Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink founder and CEO Elon Musk took to his X platform over the weekend to call for a major voting reform ahead of the 2024 election.
“We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high,” Musk wrote in a tweet that generated a lot of responses in agreement.
Musk was responding to a post from independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wrote of a recent problem with electronic voting machines in Puerto Rico.
“Puerto Rico’s primary elections just experienced hundreds of voting irregularities related to electronic voting machines, according to the Associated Press. Luckily, there was a paper trail so the problem was identified and vote tallies corrected,” said his post, which contained a link to the AP story.
“What happens in jurisdictions where there is no paper trail? 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,” RFK Jr. added.
Former President Donald Trump has also called for universal implementation of paper-only ballots, as well as limiting voting in federal elections to a single day with a few early voting exceptions for deployed U.S. military personnel and the infirm.
Following his 2020 loss, Trump touted a theory that electronic voting machines may have been hacked and votes for him changed to votes for Biden, but it could not be proven in court. That said, in the years before the 2020 election, scores of Democrats were sounding the alarm over electronic voting machines, claiming, like Trump, that they could be hacked or otherwise accessed to manipulate votes.
The X account KanekoaTheGreat posted a 20-minute supercut of Democrats who made the following claims about electronic voting machines, among others:
Spread of Malware: If a county election management system is infected with malware, it can spread to USB drives, which then transfer it to voting machines, scanners, and ballot-marking devices throughout the county.
Programming Practices: Most U.S. election systems are programmed by local county officials or third-party vendors. They use previously used USB drives on internet-connected computers before plugging them into scanners, tabulators, and voting machines.
Outdated Systems: In 2019, the Associated Press reported that most of the 10,000 election jurisdictions, including swing states, were still using Windows 7 or older systems for ballot production, vote programming, counting, and reporting.
End of Windows 7 Support: Windows 7 reached its end of life on January 14, 2020, with Microsoft stopping technical support and security updates.
The account concluded: “Hackers can potentially infiltrate elections through vulnerable USB cards, election management systems, and voting machines themselves. This underscores the urgent need for securing America’s election infrastructure.”
Republicans also argued that other changes made ahead of the 2020 election that Democratic leaders attributed to the then-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic could have influenced the outcome. Changes included mass distribution of mail-in ballots to outdated voter registration lists, the addition of scores of ballot drop boxes that in many case were unmonitored, and wide use of ballot harvesting.
Though cases failed in court, attorneys for Republicans argued that those changes, which were implemented by governors, secretaries of state, and mayors, were never approved by state legislatures, as the Constitution proscribes, and were illegal.
