Billionaire Elon Musk has voiced concerns following the announcement by Puerto Rico’s elections commission that it is reevaluating its contract with a US electronic voting company due to hundreds of anomalies found after the contentious primaries on the island.
“Luckily, there was a paper trail so the problem was identified and vote tallies corrected,” Musk stated, questioning, “What happens in jurisdictions where there is no paper trail?”
Kennedy emphasized the need for paper ballots to prevent electronic meddling in elections. “US citizens need to know that every one of their votes were counted and that their elections cannot be hacked. We need to return to paper ballots to avoid electronic interference with elections. My administration will require paper ballots and we will guarantee honest and fair elections,” he asserted.
Jeff Dornik, CEO of Pickax, highlighted the importance of adhering to chain of custody laws. “Not only paper ballots, but the most important thing is following chain of custody laws. So many states are not being strict about that which allows for shenanigans or at the very least the appearance of the potential of irregularities,” Dornik wrote.
“This should have been federal law decades ago,” one user commented, while another added, “Paper ballots, but do you also expect all votes to be counted by midnight? Not possible.” Dornik responded, “It was possible before machines came out.”
Sharing Kennedy’s post, Musk argued that EVMs should be eliminated due to the risk of being hacked by humans or AI, however small. “We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high,” he wrote.
In Puerto Rico’s primaries, the Dominion Voting Systems-supplied EVMs miscalculated vote totals due to a software glitch, according to the commission’s interim president, Jessika Padilla Rivera. While the June 2 primary results that accurately identified the winners are uncontested, in several situations, the machine-reported vote totals were less than the paper ones, and in other cases, the machine-reported totals indicated zero votes for certain contenders.
Padilla stressed the importance of ensuring that both machine and reported outcomes are accurate for the upcoming November elections. Over 6,000 Dominion voting devices were used during the primaries, with software problems caused by the electronic files used for transmitting the machines’ results.
