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In the days after news outlets called the 2020 U.S. presidential election and projected that Joe Biden would be the 46th president of the United States, the internet was flooded with various unfounded claims about voter fraud. One popular rumor concerned something called Hammer and Scorecard. While this rumor was wide ranging, it basically held that a deep state supercomputer named Hammer and a computer program called Scorecard were being used to alter vote counts. We'll take a closer look at this rumor in the article below. But before we do, we should note that Christopher Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — a position he was nominated to in 2018 by U.S. President Donald Trump — has called the Hammer and Scorecard rumors nonsense: Rumors about the existence of a CIA supercomputer called HAMR (or commonly, Hammer) can be traced to a man named Dennis Montgomery. According to the website American Report, Montgomery, whom the website describes as a CIA contractor-turned-whistleblower, designed and built this supercomputer. An article published on American Report in October 2020 claimed that U.S. President Barack Obama commandeered this supercomputer shortly after taking office in 2009, used the Scorecard program to steal the election in 2012, and that this program was being deployed again to steal the election for Biden in 2020. There are many reasons to take these claims with a hefty dose of salt. For example, the article does not explain, among one of its many plot holes, why this program was not used in 2016 to steal the election for Hillary Clinton, or why President Donald Trump, who has held office for the last four years, did not do more to secure our elections from Hammer and Scorecard in 2020. The fact-checking website Lead Stories also notes that some of the specifics in the American Report article don't hold up to scrutiny. For example, American Report claims that Scorecard works by tampering with transfer points between state computers and third-party election data vaults. The article claims that VR Systems Inc is one of these transfer points, but VR Systems' COO told Lead Stories that VR Systems does not do voter tabulation and is not connected to county or state voter tabulation systems. But perhaps the biggest red flag is this story's source, Montgomery. The Daily Beast wrote: In 2006, Montgomery claimed that he had emails showing that Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons was guilty of bribery. According to USA Today, the Justice Department cleared Gibbons of wrongdoing after a computer expert cast doubt on the authenticity of the emails that had been provided by Montgomery. Montgomery was also accused of deceptive practices in 2014 when he claimed to have evidence of a conspiracy against Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow found that Montgomery's evidence amounted to junk, and Arpaio agreed. The New York Times wrote: Here's a PBS report about some of Montgomery's fraudulent claims: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWPTbqm5Hzs&feature=emb_logo Despite Montgomery's history of deception, his claims about Hammer and Scorecard transitioned from the fringes to the mainstream when Fox News' Lou Dobbs interviewed Sidney Powell, the attorney for former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, on Fox Business. Powell said: I think there are any number of things they need to investigate, including the likelihood that 3 percent of the vote total was changed in the pre-election voting ballots that were collected digitally by using the Hammer program and the software program called Scorecard. That would have amounted to a massive change in the vote. The Director of CISA has dismissed the claims about Hammer and Scorecard altering vote counts, and these rumors originate with a man who has a long history of making deceptive claims. Still, social media users quickly found evidence that Hammer and Scorecard was real, and that it was truly being used to steal the 2020 election. In November 2020, a video started to circulate on social media that supposedly showed SCORECARD working in real time. The Conservative Daily Post wrote: The above-displayed video does show a genuine clip from CNN. However, it is not evidence of wrongdoing. In fact, what this video shows isn't even very unusual. CNN, like most news networks, uses data from the National Election Pool to provide real-time election results during their coverage. NBC News wrote: The above-displayed video shows a momentary error in these real-time results. A source from CNN told us that this video showed a brief moment when the results were incorrectly transposed from the NEP and that this human error was caught, flagged, and quickly fixed (as shown in the video). This video is not evidence of a supercomputer hacking into the U.S. election system and altering vote counts. It's a video showing a momentary error that was quickly fixed thanks to the numerous safeguards in place to protect the integrity of elections. CISA Director Kreb's message about the Hammer and Scorecard rumors bears repeating: Robust safeguards including canvassing and auditing procedures help ensure the accuracy of official election results, and that it is not true that a bad actor could change election results without detection. CISA writes:
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