During last week’s primary elections in Puerto Rico, the results were thrown into chaos because of shoddy Dominion Voting Systems machines. The machines recorded ZERO votes for candidates in some precincts. They switched people’s votes around in real time. It was a hot mess.

After that happened, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced that we should just do away with voting machines completely and switch back to an all-paper-ballots system. This means that three of the four major candidates running for president this year are in favor of ditching the machines. Amen!

Puerto Rico is now reviewing their contract with Dominion, to see if they can wriggle out of using the machines this November. Shouldn’t the contract be null and void if the damned machines don’t even work?

“US citizens need to know that every one of their votes were counted, and that their elections cannot be hacked,” wrote RFK. “We need to return to paper ballots to avoid electronic interference with elections.”

Elon Musk responded to Kennedy on X-formerly-Twitter: “We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high.”

Let’s look at the arguments in favor of keeping voting machines. People who advocate for using them claim that they are cheaper, they make the process easier, they’re faster, they’re more reliable, and they produce more credible results than hand-counting paper ballots.

Every single one of those arguments is demonstrably false.

The machines are not cheaper than hand-counting. Georgia’s 2019 contract with Dominion was $107 million. If you ask for unpaid volunteers to come out and count the ballots, they will do it. They always have! Provide them with punch and cookies and they’ll be happy to do it.

Even if you pay the counters minimum wage to sit there and count ballots (which a lot of people would be willing to do in Joe Biden’s sh*t economy), you’re still not going to blow through $107 million.

They don’t make the voting process faster. Look at Maricopa County in 2022, when people were forced to stand around for hours in heavily Republican voting districts because the machines all malfunctioned on the ONE DAY OUT OF THE YEAR when they were supposed to work.

They don’t make the vote-counting process faster, either. Countries that use paper-only ballots always know who won on Election Night. It’s only in this Third World dump that it takes days after the election is over to count everything. It always takes California WEEKS after an election to count the ballots. There’s a reason for that.

The machines aren’t easier to use than paper ballots. The paper ballots never malfunction during an election. They’re surprisingly robust like that.

Are machines more reliable than paper ballot systems? I’m not sure. Maybe we should ask someone in Puerto Rico that question.

Do the machines produce more credible results than hand-counting paper ballots?

No one knows!

You push a button on a screen and then something happens inside a black box that’s connected to the internet. It’s faith-based voting. You don’t know whether your vote was counted accurately or if it was switched from Donald Trump to the Kid Sniffer.

You don’t know whether some bored teenager in Romania hacked into the black box and loaded it with fake votes. All you can do is push a button and pray that everything works out. But you don’t know.

Plus, Elon Musk is right. We now have a new threat to voting machines that’s never been present in any previous election. What if China or somebody unleashes an artificial intelligence (AI) program to hack the machines and change the results? That will never be a risk with paper ballots.

So, now we have three of the four candidates running for president who are opposed to machine voting. Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy, and Jill Stein are in favor of using paper ballots only. Maybe Congress should take note of that and vote to ban machine voting once and for all.

Up until 2019, many Democrats in Congress held a healthy and severe distrust of voting machines and wanted to ban them. They went oddly silent on the issue after the 2020 election.

Any honest person can look at voting machines and realize that they’re not a secure or trustworthy way to run elections.