Homeland Security Cited Inaccurate Allegation to Censor New York Times Journalist

As the 2020 Election Day count dragged on into the next morning in the crucial swing state of Wisconsin, the New York Times campaign reporter Reid Epstein reported a hiccup at 4:52 a.m.: “Green Bay’s absentee ballot results are being delayed because one of the vote-counting machines ran out of ink and an elections official had to return to City Hall to get more.”

Eight minutes later Epstein sent a follow-up tweet giving the all-clear: “Clerk has returned with printer ink!”

This tiny drama from Wednesday, Nov. 4, would be lost to history but for the deep consternation it ignited among influential members of the government and tech industry. Details uncovered in the Twitter Files and revealed here for the first time show that Epstein’s tweet prompted immediate and mostly successful speech suppression efforts by the Department of Homeland Security and others who were intent on undermining any facts or claims that might possibly be used to question the integrity of the 2020 election.

The episode is of more than passing historical note because it is the first known case of the agency attempting to silence a social media account associated with a national newspaper – and because the Times, which has long professed to report the news “without fear or favor,” did little to push back against the censorship, even though nothing has emerged to invalidate Epstein’s reporting.

Epstein’s tweet set off immediate alarm bells in Wisconsin and Washington, D.C. At 5:11 a.m., 19 minutes after Epstein’s first tweet, an election clerk from another part of the state, Rachel Rodriguez, disputed the Times’ reporting on Twitter: “I’m very familiar with the ballot scanners Green Bay uses,” wrote Rodriguez. “There’s no ink involved.”

Four minutes later, at 5:15 a.m., the official Twitter account of the Wisconsin Elections Commission retweeted Rodriguez’s post commenting, “Rachel is correct.”

Except she was not. Although most of Green Bay’s voting machines did not use ink – the DS200, the primary vote-counting machine, relied on thermal tape – that year, there was another machine involved. Local officials, in expectation of higher turnout for the heated presidential race and newly eased rules concerning absentee ballots, opted to additionally use the DS450, a high-speed tabulator that prints results through an external ink-jet printer.

Rodriguez recently told RCI that her 2020 tweet was based on the mistaken understanding that Green Bay used only DS200 machines for the election. She also confirmed that if the city had indeed used a high-speed tabulator, like the DS450 or its variation, the DS850, then her tweet would have been mistaken, because that system uses ink cartridges through an external printer. She explained over phone that her tweet fact-checking Epstein got “way more traction than I thought.” Rodriguez added that “it was 3 a.m. and I was just being sarcastic.”

Her tweet did, indeed, set off a chain reaction at the highest levels..

“This is false,” Amy Cohen, the executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors wrote at 7:45 a.m. on the morning of Nov. 4, linking Epstein’s tweet. “There is no ink involved in the machines used in tabulation of the ballots, a fact confirmed by the state.” Cohen’s email was addressed to the election consortium organized by the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a contractor tasked with facilitating misinformation reports from a variety of stakeholders to DHS and private social media firms.

CIS quickly elevated the tweet in a “Misinformation Report” sent to officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the DHS sub-agency with a focus on policing social media. Brian Scully, a DHS official with CISA who then led a task force on “countering foreign influence,” attached a screenshot of the Epstein tweet and sent it to Twitter along with a note that claimed the “tweet alleges tabulation machine ran out of ink which caused delay in counting absentee ballots – there is no ink involved in tabulation machine (Green Bay, WI).”

Stacia Cardille, then a senior Twitter legal executive, thanked Scully for the alert and told the DHS official, “We will escalate.” She then forwarded the email on to a team devoted to “site integrity.” “Hi GETSupport, can you please review this report from the National Association of State Elections Directors by way of DHS?” wrote Cardille in an email time-stamped 8:30 a.m. “Please note the rebuttal information from the official handle of the state election director.”

By 9:27 that morning, Cardille wrote to inform Scully that the social media platform had “labeled this Tweet.” Scully emailed back to convey his appreciation.

The “label” action appears to refer to what’s known as a shadow ban. After receiving significant attention, the Epstein tweet disappeared for most users. The tweet became invisible for those who had quote-tweeted it and users could no longer reply to it. The public metrics of the tweet, with over 1,000 retweets and 3,180 ‘likes,’ as well as all reply tweets, vanished. Any user attempting to view the Times reporter’s tweet via direct link was greeted by a warning label that it might contain misinformation.

Adding to the uncertainty around the issue, the Green Bay Press Gazette, the local newspaper, also criticized Epstein’s tweet as inaccurate. Sandy Juno, who oversaw the 2020 election ballot count as the Brown County Clerk, told RealClearInvestigations that she may have also contributed to the misunderstanding about the voting machine issue and printer ink.

“I got a call from the media about the ink situation,” said Juno. “I said, ‘What do you mean, these machines don’t use ink?’“ But she misunderstood that the questions revolved around the count at the convention center using DS450 tabulators, not the sites using DS200 machines.

“So I might have started the confusion,” added Juno. The former clerk, who has since resigned and openly criticized Green Bay over its management of the election that year, said she is confident that the ballot certification numbers were correct. Juno confirmed that the high-speed tabulation machines, like the DS850 and DS450, use an attached ink-jet printer. Juno also noted that the KI Convention Center vote-counting site had photocopiers, which also use an ink cartridge, another possible explanation for the ink cartridge issue.

Questions swirling around the integrity of the 2020 Wisconsin vote have led to official court challenges and probes by Republicans. Those investigations, while failing to overturn the result, further confirmed the likely accuracy of the Epstein tweet.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/02/05/homeland_security_cited_inaccurate_allegation_to_censor_new_york_times_journalist_1009546.html?mc_cid=882722b9d6&mc_eid=012a6b3e32

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http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

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http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

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