‘Risk Of Being Hacked Small, But Still Too High’: Elon Musk Calls For ‘Eliminating’ EVMs

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Saturday called for eliminating electronic voting machines (EVMs) citing that these machines could be hacked by humans or artificial intelligence.

“We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high,” Musk said, quote-posting a post by US presidential contender Robert F Kennedy Jr who initially wrote about EVM irregularities during elections in Puerto Rico.

“Puerto Rico’s primary elections just experienced hundreds of voting irregularities related to electronic voting machines. Luckily, there was a paper trail so the problem was identified and vote tallies corrected,” US presidential contender Robert F Kennedy Jr. said in his original X post, citing the Associated Press.

“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,” he further added.

“My administration will require paper ballots and we will guarantee honest and fair elections,” he said.

The Puerto Rican elections commission announced earlier this Tuesday that it is reevaluating its contract with a US electronic voting company after it found scores of discrepancies in voting following the island’s heated primaries.

The problem stemmed from a software issue that caused machines supplied by Dominion Voting Systems to incorrectly calculate vote totals, the Puerto Rican poll body’s interim president, Jessika Padilla Rivera, told the Associated Press.

It should be noted that Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News in 2021, arguing the cable news giant, in an effort to boost faltering ratings, falsely claimed that the voting company had rigged the 2020 election.

Fox News agreed in 2023 to pay Colorado-based Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to avert a trial in the voting machine company’s lawsuit that would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election. Fox acknowledged in a statement “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false,” but no apology was offered after the settlement of the lawsuit.

Some Fox News employees elevated false charges that Dominion had changed votes through algorithms in its voting machines that had been created in Venezuela to rig elections for the late dictator Hugo Chavez.

Dominion’s employees, from its software engineers to its founder, have been harassed. Some received death threats. And the company has suffered “enormous and irreparable economic harm,” lawyers said in the 2021 lawsuit.

One employee, Eric Coomer, told the AP he had to go into hiding over death threats because of the false claims. He has sued the Trump campaign, conservative media columnists and conservative media outlets Newsmax and One America News Network.

(with inputs from Associated Press)