
these allegations people are talking to, it sounds like some of 
these machines or certainly the tabulators can and are 
connected to the Internet.
    So can you just kind of explain to me, the whole voting 
machine tabulation, Internet connections, is just a huge 
confusing mess. Can you speak to that?
    Mr. Krebs. I think it is important to step back 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 have the paper receipt----
    Chairman Johnson. But let me stop you there. I acknowledge 
that, yes, the paper backup is the control--if it is used. That 
was going to be my next question. So set aside the control of 
the machine process. What is capable--again, I kind of want to 
know on what basis, what aspects of this is the most secure? 
Because when you listen to Mr. Troupis and Mr. Binnall, there 
was fraud in this election. I do not have any doubt about that. 
There was fraud. We just do not know the extent, and we do not 
know what the remedy would be when identified. OK?
    Again, just speak to the computer aspect of this, the 
connection to the Internet, the possibility if these machines 
are connected to 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 people attempted 
to change the controls or the program in these computers inside 
that certification process.
    But, Mr. Krebs, just talk to the computer aspect of this 
because, again, it is the most difficult, confusing aspect of 
these allegations.
    Mr. Krebs. Yes, 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 and into the tabulation and 
post-election process. Throughout, 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.
    Chairman Johnson. But some have the capability, don't they?
    Mr. Krebs. Some may have modems that are typically 
disabled, but in certain States, I believe in Wisconsin some 
are temporarily activated to transmit some counts. But, again, 
when you have paper and you can conduct a post-election audit--
--
    Chairman Johnson. Again, if they are----
    Mr. Krebs. Important security control that----
    Chairman Johnson. Oh, absolutely.
    Mr. Krebs. Technology in 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 process.
    Chairman Johnson. Again, finish this aspect of the computer 
thing. My time has already expired, but we will come back to 
how many audits, the statistical sampling, that type of thing, 
to use those paper backups to the electronic voting. But, you 
know, finish this----
    Mr. Krebs. Right. As you move out from election day, there 
will be tabulators that may have Internet connections to 
transmit the vote from the precinct to the county level, to the 
State, again security controls in place. As long as you have 
the paper--you cannot hack paper--you can run that process.
    Chairman Johnson. But those tabulators are connected on 
election day because that is how they transmit the data to the 
counties and also into the unofficial----
    Mr. Krebs. In some cases, yes, sir.
    Chairman Johnson. Yes, OK. I will follow up. Senator 
Peters.
    Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    I have questions for Mr. Krebs, but before I get to that, I 
just want to be clear. We have heard a number of statements 
made by other witnesses. We have heard those statements before. 
We are continuing to hear those statements. I would just say to 
anybody who is watching this hearing, look at the 60 court 
cases that have been brought before the judiciary in this 
country and how the arguments--or I should say the statements. 
They are not really arguments. They are statements that have 
been made. They 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 are putting into the record.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The documents referenced by Ranking Member Peters appear in the 
Appendix on page 145.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Mr. Krebs, CISA has the primary responsibility for working 
with State and local election officials and the private sector 
to secure our election infrastructure. It is important for 
folks to realize where you sat and what were your 
responsibilities. 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. By all 
accounts, you were very successful at that.
    President Trump's own Department of Justice concluded, and 
I am going to quote the Department of Justice in the Trump 
administration, ``We have not seen fraud on a scale that could 
have effected a different outcome in the election.''
    The Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating 
Council, Executive Committee on 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 called this 
``the most secure in American history.''
    You also echoed this statement, and when you echoed that 
statement, you were fired by President Trump. He did not want 
to hear that, clearly.
    So my question to you: Do you stand by that statement? Have 
you seen anything in the weeks since November 4th that would 
lead you to change your mind? And have you identified any 
credible claim of widespread election irregularities?
    Mr. Krebs. I stand by the claim. I said it in my opening 
statement. It is my written testimony. I have yet to see 
anything from a security perspective that would change my 
opinion on that. Fraud is a different matter. It is a criminal 
matter. But, again, bolstered by the Attorney General's (AG) 
statement from last week or recently, again, nothing to change 
my opinion of that matter.
    Senator Peters. So yet despite more than 5 weeks now that 
the President has lost and numerous public officials have 
continued to pressure State and local elected officials to push 
what is a demonstrably false narrative that election 
irregularities should somehow make him a winner of this race, 
you have willingly--in fact, these folks are willingly fanning 
the flames of discontent, and they are 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 credible evidence?
    Mr. Krebs. I think generally from a timing perspective, 
particularly with the seating of the Electoral College and 306 
electoral votes for President-elect Biden, I think we are 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 only serve to 
undermine confidence in the process is ultimately, as you both 
have said, ultimately corrosive to the institutions that 
support elections, and going forward it will be that much 
harder.
    The trick about elections is that, you are not so much 
trying to convince the winner they won; it is the loser that 
they lost. You need willing participants on both sides, and I 
think we have to get back to that point. Otherwise, we are 
going to have a very difficult time going forward maintaining 
confidence in this American experiment.
    Senator Peters. During the 2016 election, we saw foreign 
disinformation campaigns trying to sow doubt about the 
integrity of our election. We have seen that before, very 
clearly, in 2016, and certainly all in the intelligence 
community in this country back that up. In fact, CISA'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 do not have to be technologically advanced. 
Our adversaries do not have to be creative to sow 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 is a former FBI agent and a 
disinformation expert. As he put it, which I think is very 
strong, he said, ``Nothing that Russia, Iran, or China could 
say is anywhere near as wild as what the President is saying.''
    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 hearing here, 
we are hearing these statements again, that are broadly 
claiming systemic irregularities where none exist? How damaging 
is that?
    Mr. Krebs. So 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 would 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 
cybersecurity nature that were emerging in the days and weeks 
following the election. I will specifically talk about the 
``Hammer and Scorecard'' claims, that there was a CIA super 
computer and program that were flipping votes throughout the 
country, in Georgia specifically.
    But, again, Chairman Johnson, I am going to keep coming 
back to it. That is why it is so important to have a paper 
trail. That is why it is so important to have paper ballots, so 
even if there was foreign interference of a malicious algorithm 
nature, you can always go back to the receipts. You can check 
your math. Georgia did that three times, and the outcomes were 
consistent over and over and over again.
    Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Johnson. Which, by the way, is precisely why I 
brought that up in my opening statement. That should 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, 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 Andrii 
Derkach. I had never heard of the person until they brought it 
up. Senator Peters introduced that false information, Russian 
disinformation, into our investigation record. Fifty people 
associated with the intelligence community after our Hunter 
Biden investigation and the revelations of the Hunter Biden 
computer said, oh, this is Russian disinformation. Now we find 
out it is a real investigation by the Justice Department.
    So it is just galling, and I just have to point out that 
the purveyors of Russian disinformation, Hillary Clinton's 
campaign, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Steele 
dossier, Ranking Member Peters accusing Senator Grassley and I 
of disseminating Russian disinformation, that is where the 
disinformation is coming. That is where the false information, 
the lies, the false allegations. I cannot sit by here and 
listen to this and say that this is not disinformation in this 
hearing today. This is getting information we have to take a 
look at to restore confidence in our election integrity. We are 
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.
    Senator Peters. Mr. Chairman, I have to respond to that. 
You are saying I am putting out information----
    Chairman Johnson. Try.
    Senator Peters. One, I had nothing to do with this report--
--
    Chairman Johnson. You lied repeatedly----
    Senator Peters. I did not----
    Chairman Johnson. You lied repeatedly in the press that I 
was spreading Russian disinformation, and that was an outright 
lie, and I told you to stop lying, and you continued to do it.
    Senator Peters. Mr. Chairman, this is not about airing your 
grievances. I do not know what rabbit hole you are running 
down----
    Chairman Johnson. You talked about Russian disinformation.
    Senator Peters. You are rushing down rabbit holes.
    Chairman Johnson. Senator Paul.
    Senator Peters. This is simply not what we are dealing 
with.
    Chairman Johnson. Senator Paul.
    Senator Peters. No, Mr. Chairman, you cannot make false 
allegations and then drop it there. That is why this 
Committee----
    Chairman Johnson. Senator Paul.
    Senator Peters [continuing]. Needs to return back to----
    This is terrible what you are doing to this Committee, and 
all the great work that you talked about----
    Chairman Johnson. It is what you have done to this 
Committee----
    Senator Peters. It is not the case----
    Chairman Johnson [continuing]. Falsely accusing the 
Chairman of spreading disinformation. Nothing could have been 
further from the truth, and you are spouting it again, which is 
why I had----
    Senator Peters. Oh, come on, Mr. Chairman. This is 
outrageous.

               OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PAUL

    Senator Paul. Judge Starr, it has been alleged that 60 
courts have refused to hear these cases; therefore, there was 
no fraud in the election. 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 is 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?
    Mr. Starr. 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. 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. The entirety of the 
decision was based upon the legal concept of standing. You just 
do not, 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 
our union that the argument is, I think, quite reasonable, and 
I think others think it is quite reasonable, that at least the 
matter should have been heard under the original jurisdiction. 
I think that is a key example.
    Senator Paul. Yes, and I think it is important, though, 
that we look at this and understand what courts are saying and 
not saying. The courts have not said there was not fraud. The 
courts just simply did not rule on or hear from the fraud.
    I do think there is 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 have to change the rules 
or reevaluate our State rules in order that this does not 
happen again. We cannot just sit by and say, we are 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 do not know if it can be heard beyond the 
election, but I think it should. This is the question of 
whether or not people who are nonlegislators can change the 
election law. This happened in 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 is any hope for any of this being heard, 
Judge Starr? Outside of the concept of changing the election, 
is there any possibility any court is 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 is no hope because it is 
mixed up in electoral politics? Judge Starr.
    Mr. 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. I think there is a doctrine, Senator Paul, to 
essentially say this issue may recur again. It should not be 
washed out as being moot because there is a very important 
principle here, as I said in my opening statement and in 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.
    Senator Paul. Yes, 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 v. Gore in the sense that 
I think Bush v. Gore's precedent is shutting down elections 
that have been certified. They were not going to continue to 
count the hanging chads. The Secretary of State had certified 
it. I actually think that the Bush v. Gore precedent actually 
argues against the Supreme Court overturning certified 
elections. Do you have an opinion on that?
    Mr. Starr. I do not 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 is also what Justice Alito said in his opinion, I think 
essentially condemning but certainly identifying as a huge 
issue what had happened in Pennsylvania. I think all in all, 
Bush v. Gore is just a reiteration of our constitutional 
structure.
    Senator Paul. Thank you.
    Mr. Chairman, as we go on with this, I think it is 
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 is 
not in our purview. But the State laws are set, and then we 
have Federal elections. So what we have heard about what 
happened in Wisconsin and what happened in Nevada I think is 
absolutely true, and we have to prevent it from happening 
again.
    I think State legislatures will need to reaffirm that 
election law can only be changed by a State legislature. I 
think there is 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 are going to do to make sure election law is upheld, not 
changed by people who are not legislators. We do have an 
interest in that. I do not want it to be Federal laws. Many on 
the other side of the aisle would just as soon Federalize it 
and mail everybody a ballot and we will have this universal 
corruption throughout the land. But what I think we need to do 
is keep it at the State level, but we cannot just say it did 
not happen. We cannot just say, oh, 4,000 people voted in 
Nevada that were noncitizens and we are just going to ignore 
it, we are going to sweep it under the rug, the courts have 
decided the facts? The courts have not decided the facts. The 
courts never looked at the facts. The courts do not like 
elections, and 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 will be fixed is by in the future reinforcing the laws.
    And then a last comment I would say on what Mr. Krebs--and 
he can speak for himself, but I think his job was keeping the 
foreigners out of the election, and it was the most secure 
election based on security of the Internet and technology. But 
he never has voiced an opinion--he is welcome to today--on 
whether or not dead people voted. I do not think he examined 
that. Did he examine noncitizens voting? So to say it was the 
safest election, sure, I agree with your statement if you are 
referring to foreign intervention. But if you are saying it is 
the safest election based on no dead people voted, no 
noncitizens voted, no people broke the absentee rules, I think 
that is false. I think that is what has upset a lot of people 
on our side, is that they are taking your statement to mean, 
oh, well, there was no problem in the election. I do not think 
you examined any of the problems that we have heard here, so, 
really, you are just referring to something differently, the 
way I look at it.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Senator Lankford. [Presiding.] Senator Carper.

              OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER

    Senator Carper. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. To our witnesses, 
those that are here and those that are afar, we welcome you.
    I just want to say to Chris Krebs on behalf of many of us 
on both sides of the aisle, thank you for your leadership and 
for a job well done. Thank you for your courage to speak truth 
to power.
    Mr. Chairman and colleagues, President Lincoln once said 
these words. He said, ``If given the truth, people can be 
depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is 
to bring them the real facts.'' Those were his words. That is 
what we in the Navy call ``the straight skinny.'' With all due 
respect, the American people have had the facts with respect to 
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 received more votes than any ticket in 
American history. That is a success for our democracy. It is 
something we ought to be celebrating. A success made possible 
in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic, thanks to ordinary 
citizens who volunteered as poll workers across the country. 
Many of them risked their own health to oversee a fair count 
while hundreds of thousands of postal workers worked tirelessly 
to deliver absentee ballots.
    The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, 
ably led by Chris Krebs, has called this election the ``most 
secure in American history.'' He has called it that again here 
today. Throughout this country, courts have flat-out rejected 
claims of election irregularities. Conservative Trump-appointed 
judges in State after State have dismissed the Trump campaign's 
claims, calling them ``baseless'' and worse. Let me just cite a 
couple of examples.
    In response to the legal challenge from the Trump campaign 
in Pennsylvania, a Federal judge, appointed by President Trump 
and a long-time member of the conservative Federalist Society, 
wrote that, ``Charges of unfairness are serious, but calling an 
election `unfair' does not make it so. Charges require specific 
allegations and then proof.''
    He went on to say, ``We have neither here.''
    One of the most strongly worded opinions came from a 
Wisconsin State justice who served as president of a chapter of 
Federalist Society and as chief legal counsel to former 
Republican Governor Scott Walker. Here is what he said: 
``Something far more fundamental than the winner of Wisconsin's 
electoral votes is implicated in this case.'' He wrote that in 
declining to hear a case asking the court to overturn the 
election results.
    He went on to say this: ``At stake is faith in our of free 
and fair elections, a feature central to the enduring strength 
of our constitutional republic.''
    To that, I think we should all just say, ``Amen.''
    We learned this week that the arguments from the Trump 
legal team thus far have been defeated 59 times out of 61 in 
State and Federal courts. Fifty-nine times, including 9-zip by 
the Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court, just last week.
    I am wearing my mask here for my alma mater, undergraduate 
alma mater of Ohio State where I was a Navy Reserve Officers 
Training Corps (ROTC) midshipman. But if the football coach at 
Ohio State were to go 2-59 over a period of 4 years, he would 
be fired. That is 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, in 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 3 
million votes, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won it by a whopping 
7 million votes, and they received 306 votes in the Electoral 
College just earlier this week, a margin described 4 years ago 
by Candidate Trump as a ``landslide.''
    What if the outcome is not as definitive 4 years from now 
or 8 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 steal an election, as is alleged here 
falsely. Think about that. It somehow might be able to steal an 
election. Friends, that ought to scare the hell out of all of 
us.
    Meanwhile, many of the President's supporters across the 
country continue to spread misinformation and 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 Democrats, they voted 
Republicans. They voted for Republicans in congressional races, 
in State legislative races, and more. You know what we call 
that in Delaware? We call it ``ticket splitting.'' It is as old 
as our democracy. It is not a conspiracy. It is plain and 
simple ticket splitting. We have done it before, and we are 
going to do it again.
    Let me go on to say that what we say 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. Georgia's Secretary of State and 
his family have received death threats.
    Mr. Krebs, 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 and shot.''
    And just this week, ``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 is 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 home 
workers who just need a break. But it is 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. They 
disagreed on a lot of things, but they all agreed on this: They 
did not want a king. Responding to arguments for the Trump 
legal team in Wisconsin, a member of the State Supreme Court 
there echoed sentiments recently when she said to them, ``You 
want us to overturn this election so that your king can stay in 
power? That is un-American.'' And you know what? She was right. 
It is un-American.
    Mr. Chairman and colleagues--the Chairman is not sitting 
here; he is out voting. But when Chairman Johnson became the 
leader of this Committee in 2015, he pledged to run this 
Committee, and I quote, ``with a spirit of bipartisan team 
work, respect, integrity, and professionalism.'' That has 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, 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, and I quote, ``The peaceful 
transition of power from one administration to the next is the 
hallmark of our democracy.''
    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.
    Sadly, I fear that today's hearing may not be truly 
reflective of those words. I hope I am wrong. But if I am not, 
today's hearing could prove deeply disappointing to me and to 
the 330 million people that we serve across this Nation. Let us 
not disappoint them.
    As we continue with this hearing today, I would just say to 
our Chairman, you asked our witnesses to stand and take an oath 
to tell the truth. It is only fair for all of us to hold 
ourselves to the same standard. If our Nation's leaders do not 
embrace the truth in our daily discourse, then we no longer 
have a democracy that will endure. Calling an election 
``unfair'' does not make it so, and spreading misinformation in 
this Committee or any committee does not just stay inside these 
four walls.
    I will 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 is what he said: 
``If the people know the truth, they will not make a mistake.''
    ``If the people know the truth, they will not make a 
mistake.''
    So let us tell them the truth. Let us 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.

             OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LANKFORD

    Senator Lankford. Thank you. The Chairman ran down to vote 
quickly, and we are in the middle of a vote series, and so we 
are going to maintain the hearing and continue to be able to 
move through this hearing process, though there are two votes, 
and so you will see us switching back and forth while he is 
running to vote. I am going to sit in for a moment for the 
Chairman, and I am going to recognize myself for the next round 
of questions. I happen to be next in line, so I am not actually 
pulling time here. But I want to be able to recognize myself 
and be able to do that. When he returns, we will switch out, 
and I will run to vote. And then we will run back and forth.
    In 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 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 could protect our next 
election. Senator Klobuchar and I worked for years on election 
security legislation and worked 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 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 percent, that 
they believed 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 determine 
do things need to change. Much of the work that has gone on in 
the last several years to be able to get paper ballots into 
States happened because this Congress engaged on an issue where 
we saw an obvious problem. And so we distributed Federal 
dollars, assistance, and a constant drumbeat to say these 
States have to fix the areas where they do not 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 is 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 problems, 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. One side is now saying, ``Let 
us 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 listening to other 
States that were saying things like, ``We do not know how many 
more ballots there are left to count.'' We had been done for a 
week. We and 27 other States had been completed for a week. 
That gives opportunities for fraud and questions and problems. 
That is a reasonable question to ask.
    It is 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 is 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 did not 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 lived there?
    I have talked to Nevada residents that received multiple 
ballots at their home for people that no longer live there. 
That is a problem. We should at least admit that is a problem. 
For some reason, the other side was very focused on we have to 
fix the potential for a problem for 2016, but in 2020 when 
there is a potential for a problem and things that have been 
shown, everyone seems to say, ``Move along. Let us not discuss 
this.''
    There is a system called the Electronic Registration 
Information Center (ERIC) system that is in place that 30 
States cooperate with. It helps them verify if people have 
moved and they are registered in two different States or if 
they have moved into your State and are registered somewhere 
else. It helps them determine if they are voting in two 
different States.
    Only 30 States use that. Other States are not. Even of the 
30 States that use it, not all of them are actually using it. 
They literally are on the system, but they are not actually 
purging their rolls 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. Ninety-
one thousand that that one system had recognized.
    There are problems in the system, and in this conversation 
that I have had with so many people and I have said, ``Is it a 
problem that people are voting in two States? Is it a problem 
that people are voting if they 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 us just move 
along.''
    Mr. Binnall, 42,000 people in Nevada voted more than once, 
according to your work in this. Forty-two thousand people. 
Fifteen hundred people voted in Nevada that were dead; 19,000 
people voted though they did not live in Nevada, and they were 
not a college student. Eight thousand people voted from a 
nonexistent address; 15,000 people voted though they were 
registered to a commercial address or a vacant address; and 
4,000 people voted in Nevada that are noncitizens.
    My question to you is: In my State, when someone votes 
twice--and we do have that occasionally, about 50 times a year 
that that actually occurs in our State--we prosecute 
individuals that vote twice. Of this 130,000 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?
    Mr. Binnall. Not yet, Senator, and that is extremely 
important. These laws have to be enforced. We, of course--I 
represent the Trump campaign and the campaign's electors. I do 
not represent the government. We cannot 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 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 is exactly what 
we are saying here today.
    Senator Lankford. Right, and that is--Mr. Chairman, could I 
ask for one additional moment?
    Judge Starr, you have raised twice this issue about 
Pennsylvania and that the laws of Pennsylvania were changed. In 
Oklahoma, we did State Bill 210 and 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, 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 and the rules for elections?
    Mr. Starr. No, it was not done, unfortunately, in 
Pennsylvania. The Governor sought to change the law. The 
General Assembly in Pennsylvania had met, reviewed, and made 
various and sundry changes and reforms. And then the 
Pennsylvania Supreme Court, building on 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.
    Senator Lankford. Judge Starr, thank you very much. Senator 
Hassan.

              OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HASSAN

    Senator Hassan. Thank you very much. I just want to test 
that folks can hear me.
    Senator Lankford. They can.
    Senator Hassan. OK. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and our 
Ranking Member. I want to also thank all our witnesses for 
being here today. I would like to specifically acknowledge 
former CISA Director Chris Krebs. Director Krebs, I want to 
thank you for your work in standing up the agency as CISA's 
first Director and in securing our elections.
    I am 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. Let us 
start with this one. As the CISA Director, you attempted to 
tackle disinformation campaigns via the rumor control effort by 
CISA. That is the name you all gave it. Rumor control is a 
resource featured on CISA's website to debunk common 
misinformation and disinformation narratives.
    First, in your time as CISA Director, were you ever asked 
by any administration official to refrain from debunking 
disinformation or misinformation?
    Mr. Krebs. 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. I never got that phone call or visit.
    Senator Hassan. But you are saying that staff did report to 
you that there was outreach from officials asking them to make 
changes?
    Mr. Krebs. Yes, ma'am.
    Senator Hassan. Were you ever asked to take down an entry 
that debunked a conspiracy theory?
    Mr. Krebs. Not directly, no, ma'am.
    Senator Hassan. Was your staff?
    Mr. Krebs. 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.
    Senator Hassan. Was it ever implied that your job was at 
stake if you did not ease up on debunking disinformation?
    Mr. Krebs. I certainly never interpreted any statements or 
anything along those lines, no, ma'am.
    Senator Hassan. I would like to explore with you further, 
perhaps after this panel, some of what you just said 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 will not or do not 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 is the goal of this disinformation 
campaign?
    Mr. Krebs. I think generally the disinformation now, 
currently particularly domestically, is being used to create 
confusion and drive a certain narrative. But our point with 
rumor control at CISA was about identifying, initially foreign 
activities, but it became more of a domestic or even uncertain 
origin, and it was things, again, like ``Hammer and 
Scorecard,'' some of these claims of malicious algorithms, and 
they were pretty straightforward to debunk in the early days, 
but they continue to this day.
    There is confusion being sown about how election machines 
are used, how they fit into the process. Even now, in Michigan 
right now, with Antrim County, there was a forensics audit done 
on some of the machines there, and there was a group that 
released a report. It is a 22-page report. I looked at it, and 
others have looked at it, and to me, it implies that those 
systems are compromised and not dependable and you cannot trust 
the votes and any other of the machines across the State.
    I was a little concerned about that, and I looked at the 
report, and it claims that there was a 60-percent error rate in 
the machines, the election management systems. So, again, I dug 
into that, and it makes the claim that then, 68 percent of the 
votes cast are, therefore, not dependable. I have seen those 
claims being repeated on social media by the campaign, by the 
President.
    I wanted to understand what that was all about. I looked at 
it, and, in fact, it was not that there were 68 percent of the 
votes that were errors. It was that the election management 
system's logs had recorded 68 percent of the logs themselves 
had some sort of alert rate. That is being used to spin that 
that machine is not trustworthy. But the problem is the report 
itself does not actually specify any of those errors except for 
one, and it is 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 into the machine and wipe 
the records.
    I looked at that, and I said, OK, I do not know if it 
actually says that, and something jumped out at me, having 
worked at Microsoft, that these are Windows-based machines. The 
election management system is a Windows-based machine, and the 
election management system is coded with a programming language 
called ``C#.'' ``There is no permission to bracket zero 
bracket'' is a place holder for a parameter, so it may be that 
it is just not good coding, but that certainly does not mean 
that somebody tried to get in there and zero. They 
misinterpreted the language in what they saw in their forensic 
audit. And that is just one example. And Commissioner Palmer, I 
am sure can talk to us about whether there is a HAVA 90-day 
safe harbor rule or which of the Voluntary Voting System 
Guidelines (VVSGs) is applicable to those machines and whether 
that machine--so I am seeing these reports that are factually 
inaccurate continue to be promoted. That is what rumor control 
is all about. That is what I am continuing to do today based on 
my experience and understanding and how these systems work. We 
have to stop this. It is undermining confidence in democracy.
    Senator Hassan. I thank you so much for that statement.
    Mr. Chair, I will 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 would like to ask it.
    Chairman Johnson. [Presiding.] Sure.
    Senator Hassan. Director Krebs, I thank you for that 
response. I think it is a very important example of the kind of 
disinformation and spinning that is happening that, frankly, 
puts confidence at risk and puts 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 
nonpartisan 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, I want you to comment to, sadly, some of these 
nonpartisan 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?
    Mr. Krebs. I am not aware of much in terms of condemning 
the threats of violence, having been a recipient of some of 
them. I think it is, again, an affront to democracy that 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 name it, 
whether it is emails, whether it is phone calls, whether it is 
people showing up at your house. This is not an America I 
recognize, and it has to stop. We need everyone across the 
leadership ranks to stand up.
    I would appreciate more support from my own party, the 
Republican Party, to call this stuff out and end it. We have to 
move on. We have a President-elect in President-elect Biden. We 
have to move on. These officials that are Republicans--look at 
Georgia: Brad Raffensperger, Gabriel Sterling, Geoff Duncan. 
These are Republicans that are putting country over party. They 
are being subjected to just horrific threats as a result. This 
is not America.
    Senator Hassan. Thank you, Mr. Krebs. Thank you, Mr. Chair, 
for your indulgence. Mr. Krebs, thank you for your patriotism.
    Chairman Johnson. Thanks, Senator Hassan.
    Senator Scott went to vote, so is Senator Rosen available?

               OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR ROSEN

    Senator Rosen. Yes, I am here. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 
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 a responsibility to our 
constituents and our Nation to defend our democratic process.
    With 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 would also publicly like to thank Nevada's election 
workers who, despite Mr. Binnall'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 that 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 
has already, unfortunately, received.
    However, we do know that foreign adversaries like Russia 
have peddled false narratives. On September 3, 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 Alethea Group, 
ahead of the election Russian media sources like RT and Sputnik 
were already pushing the narrative that the United States would 
not conduct free and fair elections. Last month, the Election 
Integrity Partnership found that social media accounts tied to 
Russian Internet Agency amplified claims of election fraud 
leading up to the 2020 election.
    Mr. Krebs, to reiterate, were there any election systems 
successfully hacked by foreign adversaries in the 2020 
election?
    Mr. Krebs. Ma'am, having been out of the job now for 5 
weeks or so, based on what I understood when I left, I am not 
aware of any voting machine involved in the casting or counting 
of votes in this election or the certification process that was 
accessed by a foreign adversary.
    Senator Rosen. Thank you. 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? Can you explain 
how domestic actors amplified foreign disinformation campaigns 
and how that undermines confidence in our democratic process?
    Mr. Krebs. I think what we saw--I believe it was October 
22--we did see some Iranian efforts. I have talked about this 
before where there were some emails that popped up on that day 
claiming to be purportedly from at least the Proud Boys that 
were talking about--sent specifically to Democratic voters that 
said, ``You need to change your registration and vote for 
President Trump. If you do not, we will find you and take care 
of business,'' I guess.
    The issue there is that ballot secrecy is the law in all 50 
States, and so we identified that issue, we isolated it, and 
then put up a rumor control debunker. 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, 4 
months, in 27 hours we went from detection to sharing that 
information with the American people.
    There is one element that does not get a lot of play, 
though. Prior to making that assessment, following up on my 
commitment to our partners in the State and local election 
community, we held a call with the Election Commissions and 
said, look, this is what we are seeing, you need to know this, 
and then we went to the public.
    Senator Rosen. Mr. Krebs, I just have about 2\1/2\ minutes 
left, so I would like to yield the rest of my time to you, 
because you did take an oath to uphold the Constitution when 
you were sworn in as Director of CISA, and so I want you to 
address anything that you feel we have not already asked today 
and give you an opportunity to speak in the last 2\1/2\ 
minutes, please.
    Mr. Krebs. Thank you for that courtesy. Look, I could not 
be more proud of my team at CISA for the work they did, not 
just protecting the 2020 election, but in getting through the 
last 9 months of all the stresses that COVID placed on the 
workforce and coming to work each day, whether they are sitting 
at home, out in the field, or the limited folks that came into 
the office. So that is point one.
    Point two is I firmly believe that this Protect 2020 
effort, working with our partners in the Federal Government, 
whether it was in the intelligence community or 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 will say is that the real heroes here at 
the State and local election workers out there across the 
country, the hundreds of thousands of election workers that 
risked their lives--and that is not a joke, right? There is a 
global pandemic. There is COVID spreading across the country. 
They went to work so that you and I could go vote and cast our 
decisions here contribute to this process. They had to deal 
with incredibly adversity. And then at the end of it, risking 
their lives, they get death threats for doing their jobs, for 
standing up and speaking truth to power, putting country over 
party.
    That has to end. We are going to have to move past this 
somehow. I have said before that democracy, yes, we survived 
this, I think. It was strong enough to survive. But democracy 
in general is fragile. It requires commitment, 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.
    Senator Rosen. Again, I thank you for being here. I thank 
you and your teams, your teams around the country, for keeping 
us safe and working so hard in this past election.
    Thank you.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Rosen.
    Senator Scott is not back yet. Senator Portman, are you on 
Webex?
    [No response.]
    Senator Hawley, are you on Webex?
    [No response.]
    I will try Senator Sinema.
    [No response.]
    Then, I will pick up the slack.
    Mr. Binnall, 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 paper backups. I 
value the controls. But they are only as good as they are 
actually used, and they only provide confidence to the extent 
that it is a transparent process. So just speak a little bit to 
what you had access to, what you did not have access to, what 
you were denied, and then go ahead.
    Mr. Binnall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The very sad fact is 
that we were denied access to almost anything meaningful that 
would allow us to verify----
    Chairman Johnson. Can you be specific?
    Mr. Binnall. Absolutely, Senator. Let us 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--I wish I could have 
quoted Mr. Krebs when we were fighting our discovery fights in 
Nevada, saying how important it was to get access to these. We 
could not 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 could not use them, 
we could not see them. They provided us zero transparency at 
all, except on 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 go and examine the 
full extent of the voter fraud. For instance, even when we were 
able to subpoena the records that led us to discover those 
4,000 noncitizens who voted, we could not put that into 
evidence because we did not get them until the end of the 
discovery period, and then the court said, well, at that point 
it is too late. Our discovery period was essentially 3 days. We 
were denied any meaningful opportunity to even use in our case 
the information that we got, and the court did not even 
consider those things, unfortunately.
    We were denied--we tried to be able to understand the code 
of these machines, to be able to find out, for instance, as 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 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 were not allowed near them. We were not 
allowed any forensic audit of it, nothing that could have given 
us any transparency, because transparency is not political. 
That is what we have talked about here. That is what we were 
denied in Nevada, is any attempt to actually find out what 
happened.
    Here is the troubling thing. One of the reasons that they 
said that we could not get transparency on those machines was 
because they are proprietary, the information, the coding was 
proprietary. But we are talking about the counting of votes for 
the Office of the President of the United States, and they are 
not going to let us see the code for how they actually coded 
the votes? You have to pick one. It is either open-sources and 
we exactly know the way 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 is where democracy 
breaks down. That is really the fear that we have of losing 
democracy, is when it is not the people's votes that are being 
counted but fraud that is being counted. We cannot just pretend 
that the emperor has any clothes if he does not. We cannot 
pretend that we have a clean election when there is evidence to 
the contrary. The way that we get that is through transparency, 
and we were denied that in Nevada at every single turn.
    We had a clerk, a register of voters, who literally dodged 
our subpoenas. We had the holiday weekend over 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. That same register of voters, we have a whistleblower 
that says he was wearing a Biden-Harris pin to inspect voter 
sites. This is not something where we are trying to attack 
officials. We are trying to say that we have to make sure that 
it is nonpartisan, that we have to make sure that there is 
transparency, and you cannot deny transparency at every turn, 
Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Johnson. Mr. Krebs, real quick, mindful that, 
again, all this testimony is under oath, so what you heard from 
Mr. Binnall is testimony under oath, does that trouble you? In 
your assessment, this was the most secure election. Again, I am 
all for paper backups. I am all for those controls. If used, it 
works. We have a system of advocacy in terms of a legal system. 
You advocate for one side. It is a combative system, but both 
sides have to have information. Does that trouble you in terms 
of lack of transparency that Mr. Binnall is testifying to under 
oath?
    Mr. Krebs. 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 
and forensic audits. We saw Georgia do that with a number of 
their machines to ensure that the hashes match what they 
expected.
    I do think that, yes, we need to make sure that, working 
with these vendors, we have the appropriate insight and 
transparency into the process, certainly. 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, if we are talking about paper backups, but 
we are also talking about paper ballots----
    Chairman Johnson. But, again, only if he just said they did 
not have access to the ballots.
    Mr. Krebs. I am not--that is----
    Chairman Johnson. Again, all I am asking, does that trouble 
you that there was not that kind of transparency? Or are you 
challenging his testimony?
    Mr. Krebs. Oh, of course not. I do not have----
    Chairman Johnson. OK. So, again, this system is--we only 
have confidence in it if it is completely transparent and 
somebody who is challenging results has access to the 
information, the paper ballot backup, can have their forensic 
experts take a look at the computer systems. That was not 
afforded. I am just asking: Does that concern you?
    Mr. Krebs. I think that there are multiple controls in 
place throughout the system. If there is a legal mechanism at 
the back end that allows for independent third-party auditing--
--
    Chairman Johnson. But that is the problem. The legal system 
did not allow for the transparency. OK. 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 
cannot obtain the evidence to actually try it in court and your 
evidence is denied in court, do you understand how that 
frustrates people? Again, that is the problem. That is why 
there are suspicions, because this was not in so many cases 
that we have heard about a transparent process.
    With that, I will turn to Senator Scott.

               OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR SCOTT

    Senator Scott. Thank you, Chairman Johnson. I want to thank 
Chairman Johnson for taking all the heat for hosting a hearing 
like this. I think it is the right thing to do, to make people 
feel comfortable that their elections are free and fair, and if 
this one was not, that the next one will be.
    Two years ago, I got elected. I won election night by 
54,000 votes, and Chuck Schumer sent a lawyer down and 
basically said, ``I do not care what the votes are. We are 
going to win through the courts.'' We went through an 
unbelievable number of lawsuits. We had, I think, something 
like 1,000 lawyers working with us. We went through two 
recounts. He did not care what the votes were. Chuck Schumer's 
goal was to win, and his lawyer's goal was just to win through 
the courts, and it did not matter what the votes were. He did 
not let me come to orientation, and so when I watch this stuff 
now, I do not remember one Democrat in this entire country say, 
``That is not right. You should not be doing it that way.'' 
They were all in on this, and nobody complained.
    We have 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, people come up to me and they are frustrated 
with the unfairness of the system.
    Now, of course, these are people that wanted Trump to win. 
They think that he lost unfairly. But they are mad. They are 
mad because they read and they hear about what happened in 
Wisconsin; they hear about what happened in other States. Then 
they are sort of furious that they think the whole system is 
rigged.
    So one thing I did is in September I put out a bill called 
``the Voter Act.'' We do absentee ballots, and it actually 
works in Florida. You have to be a registered voter. Your 
signatures have to match. You have to get your vote in, ask 
where you vote early. You have to get your vote in on time. It 
is your problem if you do not. It is not somebody else's. You 
do not get to vote after the fact. Your vote does not get to 
come in after the fact and somebody count it, although 2 years 
ago the Democrat lawyers tried to do that. And in Florida we do 
it 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 cannot be doing same-day registration 
because how can you tell if somebody is legal, illegal? How 
would you know? Do they live in that State? How would you know? 
You have to let people be able to watch ballots being opened. 
We had two election supervisors that were removed because of 
what they did in my election. They were clear. They completely 
violated the law, and they found and tried to count 95,000 
ballots after election night--not in my favor. Of course, in 
the Democrat's favor.
    Judge Starr, what do you think about the need to have local 
elections--because I think what Mr. Krebs said is right. One of 
the reasons why we have good systems here is we do not 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? You cannot get registered on the same 
day that you vote. All these things that we have, like we do in 
Florida, where you have to get your ballots early and all these 
things and you know how many--and, by the way, you are supposed 
to announce how many ballots you have that night. You should 
know, right? They did not in mine, and that is how they kept 
finding it.
    Judge Starr, what do think about this idea that we have to 
have some national standards but still have local elections?
    Mr. Starr. 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--here is an 
anecdote. One of his students, a registered voter in Vermont, 
but she is 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 to vote, but 
she receives these, and everyone is hearing these anecdotes. 
They are saying, well, aren't there control mechanisms in 
place? The issue with decentralization is you will continue to 
have these varieties and vagaries unless and until there is 
some enormous reforms in State government or Congress using its 
powers under Article I in this particular instance, says we 
need to step in and have regulations to ensure integrity. The 
signature requirement is one of the bases.
    I like to say, Senator Scott, you have to show ID if you 
want to check into a hotel or get through Transportation 
Security Administration (TSA) security, so do we not want to 
have those kinds of safeguards just to ensure, yes, this is 
going to be an honest election, which I think is what we are 
all asking for.
    Senator Scott. Mr. Binnall, if we had done some of these 
things and they had been enforced in your State, would people 
feel comfortable that there was a fair election?
    Mr. Binnall. 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 suppose to be, that one person 
only gets one vote, that the way that the ballots are counted 
leads to an accurate total. These things should not 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.
    Mr. Troupis. 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 is 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. If that is what we hear--
and I have heard that--I have been hearing that all day here, 
confidence in the election process. Why, when everything is 
teed up--I mean, I am 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 have exact 
records. What the Biden campaign did not want the court to do 
is to actually address the substantive question. That is the 
holding of the court: We will not address the substantive 
question.
    The chief justice, I mean, there was great frustration in 
the chief justice when she said four members of this court 
throw the cloak of laches 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, the same thing, I heard something about Justice 
Karofsky's comment. It was just a talking point. 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 do 
not, it undermines the integrity of our system. That is what is 
going on here. The frustration that you hear even in good 
Democrat circles is if the courts do not address these, who is 
going to? Are they not the ultimate arbiters?
    There is 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 do not talk 
about them, do not address them. That is why I thanked Senator 
Johnson when he first called and asked if I would talk, because 
if you do not inquire here in the Senate--and as Ken Starr said 
a minute ago, if you do not do this inquiry, there really is 
not going to be any analysis, and there is not going to be an 
opportunity to get the very integrity that we all want.
    As I said, as a former judge--and 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 are just not going to talk about it.'' That 
is just wrong, and that is the reason, one of the reasons 
people do not trust this outcome.
    Senator Scott. In Florida, we have a lot of people that 
moved from South America, and so a lot of them have said to me, 
``How is this different than what Maduro is doing?'' Right? I 
mean, and part of it is, people do not have enough information, 
but it is so simplistic when you hear about people that are 
dead that vote, people that do not live in the State that vote, 
and you hear all these things, and there is no recourse.
    We have to figure this out. We have to be able to prevent 
this from--I do not know if anything will happen with this 
election, but clearly we cannot let this go on for the next 
election.
    Thank you, Chairman.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Scott, and I 
completely agree. You have to have the information. This is not 
a dangerous hearing. This is an incredibly important and 
crucial hearing. Thank you for participating in it.
    Senator Portman, are you available by Webex?

              OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PORTMAN

    Senator Portman. I am, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. I have been 
moving around the Capitol as we have had to vote, but I was at 
the hearing earlier, and I appreciate the witnesses and all the 
information we have received.
    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 do not 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 is 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 
Carter-Baker Commission. I would ask you, Mr. Starr, is it time 
for us to establish a commission--I have been involved in some 
of these commissions. I have been a commissioner and co-chaired 
some that have worked, some that have not 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 were 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 with plenty of time before the next midterm election and 
help to give the States a sense of direction and perhaps even a 
template of best practices?
    Mr. Starr. The short answer is yes. 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. But they bring attention and 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 are going to 
take a look at this and we are 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 us not lose sight, even though I am thankful 
that foreign interference and so forth--and I very much admire 
Mr. Krebs and all that. But we are really talking about down in 
the boiler room, so to speak, of American elections, and that 
is where I think these reforms and safeguards need to be put in 
place.
    Senator Portman. Thank you for that, and I am looking 
forward to working with one of my Democratic colleagues to try 
to promote this idea. We have had some discussions of it 
already, and I think again today what we have heard is 
indicative 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 you mentioned, Mr. Krebs--
Chris, thank you for your service at CISA. 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 
cybersecurity side. Particularly thank you for working with 
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose so well. Frank LaRose and 
you I think were 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 kind of brief me on the 
benefits of using this kind of detection and monitoring 
hardware and how it worked?
    Mr. Krebs. Yes, sir. First off, I want to thank you for--
actually just the State of Ohio, for some reason in my senior 
staff in my front office, two of my top three advisers happened 
to be from Ohio, so you are doing something right there.
    The Albert systems are intrusion----
    Senator Portman. I am going to put on my mask, after you 
said that, since Carper had his Ohio mask on earlier. 
[Laughter.]
    Mr. Krebs. So the Albert systems are intrusion detection 
systems that effectively sit on the networks and on the wire 
that capture traffic, that we can work with our intelligence 
community partners and develop what is known as ``signatures,'' 
looking for known malicious activity or known interaction with 
suspicious Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, just looking for 
bad interaction, and it gives us a good insight into what sort 
of behaviors 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 those signatures and then go do forensics.
    It is a passive system. It is a forensic system. Where we 
need to go, though, is building on the trust we have developed 
through the Albert censors and through the Information Sharing 
and Analysis Center (ISAC) and through the Coordinating 
Councils to start deploying more advanced technologies. I am 
specifically talking about some of the endpoint detection and 
response capabilities that will actually sit on a computer in a 
State and local office and be more of a real-time monitoring 
and mitigation capability. That is how we continue moving 
forward. We need the same capability in the Federal Government. 
We are not there yet, but we have to continue advancing, and I 
think Congress needs--I will stop there.
    Senator Portman. Chris, yes, and again, as you know, you 
and I have 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 is another topic for 
another hearing, perhaps one where you will be back to testify. 
But look at what has happened just recently. In the last week, 
we found out that a very sophisticated group of hackers got 
into the computers of some our most sensitive agencies, and so 
we obviously have a lot of work to do. I am not suggesting that 
CISA was at fault there, but on the other hand, I think we have 
not yet given even CISA the adequate resources and authority to 
be able to handle all these issues, not just the election 
issues, but obviously we have a huge problem right now with 
cyber attacks. We do not know all the details yet, and I will 
not ask you to get into stuff you do not 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 have heard 
about some of those today.
    Is Senator Paul correct? 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 good news, but also with regard 
to domestic cyber attacks. Is that what your report was about? 
Is he accurate in saying that?
    Mr. Krebs. Yes, sir, so when you come into a Federal 
office, you pledge the oath to uphold and defend the 
Constitution from threats, foreign and domestic, and that is 
what we did. The focus of the statement, the joint statement, 
was security. It was secure. I think terms have been conflated 
here, alleging 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.
    Senator Portman. I think that is very important to point 
out, and I think a number of people were confused about that, 
including, perhaps, some folks in the administration. Post-
election, there has been a lot of talk about signature 
matching, and I will end with this, Mr. Chairman. I know we are 
getting over time here. But in Ohio, what we do is--and we have 
been doing this for 15 years quite successfully--we send out an 
application for an absentee ballot. It is no-fault absentee. 
That is how I vote. But you have to send in an application, 
including a signature. Those signatures are checked. Then the 
signature on the actual ballot, once you receive the ballot and 
you send that in, you have another signature, that is checked. 
Of course, the two are compared.
    They also in Ohio have access to other signatures 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?
    Mr. Krebs. Not an expert on the system. Seems reasonable to 
me.
    Senator Portman. Anybody else want to comment on that?
    Mr. Ryan. Sir, this is Representative Frank Ryan. I would 
tell you that that is a good system, and that would alleviate a 
significant number of the concerns that I had in the election. 
Based on some of the comments that were made by many of the 
Senators and the testifiers, I would indicate that we saw a 
major problem with the dot-com bubble in 2001, which led to the 
Sarbanes-Oxley bill, much of which is the basis of my testimony 
today. In 2008 and 2009, we had the crisis that happened in the 
banking industry with the no-documentation loans, and we saw 
how that worked and then led to the Dodd-Frank bill. I would 
hope that would happen in the 2000 elections and in the Abraham 
Lincoln election and these most recent ones in 2016 and 2020. 
There would be similar legislation that could help us restore 
the confidence that people have that there is some degree of 
uniform perspective about the requirements that each of the 
States need to be able to comply with. What Ohio is 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.
    Mr. Starr. 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 if founded, could 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 us just see what 
has worked in the various States with reputations for honesty 
and integrity.
    Senator Portman. Yes, that would be the objective. Thank 
you, Mr. Starr. And thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your 
indulgence.

              OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HAWLEY

    Senator Hawley. [Presiding.] Thank you very much, Senator 
Portman.
    Now, on behalf of the Chairman, I am going to recognize 
myself, so thanks to the witnesses for being here. I just want 
to say how important it is that we are having today's hearing, 
and let me just give you an example why.
    Yesterday I was talking with some of the constituents back 
at home, a 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 did not 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 have won, 
they have lost, they have 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 4 years of 
non-stop Russia hoax, it was 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 4 
years of that, being told that the last election was fake and 
that Donald Trump was not really elected, and that Russia 
intervened, after 4 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 are nut case. You should shut 
up.''
    I will tell you what. Seventy-four million Americans are 
not going to shut up, and telling them that their views do not 
matter and that their concerns do not matter and they should 
just be quiet is not a recipe for success in this country. It 
is not a recipe for the unity that I hear now the other side is 
suddenly so interested in after years of trying to delegitimize 
President Donald Trump.
    Suffice it to say I am 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 is 
absolutely unbelievable.
    Let me talk about the First Amendment. Judge Starr, 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 Starr, 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?
    Mr. Starr. 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 us test things in the marketplace of ideas. 
You cannot test ideas and theories unless you allow the 
marketplace of information, communication, to flourish.
    Senator Hawley. Well said. I agree with that 100 percent. 
It is an extraordinary thing not to be able to get--I have had 
Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg under oath. We have asked them, 
``Did you coordinate with the Democrat campaign?'' How was it 
that within minutes of this story breaking, both of those major 
corporate giants decided that they would suppress this story 
and exactly what the Biden campaign wanted them to do? They 
will not answer questions. I have asked the Federal Election 
Commission (FEC) to determine whether or not this was an 
illegal campaign contribution on the part of these corporate 
entities, and I just cannot 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, Judge Starr, about something else. Let us 
talk a little bit about mail-in balloting. In your written 
testimony, you discuss the findings of the Carter-Baker 
Commission, and you have 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?
    Mr. Starr. Yes. The Commission was referring to absentee 
ballots, but, of course, in light of what has happened in this 
Presidential election, we are now talking about the 
unprecedented use of mail-in ballots. Their concern and their 
warning, 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. I think that is 
at the bottom of what some of these concerns are.
    How did dead people vote, accepting that allegation from 
Nevada? It is because of inadequate safeguards. The dead person 
did not walk into the voting booth and vote. Someone voted for 
him or her. We have to have those safeguards in place, and that 
is what the Commission was saying and issuing that fervent 
warning, that it may get worse in a deeply divided country.
    Senator Hawley. Twenty-six States, as I understand it, when 
it comes to mail-in voting, Judge, 26 States now in this 
country allow third-party ballot harvesting of mail-in votes. 
That is where you can pay a third party to go distribute the 
ballots, and you cannot do this in my home State of Missouri 
because we have controls 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 is no chain of 
custody there. There is no verification. This seems to me an 
invitation to fraud and abuse.
    I have introduced legislation to end third-party ballot 
harvesting nationwide, to make it illegal nationwide. 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 is a common-sense place to start when 
we think about preventing fraud and addressing it in our 
elections?
    Mr. Starr. Yes, because the opportunity for fraud and abuse 
is so rife and omnipresent with that kind of, if I may now call 
it, ``worst practice.'' So many States have best practices. We 
heard from Senator Portman about Ohio. Other States have the 
safeguards in place. Let us put safeguards in place, but one of 
them is let us eliminate practices that are so prone to fraud 
and abuse.
    Senator Hawley. I think that is 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, that there 
are significant verification requirements that are mandatory, 
that there is mandatory reporting requirements about where we 
are in the count, where the States are, so the States just 
cannot 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, ``Fraud happens all the time. No big deal.''
    It is a very big deal, and for millions and millions of 
Americans in this election, it is a very big deal indeed.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Johnson. [Presiding.] Thank you, Senator Hawley, 
for your questions and for standing in.
    Based on one question and the answer from Judge Starr, I 
just want to read from my opening statement from the last 
hearing: ``In his `Reflections on Progress, Peaceful 
Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom,' Russian dissident 
Andrei D. Sakharov wrote, `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 would like to think that this hearing is a demonstration 
of that freedom to obtain and distribute information to the 
public. There is nothing dangerous about that. It is essential 
to our freedom. It is essential to our country, to our 
democratic republic, and it is essential if we are going to 
restore confidence in this election system we have. We have to 
do this. We cannot 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, as 
my hearings have been, has been a problem-solving process, 
first gathering the information. That is what we are trying to 
do here today. Senator Sinema.

              OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR SINEMA

    Senator Sinema. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman.
    The 2020 Arizona election was a successful election, not 
for any one party or individual but for our democracy, and it 
is a demonstration of the will of Arizona voters. A record 80 
percent of registered voters participated. Arizonans are 
independent. They vote for State and Federal 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 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 or for throwing out someone's 
ballot.
    In 2018, when I was elected to the U.S. Senate, nearly 80 
percent of Arizona voters voted early, most of them by mail. In 
2020, that increased to 88 percent. That is 2.9 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 were 
returned by State deadlines so they could be counted. Even 
though many postal facilities in Arizona are short-staffed 
right now, these essential workers did not 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 in 6 days, but it took 12 days to 
finish counting the votes. Now, that is not an indication of 
fraud. It shows that election officials are following the law 
and counting all the votes. That is how elections have worked 
in Arizona since our State adopted widespread mail-in voting, 
and it is how things worked in Arizona again in 2020. Our 
elections this year produced bipartisan results where members 
of both parties won elections.
    Arizona's 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 9 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 20, 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.''
    On December 4, 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 is his quote: 
``As a conservative Republican, I do not like the results of 
the Presidential election. I voted for President Trump and 
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 U.S. 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 of 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 Cybersecurity 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?
    Mr. Krebs. No, ma'am.
    Senator Sinema. More broadly, what evidence can you offer 
to support the idea that the election across the country, not 
just in Arizona, was fair and secure?
    Mr. Krebs. Again, it is those layered security controls 
that are in place before, during, and after an election. 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 2 
percent audit. In Georgia, they did a risk-limiting audit that 
then triggered a full hand tally. The outcomes were consistent. 
A 5-percent audit in Wisconsin, a 2 percent audit in 
Pennsylvania. Those are the sorts of things that give you 
confidence in the process when you can go and recount the 
ballots over and over and over.
    Senator Sinema. What lessons should we learn from the 2020 
election as we plan for future elections?
    Mr. Krebs. We need to invest in democracy. First and 
foremost, we need to fully eradicate those machines that do not 
have paper ballots, so those direct recording electronic 
machines, there is only one State that is statewide, and that 
is Louisiana, but they are throughout Texas, Indiana, 
Tennessee, and a couple other States, 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 also to continue investing in post-election audit 
capabilities for the State. That takes a little bit more time. 
Then a steady stream of funding and grants on a regular basis, 
not every 10 years or every 4 years but, on a regular, 
dependable basis, to support elections. Along the same lines, 
we need to fully fund and support the Election Assistance 
Commission. They are a critical tool to helping the 
administration of elections.
    Last--and this is my pet project here--we need to reinvest 
in civics education in K through 12 throughout the country. We 
have to continue educating our children on what it means to be 
an American and the democracy that we are enjoying here.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you. My last question: Early in this 
election cycle, sites on the FBI highlighted a potential threat 
that foreign elements could pose to the U.S. election system 
through disinformation campaigns. Looking back, did the United 
States do enough to prepare for this threat from both foreign 
and domestic actors?
    Mr. Krebs. Ma'am, we had the distinct advantage this time 
around of having about 3\1/2\ to 4 years to prepare for this 
election, and that is in comparison to the prior 
administration. They only had about 4 months. We had 4 years. I 
know my team, we took every moment of the day to think through 
any number of scenarios. I have talked about it often that I 
was paranoid, that we were looking for every angle that we 
possibly could. I think that ultimately benefited us from a 
preparation perspective when it came around and that we had a 
full range of scenarios we had worked through, that we improved 
security at the State level. But ultimately it came down to 
those perception hacks. It came down to disinformation. I think 
rumor control was an incredibly valuable tool that we need to 
think about from a governmentwide perspective how rumor 
control--I have said rumor control as a service. How can we use 
rumor control to help ensure--well, rather, counter 
disinformation on the vaccine for COVID as it rolls out. Those 
are the sorts of things we need to be thinking about.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you.
    Mr. Chairman, I overextended my time. I yield back and 
thank you for your indulgence.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Sinema, for 
participating.
    I do want to just warn Mr. Palmer and Mr. Ryan, first of 
all, I apologize for not having maybe any questions directed 
your way. I will at the tail end of this have another quick 
round of questions here. Senator Peters has some. I will ask 
you a couple questions. Then what I will tell all the witnesses 
is a final summary--I actually got this technique from Senator 
Carper. We will give you each an opportunity to make kind of a 
final statement, things that either you were not asked that you 
wanted to be asked about or something that you just think needs 
to be said during this hearing. We will do that, but I will 
first turn it over to Senator Peters for some extra questions.
    Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    A question for Mr. Krebs. As you know, you and I have 
spoken about the rise of domestic extremist violence in the 
country and how we need to be conscious of that rise. In 
August, FBI and the 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 seemed to have been 
well warranted.
    Since President Trump's false claims 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 had 
protesters surround her home while she was decorating it with 
her young child to get ready 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.
    After speaking out defending the integrity of the 2020 
election, it is my understanding that you and your family also 
faced threats. In fact, it required us to make some 
arrangements for your security to be here today to testify in 
person.
    On December 1 of this year, a top Republican election 
official, Gabriel Sterling, in the Georgia Secretary of State's 
office, held a news conference urging President Trump and 
Republican lawmakers to stop attacking Georgia's election 
system with baseless claims of voter fraud. In that news 
conference, Mr. Sterling said President Trump was, and I am 
quoting Mr. Sterling here, ``inspiring people to commit 
potential acts of violence,'' and that, a new quote, ``someone 
is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone is 
going to get killed.''
    Now, we saw a similar dangerous trend earlier this year 
when election officials questioned COVID public health safety 
protocols and also fueled extremists, including in my home 
State, extremists that targeted the Governor of the State of 
Michigan.
    So my question for you, Mr. Krebs, particularly given the 
fact that you have faced some of this: Do you believe Mr. 
Sterling's statements are overstated or that, unfortunately, 
real-world violence stemming from dangerous claims can indeed 
be a realistic concern that we should be conscious of?
    Mr. Krebs. Absolutely. He himself received a number of 
threats, and he has continued to receive threats, as I 
understand it. Secretary Raffensperger down there has. I have 
continued to receive threats. It is not just the heads, the 
principal level people, the directors of the offices. He was 
having information technology (IT) contractors that were 
receiving death threats.
    We are seeing stoking of fires that is completely 
unnecessary with claims that are, I am not even talking about 
some of the court cases. I am talking about, in my case and in 
many of our cases, it is these fanciful claims of dead 
dictators and computer algorithms. We are debunking them 
because they are nonsense, and we have said that from the 
beginning. But they have taken root, and, some people just do 
not want to hear how these systems actually work and what is 
actually capable across these systems. Most importantly, 
those--I am going to say it again. I am going say it again, the 
paper ballots, it is those measures--the root of trust in the 
process that can dispense with these claims; even if these 
algorithms were there, they did not work. But they are probably 
not there.
    So we have to move past this, and these cases of threats, 
they need to be prosecuted. People need to be held accountable 
for the claims they are making.
    Senator Peters. And just the last question, and we spoke 
about this earlier. If you look at the fact that we were able 
to conduct this election in a fair 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, the process voting, did it with concerns about 
their health, people who went to vote, for their health, or 
folks who chose to vote absentee in order to minimize 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 are living in, and it is the 
result of folks in CISA, your folks, others with Homeland 
Security, folks with the FBI, and others.
    Would you just comment on that as to how we should look at 
what we just went through? That does not mean that we should 
not be looking at ways to improve the system, to make sure that 
we minimize clerical errors, to make sure that if there are 
isolated incidents of fraud, that they are dealt with and they 
are 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.
    Mr. Krebs. I absolutely agree with the earlier conversation 
about the need for a national conversation about how to improve 
trust in the elections. I think things I have even recommended 
about eliminating the direct-recording electronic voting 
machine (DRE) and having more audits available after the 
election, and that is going to require, again, that policy 
conversation. It 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 3. That shows 
that people wanted to get out there and vote. They wanted to 
participate in this process. All along we have hundreds of 
thousands of election workers out there that, as you have 
pointed out, as I said in my opening statement, that risked 
their lives in a global pandemic to make sure that we could all 
get out there and vote.
    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. If there are no election workers, it is really hard to 
do an election. We need to think about that and how to counter 
that going forward.
    Senator Peters. Thank you.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Peters.
    This was a number of times we have talked about threat and 
violence against election workers, which obviously nobody on 
this Committee condones at all. At all. I certainly hope there 
is not an 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. OK? I wish Senator Paul were actually 
here to talk about his scrape with threats and violence in the 
political realm. We are in a terrible position in this country 
where you have this level of threat across the political 
spectrum. Nobody should condone it, certainly not this 
Committee. But that is 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 
table. There is plenty, as we were doing our preparation for 
this hearing, that we were able to take off the table. But that 
is what this is about. This is about information, obtaining it, 
the freedom to obtain it and disseminate it, information.
    With that, I will turn it over to Senator Carper.
    Senator Carper. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Again, our thanks to 
our witnesses. You have been patient and been here for a long 
time, those of you that are here personally and those that are 
connected from afar.
    I mentioned earlier I went to Ohio State. Unfortunately, 
nobody in my family had ever graduated from college. I won this 
Navy ROTC scholarship. I got to go to college, and the first 
one in my family, I think, to graduate from college.
    When I got to Ohio State, I found out there was a little 
town just north of Columbus called ``Delaware,'' and so my 4 
years at Ohio State, I am thinking of Delaware. I am thinking, 
it is a little town just north of Columbus. Then I found out 
later on it is a State. When I finished up my active duty at 
the end of the Vietnam War and moved from California to 
Delaware to get an Master of Business Administration (MBA), I 
learned on December 7, 1787, Delaware became the first colony 
to ratify the Constitution. Then 12 others followed suit, and 
we ended up with a country that prevails to this day.
