Faulty legislation passed by Congress in 2002 — The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), was hastily passed to avoid repeating the problems with the 2000 presidential election, when Bush was illicitly appointed to the presidendy by the U.S. Supreme Court — caused many states to invest in electronic voting systems in hopes that it would eliminate hanging chad problems, and other problems found in paper-based voting systems. The legislation is faulty because it opens loopholes that allow states to prejudice blocks of voters and make sure they can’t vote.
Six years later, many of the electronic voting machines are fraught with security and software glitches, designed to intentionally cause more harm than good. Electronic voting machines allowed voters and poll workers to place multiple votes, load viruses that crashed the machines and fake vote tallies, oftentimes flipping votes from one candidate to another. Many machines still have no paper trail that would allow results to be verified and audited later.
The only people involved in checking these systems are the vendors wanting to sell their equipment — some of which were later found to be adament supporters of one presidential candidate over another — and the local election officials who were ill-equipped to understand the security issues. Vendors of the machines had a certification process in place, but the certification process had little if anything to do with security. A very disturbing report regarding electronic voting machines and how they can be manipulated to get the desired results can be found from The Scientific American.
Millions of people — whose names aren’t intentionally purged to help Republicans win elections in heavily populated, potentially Democratic States — will be using reportedly flawed voting machines that won’t be fixed in time for the presidential election, allegedly because of a government backlog on testing the machines’ hardware and software.