Billionaire Elon Musk said this Saturday (15) that “we must eliminate electronic voting machines”, which includes electronic voting machines. “The risk of being hacked (invaded) by humans or artificial intelligence, even if small, it is still too big”, said the businessman on the social network X, which he owns.
Musk was reacting to a post by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., independent candidate in this year’s United States presidential elections, on the same social network.
Kennedy stated that the primaries in Puerto Rico, a US territory in the Caribbean, were marred by “hundreds of voting irregularities related to voting machines”. “Luckily,” he continued, “there were paper records, so the problem was identified and the vote count was corrected. What happens in jurisdictions without paper records?”
For the candidate, Americans need to “return to paper ballots to avoid electronic interference in elections.” If he wins, his government “will demand printed ballots and guarantee honest and fair elections.”
The politician cited as a source a report from the news agency Associated Press (AP). “The problem started with a fault in the software which made the machines supplied by the company Dominion Voting Systems incorrectly calculated the vote total,” the interim president of Puerto Rico’s electoral commission, Jessika Padilla Rivera, told the AP.
More than 6000 machines from Dominion were used in the island’s primaries. The company has a contract with the electoral commission that expires at the end of June. If this fails, renewal is uncertain. “We cannot allow public confidence in the voting process to continue to be undermined as we approach the general elections,” said José Varela, vice president of Puerto Rico’s Chamber of Deputies.
Puerto Ricans will elect their governor in November. However, as the island is an unincorporated territory of the United States, they do not have the right to choose the country’s next president.
The inconsistency in vote counting affected the main parties, without an apparent ideological or partisan direction, and affected votes for the positions of governor and mayor.
Differences between Dominion machines and Brazilian electronic voting machines
The United States has a more decentralized electoral system than Brazil, so the adoption of voting machines like those produced by Dominion It varies from state to state and county to county.
There are different types of machines Dominion, some print a paper record of the vote called VVPAT (an acronym for “voter-verified auditable paper record”). Some regions count the votes in these machines directly, as is done with the Brazilian electronic voting machines produced by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), but printed receipts are also counted.
Brazilian electronic voting machines do not issue printed receipts for each vote. Paraguay, in turn, has voting machines that issue them.
In April, the series of reports Twitter Files Brazil revealed, with internal communications from the social network, that the TSE wanted to collect personal data en masse from Twitter users who participated in campaigns with subject tags with links (hashtags) in favor of the “auditable printed vote”. According to Twitter’s senior legal advisors, this court initiative violated the Marco Civil and the Constitution.
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