    I am little bit of a student of history. I know we all are. 
But one of the things I learned about the Framers, the 
Constitutional Convention up in Philadelphia, just north of 
where my wife and I live--our family lives just north of 
Wilmington--is they disagreed on a bunch of stuff. Probably the 
hardest thing for them to agree on, as it turns out, was should 
there be a judiciary, Article II I think it is, but should 
there be a judiciary, and if so, who is going to pick the 
judges? And they argued and argued for days, weeks, trying to 
figure it out. And somebody came up with the idea and they 
finally said it should not just be the Senate, it should not 
just be the House. It ought to be the President to appoint with 
the advice and consent of the Senate.
    And so they voted on it, and they voted it down. Whenever 
they would run into an impasse up in Philadelphia, they would 
bring in faith leaders to come in and pray for wisdom for our 
Framers. They did that again, and they debate some more for 
days, and finally somebody said, why don't we just go back to 
the 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 
lifetime terms, rather extraordinary, our judges.
    Is it a perfect solution? No. We have been wrestling for, 
what, 200-and-some years figuring out what is the advice and 
consent of the Senate. What does that really mean? Just in 
recent months, we have been wrestling again with that.
    But it is an imperfect solution to a very real challenge, 
and that is that we are going to have disagreements and we are 
going to have disputes that need to be resolved. This is 
before--I was talking about football earlier. In baseball, they 
call balls and strikes. But the Framers, they did not have 
baseball to talk about, but they knew they needed somebody to 
call balls and strikes and to have a system that most people 
say, well, that is fair and reasonable.
    We have needed judges, Federal judges and others, to be 
able to call balls and strikes in all this litigation, 61 
instances around the country. Sixty-one. And they have done 
that, and some people like the results, and other people do 
not.
    I have two points to make in closing before I have to go to 
another meeting. But one of those is at some point in time we 
have to say enough is enough, it is time to turn the page, and 
let us get about our Nation's work. Here this week, we were 
just voting on the floor, and people are talking about 
negotiations going on with this COVID package, addressing 
climate change in ways that create jobs, all kinds of stuff 
that is in play. Literally right now, it is an exciting time to 
be in the Senate, and I am encouraged by that.
    The other thing I would say, in the Navy, I was a naval 
flight officer (NFO), P-3 aircraft, mission commander for a 
long time, active and reserve. In naval aviation, especially in 
the P-3 community, you have a job in the airplane, and the 
crew, and you have a job on the ground. For a while, my job 
was--I was described as an air intelligence officer when we 
were in Southeast Asia. I had huge respect for intelligence 
agents, and we got a bunch of them, really good ones. One of 
our friends, one of our former colleagues, was the former 
Senator from Indiana, and he ended up as Director of National 
Intelligence (DNI), and a good friend of, I think, all of us. 
Dan, I talked to him when he stepped down as head of DNI, and I 
asked him, I said, ``Just talk to me as a friend and off the 
record.'' I guess I am going on the record. But I said, ``Are 
you convinced that the Russians were involved in trying to put 
their fingers on the scales of the Presidential elections in 
2016?'' He said, ``Without a doubt. Without a doubt they 
were.'' I said, ``Well, there are like 17 or so intelligence 
agencies. Do some of them feel that way?'' He said, ``All of us 
do. It is unanimous. Everybody feels that the Russians were 
interfering in our election in 2016, and they wanted to change 
the outcome.'' And he said, ``They were not trying to help 
Hillary Clinton. They were trying to help Donald Trump.''
    I am not asserting that they were doing that at his request 
or--but, wait a minute, maybe they were, come to think of it. 
But there is no question they were involved, and with a 
purpose, a single purpose, the Russians, and we caught them 
red-handed. We have been dwelling on that for 4 years now. We 
need to get over it. I respect enormously the work of our 
intelligence agencies. I think we all do. But we need to put 
that in our rearview mirror. If we are ever going to put this 
pandemic in the rearview mirror, we have to figure out how to 
provide vaccinations timely, promptly, correctly to about 250 
million Americans. If we do not vaccinate kids under the age of 
7, there are 250 million Americans we have to get vaccinated 
not once but twice, in the right sequence, good recordkeeping. 
We have to convince about 30 percent of the people in this 
country that it is safe to do this. We have to set an example 
for that. We have a lot of work to do. If we do that, we will 
be on our way coming out of this recession and on our way to 
better days ahead for our country and for the people who really 
are counting on us. I would ask us to keep our eye on the ball.
    Let me close, Mr. Chairman, if I could. We only have three 
counties in Delaware. The southernmost county is called Sussex 
County, and there is a town in Sussex County called Seaford, 
which is famous for being the first nylon plant in the world. 
It was built in Seaford, Delaware, and they had like 4,000 
people working there from World War II up until about 10 years 
ago. There was a church close to the plant there. It is a 
Methodist church, and the minister that used to be there was an 
old guy, Reverend Reynolds. His son was a Republican State 
representative and a football coach and a great guy. When I got 
elected Governor, he said to me--he wanted to come and sit and 
talk to me and visit with me and share some thoughts, and I 
said, ``Sure.'' Everybody has known in our lives--I am sure the 
Chairman and Ranking Member, people we have known in our lives, 
they are just wise. They just have a lot of wisdom, and every 
now and then they share it with us.
    He came to meet with me, and he said these words--we were 
having a lovely conversation. We used to have lunch together. 
And he said to me, ``Just remember this, Tom. The main thing is 
to keep the main thing the main thing.'' That is what he said. 
``The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.''
    I sat there and I thought, ``What in the world are you 
talking about?'' It took me a while to figure it out, but I 
finally did. 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 is not perfect but it actually puts us 
on a course for a more perfect union. A more perfect union. 
Hopefully we are going to learn from this what we did well in 
this election and what we did not. And years from now, people 
will look back and say, ``Well, they kept their eye on the 
ball. They kept their eye on the main thing.'' If we do that, 
our history will look well on our efforts.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to our Ranking Member, 
Senator Peters. To our witnesses, again, thank you all.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Carper, and, again, I 
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 4 years--that has not existed. In 2016, 
illegitimate result, resistant, you remember the famous Tweet 
by Mark Zaid. I cannot remember it off the top of my head but 
something like the coup has begun, impeachment will follow. 
That is what we have been living with for 4 years. Different 
election, different result, different side. The reality is 
people have concerns. I am just saying these are legitimate 
concerns.
    You mentioned the courts. I have acknowledged the process 
has worked its way to a conclusion. I have something like 59 
court cases. Now, many of them, as Mr. Troupis talked about, 
some were not decided on the facts. They were just decided and 
dismissed based on standing, which, again, that is our process. 
That is a legitimate decision by a court. But it is not very 
satisfying for people who have some facts that they want to be 
considered by a court, or, Mr. Binnall, the same thing in 
Nevada.
    So to deny the reality that we have a very serious problem, 
that is not the main thing. The main thing is we have to 
acknowledge that problem, and we have to work together to fix 
it, to restore the confidence.
    Let me just see if I can wake up Mr. Ryan and Mr. Palmer 
and make sure they are there. I will ask a question of each of 
you, and then I will give all of you the opportunity to kind of 
make a relatively brief--this is actually a long hearing for 
us. I know the Judiciary Committee sometimes goes on long, but 
this is a long hearing for our Committee, and I really do 
appreciate the involvement of as many members who took this 
thing seriously.
    But, Mr. Ryan, are you there?
    Mr. Ryan. I am. Thank you, Senator.
    Chairman Johnson. Sorry about that. I hope you had lunch or 
something in the interim. Representative Ryan, in our 
conversations, you were talking about, as Mr. Binnall talked 
about, your inability to get access to certain things that I 
would hope Director Krebs would agree should be transparent and 
that those of you having questions about or even challenging 
results should have access to in order to mount an effective 
challenge. Can you talk a little bit about that?
    Mr. Ryan. Actually, Senator, as a former chair of an audit 
committee of publicly traded companies and currently the chair 
of the audit committee of 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 do not dispute his comments on that at all. I applaud the 
great work that has been done at CISA. But until the entire 
control environment--that is, the tone at the top--has been 
properly evaluated and documented to where you can have a Six 
Sigma 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 
Sarbanes-Oxley bill that I think was done effectively was this 
concept of control deficiencies, significant deficiencies, and 
material weaknesses. The absence of the ability to provide a 
timely audit of that information is problematic.
    I would like to just make this comment. I spent a lifetime 
as a reserve officer, and I was also on active duty, either in 
Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti, Operation Iraqi Freedom. I 
helped supervise some of the election results in Iraq in 2005 
after I was called out of retirement. 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 that we can 
ensure the same type of election integrity that we are asking 
for with transparent, fair, and accurate results to 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 are dealing with. That is 
a pretty good track record, but, unfortunately, when you 
consider the fact that four of the States were razor-thin 
margin close, the results of the election could have been in 
question. I concur, Senator, that most of the results have 
already been looked at from a challenge from a legal 
perspective, so it is 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 
the people have the faith and confidence in our election 
systems.
    I try to live by a triangle of faith, that 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. I pray to God that 
every person listening to this testimony hears your words and 
says let us have a peaceful resolution of all of these concerns 
that we have so we can get on with business as usual.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Representative Ryan, and thank 
you for your service. We will come back to you for your closing 
comment.
    Mr. Palmer, in our discussion prior to this hearing--and, 
again, I appreciate your service and your membership in the 
Commission--you talked about some things that troubled you with 
this election. Can you just kind of review those with the 
Committee?
    Mr. Palmer. A few of the things that I was concerned about, 
I think that raise the emotions from the political campaigns, 
some of it was the treatment of poll watchers. 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 that often we are doing 
our job, and we do not 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, 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 of the 
election official. There were some significant reports that 
that process was, interfered with, and people were treated very 
poorly. It is not the first time. I worked at the Department of 
Justice in the Civil Rights Division, and one of the things 
that I saw often was based on party or race, citizens treat 
each other poorly, and even in the context of elections.
    I think that we need to make a commitment of respect toward 
each other and to each political campaign. 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 have been talking 
about this for a long time. It is because there is 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 nonpartisan way, in a very 
smart way, with technology. Election officials do not 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 rolls are as accurate as could be. 
Frankly, I just think that this becomes somewhat of a partisan 
issue and, therefore, any attempt to maintain the accuracy of 
the rolls can be seen as a negative. This is what happens, that 
if you have highly inaccurate rolls, then there is a perception 
of fraud. Sometimes there is actual fraud. We actually see 
that. It may not change an election except in a close race. But 
our job as administrators is to make sure that there is no 
