by Natalia Mittelstadt
Vice President Kamala Harris promoted using paper ballots for elections the last time she was a presidential candidate, but since then, Democrats and the Biden administration have largely pushed back against election integrity laws that Republicans have promoted.
Five years ago, Harris was part of a bipartisan effort to encourage the use of paper ballots. However, since the 2020 presidential election, Democrats have called Republicans “election deniers” for promoting such election integrity measures, and the Biden administration is focusing on suing states with election integrity laws.
While on the presidential primary campaign trail in February 2019, Harris spoke at the Saint Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics, giving her thoughts on funding infrastructure.
She mentioned that, under the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security designated elections as “critical infrastructure.”
Following Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, she said she joined Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., on a bill that would help fund election infrastructure regarding paper ballots.
“We have proposed that part of the investment in infrastructure has to be upgrading the infrastructure of states around elections,” Harris said. “Because, guess what? As it turns out, for all that technology has brought us, good and bad, the best and most secure way to conduct elections? Paper ballots.”
“‘Cause, the way that I say it, kind of half-joking, ‘Russia can’t hack a piece of paper,’” Harris continued.
Harris is running for Democratic presidential nomination again this year, as President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race on Sunday. Neither the White House nor Harris campaign responded to requests for comment.
Since the 2020 presidential election, which former President Donald Trump claims was rigged against him through election fraud, the former president has repeatedly called for elections to be conducted via paper ballots.
In December, Trump said that if he returns to the White House, “We’ll straighten out our elections, too, so that we’re going to paper ballots.” A month before the 2022 midterm elections, Trump told the “Just the News, No Noise“ television show, “We should go to paper ballots, like they did in France. Thirty-six million people (voted) and they had no disputes. Everyone had paper ballots, and it was one-day voting. They didn’t store them over there in the corner, and you see the boxes moving all over the place.”
The state “should go to one-day voting. They should go to paper ballots. And you would have elections that everybody could be proud of. Because right now, this country is a laughingstock all over the world. They’re laughing at our stupid elections,” he added.
Concerns about vulnerabilities of voting machines have led to calls for paper ballots.
In June 2022, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) acknowledged that Dominion voting machines are vulnerable to hacking.
CISA released a report detailing nine vulnerabilities in Dominion’s Democracy Suite ImageCast X voting system, most of which include the ability to “install malicious code” on the machines.
With the report, CISA Director Jen Easterly highlighted in a post on X, the absence of evidence that the Dominion system’s vulnerabilities have been exploited for nefarious purposes. “While these risks should be mitigated as soon as possible, we have no evidence they have been exploited in any elections,” she wrote.
As Trump has called for election integrity measures to be implemented, Democrats have pushed back against them.
This past March, Harris joined Attorney General Merrick Garland at a church in Selma, Ala., as he said he would fight back against state laws that are “discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary restrictions on access to the ballot, including those related to mail-in voting, the use of drop boxes, and voter ID requirements.”
“Those measures include practices and procedures that make voting more difficult; redistricting maps that disadvantage minorities; and changes in voting administration that diminish the authority of locally elected or nonpartisan election administrators,” Garland said. “Such measures threaten the foundation of our system of government.”
Democrats have repeatedly called Republicans “election deniers” for implementing election integrity measures, such as preventing non-citizens from voting.
However, Phill Kline, director of the Amistad Project, told Just the News on Monday that Democrats were “complaining” about voting machines before the 2020 presidential election. “After the Help America Vote Act was passed,” which enabled a “widespread use of machines, you see bipartisan concern” about them, Kline said.
“There’s so much evidence of the ability to penetrate machines that clearly paper ballots are the better way to go,” he added.
Kline also said that he was “not surprised to see Harris change her tune because the Biden administration is using federal funds and agencies to get people to vote and combining that with private monies and talent to create a government-supported turnout effort for the Democratic Party.”
The former Kansas attorney general was referencing “Bidenbucks,” which is what critics call Biden’s Executive Order 14019 that he signed in March 2021.
According to the Executive Order, “The head of each agency shall evaluate ways in which the agency can, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, promote voter registration and voter participation,” including “soliciting and facilitating approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations and State officials to provide voter registration services on agency premises.”
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Natalia Mittelstadt is a reporter for Just the News.
Photo “Kamala Harris” by Kamala Harris. Background Photo “Voting Booth” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
