WASHINGTON (AP) — Foreign hackers did not change vote totals or compromise the integrity of last year’s U.S. federal election, a report says. A declassified US government report was released Monday.
The report identifies several cases in which hackers linked to Iran, China and Russia connected to election infrastructure, scanned state government websites and copied voter information. But he says there is no evidence that these cyber activities had any impact on the election or the vote totals.
“We have no evidence that any detected activity prevented voting, altered votes, or disrupted the ability to count votes or transmit election results in a timely manner; changed any technical aspect of the voting process; or otherwise compromised the integrity of voter registration information or any ballot cast in the 2022 federal election,” the report states.
The report, a joint document prepared by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, represents a declassified overview of the U.S. government’s assessment of last year’s election security. It assessed the impact of foreign government activity on electoral infrastructure, but did not examine efforts by foreign governments to shape public perception or influence voters’ opinions.
A separate report released Monday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence examined foreign influence campaigns by several countries during the midterm elections.
The report assesses, for example, that Russia attempted to denigrate the Democratic Party, aiming to weaken U.S. support for Ukraine and undermine confidence in the elections. He said China had sought to influence a handful of races featuring candidates from both major political parties, focusing on those with anti-China views and secretly denigrating a U.S. senator. And he said Iran was carrying out covert operations aimed at exploiting perceived social divisions.
Foreign government interference has been at the heart of American discourse in recent elections, particularly after In 2016, Russian agents hacked Democrats’ emails and facilitated their public release. in what U.S. officials said was an effort to advantage Republican candidate Donald Trump over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
Four years later, several Trump administration officials rejected Trump’s often-made claims about voter fraud and other problems in the 2020 election, with a broad coalition of senior government officials and industry representatives declaring this contest “the safest in American history.”
The Justice and Homeland Security report says that since then, election officials, third-party vendors, and political organizations have all taken steps to reduce the potential for a damaging cyber intrusion, and that federal and state officials have improved their collaboration with the private sector.
Despite the improvement and lack of outright disruptions to voting, the report highlights several episodes that caught the attention of officials, including suspected Chinese government hackers scanning “state government websites linked to “electoral and non-electoral” or have collected publicly available information on American voters. information, as well as pro-Russian “hacktivists” who claimed to have carried out a cyberattack that temporarily affected access to the website of a US state election office.
