Elon Musk has picked up the baseball bat once again in favour of paper ballots over machines in elections.

In response to a question during a town hall event in Pennsylvania, US, where he appeared in a rally with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Musk, the CEO of Tesla, the electric car manufacturer, said: “My view: paper ballots, hand counted.”

Elaborating on why he wants technology away from elections, the technology billionaire said: “I am a technologist I know a lot about computers. The last thing I will do is trust a computer program. Because it is just too easy to hack, to easy to add just one line [of code]; and it is difficult to hack paper ballots.”

A 47 minute 28 second video from the Pennsylvania event, in which he barely spoke for 58 seconds to endorse paper ballots, is available on the YouTube channel of The National Desk, a daily American TV news programme produced by the Sinclair Broadcast Group. The National Desk is seen as pro-conservative.

The video was uploaded early on Friday, and YouTube has added a disclaimer from the Election Commission of India: “The strong technical safeguards in electronic voting machines and elaborate administrative, safeguards, procedures and security put in place by ECI ensure that the elections are transparent, free and fair.”

A 58-second clip, the bit where Musk spoke in favour of paper ballots, was widely shared on social media by supporters of India’s Opposition parties on Friday.

Calls from the Opposition to revert to paper ballots have been getting stronger after each election that the BJP wins at the state and national level.

The Congress had a heated debate with the Election Commission during the Haryana Assembly election vote counting,

A week after the results for the Haryana Assembly election – that the BJP won with a comfortable majority – were declared, some poll experts have pointed to the mismatch in the ECI voting percentage data in 86 of the 90 Assembly seats in the state.

A little over a month from now, elections will be held in Jharkhand and Maharashtra.

This is not the first time Musk has spoken against using technology in elections.

Days after the Lok Sabha elections, he had called for “eliminating electronic voting machines” saying that the risk of these being hacked by humans or artificial intelligence, “while small, is still too high”.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, former Union minister for information technology, had offered to hold a tutorial on EVMs for Musk.

“This is a huge sweeping generalisation statement that implies no one can build secure digital hardware. Wrong. Elon Musk’s view may apply to US and other places – where they use regular computer platforms to build internet connected voting machines. But Indian EVMs are custom designed, secure and isolated from any network or media- No connectivity, no Bluetooth. Wifi. Internet, that is there is no way in. Factory programmed controllers that cannot be reprogrammed,” Chandrasekhar had argued in a post on X (formerly Twitter), the social medium owned by Musk..

Musk did not take up the tutorial offer. “Anything can be hacked,” he had replied.

A Democrat voter in the past, Musk has not only endorsed Trump but has turned into one of the highest donors for the former President’s campaign against Democrat nominee Kamala Harris, having pumped in around $75 million in three months, according to a report by America’s Federal Election Commission.

Voting fraud is a contentious issue in the US as well and it’s the Republicans who have mostly questioned the voting process.

In Pennsylvania, Musk did add a caveat: “Almost every country that has democratic elections requires in-person voting with voter ID. It is weird, it is super weird to not have that. I think that is the only way to effectively address fraud.”

Though India’s ruling establishment is firmly with the EVMs, the list of IDs prescribed by the Election Commission makes India a little less weird, as Musk said.