Matt Masterson, one of the U.S. government’s top election experts, is leaving his post as of next week for a role in academia where he will continue to study the disinformation campaigns that have plagued the country, he told CyberScoop on Thursday. Masterson has been a senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency since 2018. He led a team that reassured the public that the 2020 election was secure, despite President Donald Trump’s baseless assertions to the contrary. Masterson will join the Stanford Internet Observatory, a team of academics and tech experts led by former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos, which works on election security and social media challenges. Masterson said his last day at CISA will be Dec. 18. At Stanford, “We’re going to unpack what we’ve learned over the last few years [on election security],” Masterson said in an interview, including “what more needs to be done on a broader level.” Masterson said he wants to continue to tackle disinformation campaigns, which could extend to the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine. Experts fear that a large swath of Americans are distrustful of the efficacy of the vaccine, in part because of conspiracy theories that spread online. Masterson, a former election official in Ohio, was part of a team of CISA officials who rebuilt trust between election officials across the country and federal personnel after the 2016 election.
Editorial: Republican officials have followed Trump along his dangerous and destructive path | Dan Balz/The Washington Post
President Trump’s unsuccessful but unceasing efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election represent an unprecedented assault on the underpinnings of American democracy. They have been equally destructive to a compliant Republican Party. The depths to which the party has fallen played out in bold colors the past few days as first 17 Republican state attorneys general and then 126 Republican members of the House signed onto a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that asked the Supreme Court to reject the certified vote counts in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia and throw out the results of the election. The high court rejected the challenge late Friday, stating that Texas did not have standing to challenge how other states conduct their elections. The terse denial only underscored the folly of the support that came from members of Trump’s party. The decision came after the Trump campaign and its allies had filed dozens of other lawsuits. Those too were routinely dismissed, often in scathing language. In those prior lawsuits, no evidence of widespread fraud — certainly not enough to change the result in any of the affected states — was presented. In many cases, the lawyers did not even explicitly claim there was fraud.
Full Article: Republican officials have followed Trump along his dangerous and destructive path - The Washington Post