Fifty-nine top computer scientists and election security experts in the US have rebuked President Donald Trump's baseless claims of voter fraud and hacking, writing that such assertions are "unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent".
The rebuttal, in a letter to be published on various websites, did not mention Mr Trump by name but amounted to another forceful corrective to the torrents of disinformation that he has posted on Twitter.
"Anyone asserting that a US election was 'rigged' is making an extraordinary claim, one that must be supported by persuasive and verifiable evidence," the scientists wrote on Monday.
In the absence of evidence, it's "simply speculation", they said.
"To our collective knowledge, no credible evidence has been put forth that supports a conclusion that the 2020 election outcome in any state has been altered through technical compromise," they wrote.
The letter followed a similarly strong rebuttal of Mr Trump's unfounded allegations by the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, which includes top officials from the Department of Homeland Security's cyber security agency, the US Election Assistance Commission, as well as secretaries of state and state election directors from around the country.
In a joint statement last Thursday, the council declared that the 2020 presidential election "was the most secure in American history" and that "there is no evidence" any voting systems had been compromised.
Some of those officials expect to be fired in the coming weeks for their refusal to echo Mr Trump's claims.
Over the past week, he has tweeted various conspiracy theories involving Dominion, a major supplier of voting machines, and other election technology.
Among the allegations, he wrote that Dominion machines had "deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide", a claim with no basis in fact.
Of five counties that experienced different software problems on election day in Michigan and Georgia, only two had used Dominion software, and in each case, the problems were fixed and did not affect results.
NYTIMES