Voting scandals are nothing new. Lyndon Johnson (whose Voting Rights Act of 1965 was recently renewed by President Bush) was accused of ballot stuffing during his 1948 Senate bid, after a now-infamous "box 13" mysteriously appeared containing enough ballots to push the candidate ahead by a mere 87 votes. In the 1960 presidential election, Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley managed to have thousands of recently deceased voters cast their ballots for John F. Kennedy. Even "honest" Abe Lincoln, in his 1864 bid for reelection, is said to have furloughed registered Republican Union soldiers, while keeping Democrats on the battlefield, where they were unable to vote.

E-voting machines aren't new, either. Optical-scan systems have been in limited use for decades—not just in voting, but in standardized testing (think college board exams) and state lotteries. In the 1996 presidential election, 7.7 percent of all U.S. votes were cast on Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) systems, better known as touchscreens, and they are fast becoming the most popular e-voting machine, thanks to HAVA. By 2004, more than 61 percent of all U.S. votes were cast using some kind of electronic system.

The problem is, much of the $3.8 billion allocated for e-voting by the new law was distributed before the Election Assistance Commission (EAC)—the group that enforces HAVA—was even appointed. That left the states with no guidelines about how funds should be spent, or what e-voting systems should look like. By the time the EAC was named, nearly a year after HAVA was passed, much of the states' funds had already been spent on e-voting machines, most of them manufactured by companies such as Diebold Inc., Election Systems & Software Inc. and Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. By the 2004 presidential election, 47 percent of all states had spent or obligated more than half the funds they received from HAVA. And the EAC's "Voluntary Voting System Guidelines" were not finalized until December 2005.

The results haven't been pretty. Early critics of electronic-voting systems, such as Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science and technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, tested Diebold's source code (which the vendor had inadvertently made available on its Web site) in 2003 for flaws that could lead to significant errors or security breaches—and found plenty. "The problem," says Rubin, "is that technology makes it easier to manipulate elections in an invisible way. Because the systems are less transparent, the attacks can scale." In other words, an e-voting programmer could covertly insert a script designed to change votes without ever being detected. Or a hacker could break into the systems and change results on the fly.

The notion that e-voting manufacturers might secretly rig their own systems is laughable to Michelle Shafer, vice president of communications at Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems and vice chair of the Election Technology Council, a vendor trade association sponsored by the Information Technology Association of America. "These systems have undergone intense federal reviews by independent testing authorities, including a line-by-line review of system source code. And software is stored in the National Software Reference Library (maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology), so our customers can compare the certified code they have in escrow against the code on file with NIST. The idea that this code is secret isn't the case at all." Diebold said the flaws Rubin uncovered were minor and would be corrected immediately.

Michael Shamos, who oversees the master of science in eBusiness Technology program at Carnegie Mellon University, has spent 25 years testing electronic voting technology. He says the likelihood of hacking or otherwise tampering with an e-voting machine is far lower than any other type of voter fraud. "There is no way someone can manipulate a million e-voting machines," he says. "The amount of effort and people required to do so is unimaginable." In fact, despite numerous admitted foul-ups, a verified case of voter fraud or deliberate tampering has yet to be reported.

Next page: Election Results: Problems Persist