Vol. 42, No. 10
Paper Ballots and Election Integrity
History Catches Up to The John Birch Society
AT A GLANCE
• Forty years ago, election expert Kurt Hyde warned against the dangers of paperless digital voting.
• Recent election fraud has underscored the perils of electronic voting.
• A nationwide Pew poll shows Americans overwhelmingly support paper ballots.
• Claims that 98 percent of Americans already vote with paper are false.
This year’s elections bring us to the 40th anniversary of a momentous turning point in American electoral history. In 1986, computers and the internet were coming into full stride, and the push was on to transform American elections from “old-fashioned” paper ballots to “modern” digital ballots. What could be more sensible, efficient, and progressive?
All the hype notwithstanding, Kurt Hyde saw not an election boon, but a looming catastrophe if electronic voting replaced paper ballots. A retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, adjunct college instructor in systems analysis, and computer professional for Digital Equipment Corporation, Hyde was fully aware of the havoc that a nonverifiable digital system could wreak. His concern over this headlong rush toward disaster prompted him to help organize, and then co-chair, the First National Symposium on Security and Reliability of Computers in the Voting Process, held August 14-15, 1986, in Boston. Following that event, Hyde wrote an article for the October 13, 1986 issue of The New American titled “Computerized Elections: The Votes Are Still Out” about the symposium and the dangerous madness of efforts to get rid of paper ballots. It was the first article in a national publication to sound the alarm on paperless balloting. But that was not his only salvo on the matter; over the succeeding decades, he has continued to pound away on election-integrity issues in articles, podcasts, radio interviews, and speaking engagements. His faithful service has paid off; millions of Americans who were previously oblivious are now aware.
The 2026 primaries and upcoming November 3 general midterm elections have pushed election-integrity issues into focus again. The heated debate over election fraud — in the 2020 presidential election as well as in state and local elections — has not subsided, with President Donald Trump and his supporters charging that elections were “stolen,” and the Democrats and major media still echoing former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency head Christopher Krebs’ claim that the 2020 elections were the “most secure in American history.”
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