RFK Jr. is right — paper ballots will restore faith in our elections

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. declared that "we need to return to paper ballots to avoid electronic interference with elections." MediaNews Group via Getty Images

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on to something.

Last week he responded to reports of voting-machine irregularities in Puerto Rico’s recent primary election with a bold post on X.

“US citizens need to know that every one of their votes were counted, and that their elections cannot be hacked,” he wrote.

“We need to return to paper ballots to avoid electronic interference with elections.”

Hear, hear.

Although lately complaints about voter fraud and insecure voting machines are identified with the GOP, many of RFK Jr.’s fellow Democrats — as well as the independent presidential candidate himself — have raised such concerns in the past.

Multiple computer security experts have also voiced serious worries about voting machine integrity.

As far back as 2006, tech blog Gizmodo published a piece headlined “How to Steal an Election with a Diebold Voting Machine.”

Prior to the 2020 presidential election, Democrat Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, Amy Klobuchar and others warned of potential “vote switching” by Dominion voting machines.

That same year computer safety experts warned that computerized voting machines were deeply insecure.

“The whole community of computer scientists is mystified why election officials will not listen to experts about technology but will listen to the vendors,” Duncan Buell, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina, told USA Today in a 2020 story about voting-machine problems.

Well, professor, the vendors make campaign donations and other payments. The experts don’t.

There was never any proof of the wild claims of fraud involving Dominion voting machines that circulated after the contentious 2020 election — nor was there any evidence of meaningful chicanery as the votes were tallied.

But voters had plenty of reason to fear such tales, thanks to Sen. Warren & Co.

And of course, after the post-election “Stop the Steal” business, the press decided that anyone who worried about voting machines was an “election denier,” and practically an insurrectionist.

People who raised critiques were mobbed, silenced and sometimes sued. It became essential to “protect democracy” by eliminating any critics from public debate.

As you might imagine, that hasn’t inspired more confidence in the system.

Which is why RFK Jr.’s stance is so important.

Look, an election is, in a sense, a nonviolent substitute for a civil war.

Rather than fighting over who gets power, we just count up the sides — and everyone agrees to go along with the result.

But for people to go along, they have to believe that the contest and the counting were fair. And while press bullying (and worse) may silence people for a while, it doesn’t convince them.

A functioning democracy needs to convince people.

That’s where paper ballots come in.

As USA Today noted in its 2020 story, paper is the gold standard for voting security.

It’s easy to see why.

Voting machines are black boxes.

They spit out totals, but there’s no way for voters to tell what’s going on inside.

We can’t be sure that our votes were counted, or that only legitimate voters are casting votes.

If, as too often is the case, the machines connect to the internet, someone could be loading them up with bogus votes from anywhere.

There’s no tangible record: Everything is just a bucket of bits, and we all know that bits are easy to change — or to fake.

Paper ballots, though, are surprisingly resistant to fraud, because a paper ballot encodes lots of useful information besides the obvious.

Not only is information about the vote contained in the form, but also information about the voter.

Different colors of ink, different styles of handwriting and other factors make each ballot unique. Erasing the original votes would likely leave a detectable residue.

Creating brand-new ballots with fraudulent votes requires substantial variation among them to keep the fakery from being obvious — that’s hard work.

Protecting paper ballots before counting them doesn’t require fancy encryption, just a steel box with a lock, a slot on the top, and a seal.

What’s more, because people are familiar with paper documents, fraud is easy to understand when it occurs.

Paper ballots are both robust (resistant to fraud) and transparent (easy to understand).

Paper ballots aren’t fraud-proof — Chicago has entered the chat — but they’re less susceptible to it than machines are.

And if votes are changed it has to be done by someone on the spot, not some faraway person with an internet connection.

Which is why it’s odd that so many politicians — and journalists — are vocally opposed to this reform.

We live in a society that’s deeply divided, and where trust in institutions has plummeted.

In such a society, it’s particularly important that people believe that elections are legitimate.

If we had paper ballots, along with other common-sense precautions practiced in most civilized countries — photo ID, purple ink on fingers to prevent multiple votes, and the like — there would be far less room for fraud, and far more room for trust.

RFK Jr. is right. Paper ballots are the way to go. Let’s do it.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.