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The same left-leaning nonprofit advocacy group that unsuccessfully attempted to disqualify Donald Trump from the November ballot in several states is now calling for a recount of the votes, alleging a mass breach of voting systems. 

The organization, Free Speech for People, recently publicized a Nov. 13 letter it sent to Vice President Kamala Harris that included the names of computer security experts urging her to seek a recount of paper ballots in the battleground states of Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, even though she had already conceded the election. 

The letter urges Harris to act quickly, since the window for seeking recounts for the November election will close soon. The letter further claims that after the 2020 election dispute, Trump lawyers accessed voting equipment and thus gained copies of software that records vote counts. 

“Possessing copies of the voting system software enables bad actors to install it on electronic devices and to create their own working replicas of the voting systems, probe them, and develop exploits,” the six-page letter to Harris says. 

“Skilled adversaries can decompile the software to get a version of the source code, study it for vulnerabilities, and could even develop malware designed to be installed with minimal physical access to the voting equipment by unskilled accomplices to manipulate the vote counts,” the letter continues. “Attacks could also be launched by compromising the vendors responsible for programming systems before elections, enabling large scale distribution of malware.”

In December 2022, the organization unsuccessfully pushed the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to investigate what it called a “multistate conspiracy to copy voting software.” Susan Greenhalgh, senior advisor for election security at Free Speech for People, complained that the FBI was noncommittal. 

Free Speech for People has a history of opposing Trump. The organization has frequently used a variation of the phrase “election denier” to describe Trump supporters who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election in which Joe Biden defeated Trump. Meanwhile, Free Speech for People President John Bonifaz referred to questions about the 2020 election as “the big lie.”

On the day of Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017, the organization co-launched an online petition calling for Trump to be impeached and removed from office. It partnered with another liberal activist group, Roots Action. 

It later called for New York state to dissolve the Trump Organization. 

Free Speech for People was behind lawsuits to disqualify Trump from the ballot in Michigan, Oregon, and Colorado—on the grounds that he was an “insurrectionist” for inciting the Capitol disruption that occurred on Jan. 6, 2021. The Colorado Supreme Court sided with the organization, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ruling to keep Trump on the ballot. 

Still, not all signers of the letter to Harris were partisan activists. 

Other signers included Duncan Buell, chair emeritus NCR Chair in Computer Science and Engineering in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina; David Jefferson of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Election Integrity Foundation; Chris Klaus, CEO of Fusen World; William John Malik of Malik Consulting, LLC; Peter G. Neumann, chief scientist of SRI International Computer Science Lab; Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance; and John E. Savage, An Wang Professor Emeritus of computer science at Brown University.

Neither Free Press for People nor the vice president’s office responded to inquiries from The Daily Signal for this story.  

During the post-2020 election litigation, Trump-affiliated lawyers obtained voting machine information through courts and law enforcement agencies. But there was no evidence hackers or bad actors obtained or used the information. 

The computer scientists’ “hearts are in the right place” for expressing concern about election integrity, but speculation isn’t grounds for large scale recounts since there is no evidence that any actual voting systems used in this election were compromised, said Hans von Spakovsky, the manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at The Heritage Foundation. 

“I wouldn’t think you would authorize hand recounts based on speculation,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Signal. “If there is evidence of malware, OK, but, just based on speculation doesn’t make sense to me.”