Hours after US President Donald Trump repeated a baseless report that a voting machine system "deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide", he was directly contradicted by a group of federal, state and local election officials.
They issued a statement declaring flatly that the election "was the most secure in American history" and that "there is no evidence" any voting systems were compromised.
The rebuke, in a statement on Thursday by a coordinating council overseeing the voting systems used around the country, never mentioned Mr Trump by name.
But it amounted to a remarkable corrective to a wave of disinformation that Mr Trump has been pushing in his Twitter feed.
The statement was distributed by the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for helping states secure the voting process.
Coming directly from one of Mr Trump's own Cabinet agencies, it further isolated the President in his false claims that widespread fraud cost him the election.
The statement also came as a previously unified Republican Party showed signs of cracking on the question of whether to keep backing the President.
Across the country, election officials have said the vote came off smoothly, with no reports of systemic fraud in any state, no sign of foreign interference in the voting infrastructure and no hardware or software failures beyond the episodic glitches that happen in any election.
President-elect Joe Biden's lead in the popular vote has expanded to more than five million.
He remains on track to win a solid victory in the Electoral College.
The group that issued the statement was the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, which includes top officials from the cyber security agency, the US Election Assistance Commission and secretaries of state and state election directors from around the country.
The group also includes representatives from the voting machine industry, which has often been accused of being slow to admit to technological shortcomings and resistant to creating paper backups.
"While we know there are several unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation concerning the process of our elections, we can assure you we've the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should, too," the officials added in their statement.
"When you have questions, turn to election officials as trusted voices as they administer elections."
This year, in part because of the vastly increased use of mail-in ballots, over 92 per cent of votes had some form of paper backup that can be used in audits or recounts.
The council was responsible only for the security of the actual election infrastructurethe voting machines, the scanners and the counting systems for ballots.
So its statement did not encompass the full range of Mr Trump's accusationsrebutted by election officials across the countryof other types of voting fraud, most notably that mail-in ballots were manipulated to give an advantage to Mr Biden.
The council's statement on Thursday was prompted by repeated "baseless claims of voter fraud that none of us have seen any evidence of", said Mr Benjamin Hovland, one of the federal officials who signed it.
He is chair of the US Election Assistance Commission.
Democratic National Committee spokesman Lily Adams said: "It's always been clear that this election was free, fair and secure, and now even Trump's own Department of Homeland Security has fact-checked his lies."
NYTIMES