fraud and mitigate and minimize any irregularities. That is the 
goal. Only with technology and resources and a commitment to 
doing it will we see those instances decrease. I believe 
technology and resources are some bipartisan ways to decrease 
that, sir.
    Chairman Johnson. If you could also, because your 
Commission does act to certify some of these voting machines--
not all of them, but in some States you do. Can you just 
quickly go through kind of what that certification process is? 
I think that was one of the issues you did see, somebody trying 
to get back into those machines inside that certification 
process.
    Mr. Palmer. We have a certification process for voting 
systems. One of the vulnerabilities that we have--and I believe 
CISA would agree--is that the nonvoting systems that are tied 
to the Internet, they perform important functions like voter 
registration, electronic poll books. There are no standards or 
testing, and that is one of the things that we are trying to do 
at the EAC with adequate funding we could do. But it is a big 
gap in our defenses, and it is one that we may not have been 
burned this time, but it is a vulnerability, and we need to 
take care of it.
    Chairman Johnson. OK. Thank you.
    Now we will move to closing statements here, and we will go 
in reverse order. Again, former Director Krebs, I appreciate 
your service to the country. I appreciate what you 
accomplished. As you know, I have acknowledged that repeatedly. 
I think the fact that we have gone from 82 to 95 percent paper 
backup, that is all great stuff. I certainly appreciate you 
coming here and testifying today. I will let you make any 
closing comments. Go ahead.
    Mr. Krebs. Thank you, Chairman Johnson. I am going to keep 
this short because I think this is a historic hearing for me. 
This may be the longest hearing that I have 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 were key in getting us across the finish 
line in the Senate and ultimately in November 2018. So thank 
you for your leadership there, supporting other key initiatives 
for the agency, including the administrative subpoena bill. So 
thank you for that.
    Just a quick comment to the team at CISA, if they are 
watching. It was honor to lead. Thank you for that opportunity 
to lead you. You have a great future ahead of you, keep at it.
    And then, last, thank you to the other witnesses for 
showing up today and thank you for what they do. But, again, 
thank you for your leadership here and good luck.
    Chairman Johnson. Although maybe based on their attention, 
you might encourage them to stay a little bit longer, but I 
will do that. Mr. Binnall.
    Mr. Binnall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We cannot ignore 
voter fraud away. We cannot just wish it away. Unfortunately, 
that is what the media these past weeks has been trying to do 
in the most biased reporting I think I have ever seen, where 
even in headlines they try to claim that the evidence I have 
seen with my own eyes is somehow not there. We cannot wish it 
away. 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 is so important that 
government officials, election officials, not be intimidated. 
But myself, the lawyers on my team, volunteers, whistleblowers, 
there are a number of people who have stood up for this fraud 
that have faced similar death threats, similar intimidation, 
similar harassment. I do not 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, from threatening 
to go after their bar cards on one side, going after their 
clients or going after their safety or their lives, 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 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 told in many instances to deliver ballots to undeliverable 
addresses. 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 
encountered: What do you have to hide? I think we know in this 
case what there is to hide.
    I said in my opening statement that government by consent 
of the governed is hard to win and easy to lose. That is why it 
is 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 are supposed to tell your 
constituents to turn out to vote if they do not know that it is 
their vote that is going to matter, that they do not know if 
their vote is going to be canceled out by the fraud of somebody 
else, their vote is going to be diluted by these 
irregularities.
    We cannot pretend that this problem did not happen. It did. 
This is the United States of America. We do not run from that. 
We fix it. We have to use every arrow in our quiver to fix it 
because it did happen, and it is now on all of us to make sure 
that we fix it.
    I really appreciate the Committee's time and the Chairman's 
time. Thank you.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Binnall. Representative 
Ryan.
    Mr. Ryan. Senator, thank you very much for your courage in 
having this hearing.
    If I could just conclude with these comments, our Nation is 
at a crossroads. No matter what happens with any of the work 
that is being done relative to looking at this, since probably 
about the year 2000 and apparently even going back as far as 
1787, although I was not 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 
is 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. CISA 
has done a phenomenal job in so many different respects, and 
under the concerns relative to COVID-19, I actually recommend 
using the CISA standards. For all the poll watchers, all the 
poll workers, the directors of election, God bless them for the 
great work they have done.
    By the same token, there is 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 controls that we can no longer rely on.
    I have heard so many 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 as triggering event, and the 
housing bubble burst, and the United States was thrust into one 
of the worst issues that we have 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 that have 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 get to an open, 
transparent process 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 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.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Representative Ryan, for your 
testimony and your service to this country. Mr. Troupis.
    Mr. Troupis. Senator, thank you very much. I want to say 
right off the bat that I am honored to represent the President. 
I was honored to get the call. But I am 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 
have certainly demonstrated there is merit--but because of the 
cancel culture, because of the environment that has been 
created by the left that has intimidated lawyers so they cannot 
be here. They are not here from the giant law firms precisely 
because they were ordered by their management committees and 
others that you cannot take those cases. 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 is 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. I have heard a lot today about what went on 
afterwards 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. I so much appreciate, Senator, that you 
are holding these hearings because, otherwise, as we are 
finding out all over the country, these items just disappear.
    No. 2, I wanted to say, as I have 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 do not hear the evidence, do not let them 
litigate, do not have a court rule on the substance.
    Let us be honest. That is what is going on. That is why the 
public does not trust this outcome. It is not about the 
President. It is about what the other side is doing to 
intimidate and force people not to listen, not to take the 
evidence.
    I have heard lots of fancy words here today, but if you 
give transparency, if you let the issues come out--and I have 
represented Republicans, and I have represented Democrats, and 
at the end of the day, lawyers do their job when it is open and 
we are able to present the evidence. I so appreciate the fact 
that you, a nonlawyer, is taking on this task here.
    But, finally--and 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 2,500 volunteers 
over a 10-day period take their own time, their own money, come 
from all over the country, and they came and they attended the 
recount and they participated. 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 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 
on our legal team and everyone who was there.
    We have a great system, and people want to participate. Let 
us make it transparent. Again, I cannot thank those volunteers 
enough. They are the ones who make this democracy work.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Troupis. I noticed Mr. 
Binnall shaking his head when you were talking about the fact 
that lawyers from large law firms were more than discouraged, 
they were actually prevented from representing the President, 
which is kind of a sad state of affairs.
    I will also say storefronts in big cities did not board up 
their windows in anticipation of a Vice President Biden 
victory. Commissioner Palmer.
    Mr. Palmer. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. 
I will make a few comments.
    The EAC is looking at holding a series of hearing and issue 
a report on some nonpartisan recommendations. There are going 
to be a lot of policy disputes around the country in State 
legislatures, and, that could be debated back and forth about 
what the best policies in 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 and more resources when available, and that is really 
the recipe, I believe, moving forward, if you want to improve 
the performance of election officials and their election 
workers within an office and our poll workers, it will take a 
commitment of time, resources, and training to do so. The EAC 
is prepared to do that free to localities with appropriate 
funding.
    I think that is really my solution, thinking back to my 
military days, whenever there was an issue, more education and 
more funding, more training.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Commissioner Palmer.
    Judge Starr, you were our lead-off hitter. Now you are 
batting cleanup here, so thank you for hanging in there. Do you 
have some closing comments?
    Mr. Starr. I think the bottom of the order, Mr. Chairman, 
but thank you. Thank you for your leadership and a real sense 
today's hearing has been a tribute to the Constitution. I loved 
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 am also reminded of one of President Lyndon Johnson's 
favorite quotes from the Prophet Isaiah: ``Come let us reason 
together.'' I think this has been a time of reasoning together 
and listening in the great traditions of the U.S. Senate.
    Let me close with words that I heard with my own ears from 
United States Senator Alan Simpson, now the tender age of 89 in 
retirement, when he was addressing in his valedictory at the 
Kennedy Institute of Politics which he headed for 2 years. He 
told the audience--and it was in very hushed tones. Whatever 
your politics were, Alan Simpson was a great man and recognized 
to be that. He closed with these words: ``In politics, if you 
do not have integrity, you do not have anything.'' What this 
hearing has tried to do is 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.
    Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Judge Starr, for your 
participation and for your service to this country.
    I do want to make a comment. We spoke to--and we 
appreciated the fact--Dominion Systems, Edison Research, AP, a 
number of people we spoke to prior to this hearing. Now, they 
did not all participate, but we will leave the record open, and 
I encourage everybody who spoke, and people that we did not, if 
you want to input information into this record, you have a 
couple weeks to do it, and I encourage it. Our staff will look 
at that, and we will vet it. We will call you; we will ask 
questions. 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. We are only going to do that with 
information. I am soliciting information. This is only part of 
the process. There was oversight before this hearing. There 
needs to be oversight after this in the next Congress, and 
hopefully I can work with Senator Carper, who I think we all 
recognize has done a pretty good job of outreach here and some 
pretty bipartisan words here. I am hoping that is 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, community. That is what we want. We want to be able to 
raise our children in safety and freedom. The way it works in 
this country is through participation in the democratic 
process.
    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 what we should 
be every bit in favor of making sure that every vote is 
legitimate. That is what this is all about. If we can put the 
controls in place and actually act on them--it is 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, OK, this all worked out.
    Wisconsin's recount, totally honest. Our count was almost 
100 percent accurate. Other issues, but, again, I think in 
Wisconsin we got a pretty good level of confidence that we run 
our elections right. I will just give another shout-out to 
Jeanette Merten, the county clerk in the town of Oshkosh. I am 
sure the vast majority are just like Jeanette. We are in really 
good hands.
    To conclude, this is my last hearing. It has been an honor 
and privilege to chair this Committee.
    The hearing is adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 1:39 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]

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