In a post on Saturday, Elon Musk called for the elimination of all electronic voting machines out of concerns that the results could be manipulated or hacked.
Musk’s comments were in response to a recent Associated Press report highlighting hundreds of voting irregularities in Puerto Rico’s primary elections, attributed to electronic voting machines supplied by the US company Dominion Voting Systems.
“We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high,” Musk remarked in response to Robert F. Kenndy Jr. posting the article.
The AP report revealed that Puerto Rico’s elections commission is reviewing its contract with Dominion after discovering that the machines were incorrectly calculating vote totals. Machine-reported vote counters were revealed to have been lower than the actual paper ballots. Machines also reversed certain totals and reported zero votes for candidates.
“The concern is that we obviously have elections in November, and we must provide the (island) not only with the assurance that the machine produces a correct result, but also that the result it produces is the same one that is reported,” said Puerto Rico elections commission interim president Jessika Padilla.
This revelation prompted Kennedy to post the article, emphasizing that Puerto Rico had a paper ballot trail, which allowed the issue to be identified and corrected. He raised concerns about what might happen in jurisdictions without such a paper trail.
“What happens in jurisdictions where there is no paper trail,” Kennedy wrote in response. “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,” he added.
