I'm wrong and so is tw. Hell, most of us are wrong.
I'm wrong because I thought the feds could not rule how the states run elections. They have done. That's what HAVA is. It's the Help America Vote Act of 2002. It passed Congress and was signed by Bush.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_America_Vote_Act
Currently all electronic voting machines are HAVA-compliant, including those of Diebold/Premier Election Systems.
In fact, one of the criticisms of HAVA is that it
causes election officials to switch to the electronic machines because their current punch card systems were not HAVA-compliant. By Election 2006, a third of the nation's precincts had switched to HAVA-compliant -- mostly electronic machines. Can't find numbers on how many more have switched since then.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by The Commission on Federal Election Reform's 2005 report
"The Help America Vote Act of 2002 authorized up to $650 million in federal funds to replace antiquated voting machines throughout the country. States are using these funds and their own resources to upgrade voting technology, generally to replace punch card and lever voting machines with new optical scan and electronic voting systems...
|
TW read an IEEE Spectrum article in 2004 that said not all HAVA money was spent by NIST -- and assumed wrongly, for four years apparently, that it was "killed" or that the administration strategically de-funded it. That is not the case. They were just late. The standards were finished in Dec. 2005.
Here is the PDF of it.