"'all of the most commonly purchased electronic voting machines -- DREs, DREs with VVPT and PCOS -- have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities, which pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections."

HAVA

The was the catalyst for most of the changes to U.S. voting in the past five years. HAVA was enacted partly in response to the chaos of the 2000 presidential elections. It requires, among other things, state (rather than city or county) management of elections and voter-registration rolls, computerization of many aspects of the registration process and the replacement of punch-card and lever machines.

Lever

Lever-based systems were used throughout the country for decades; the Nov. 7 elections are almost sure to be their last hurrah. Despite a certain amount of nostalgia for the satisfyingly tactile "thunk" of voting on those hulking piles of knobs and metal, the machines are a HAVA nightmare -- prone to breakdown and incapable of producing a paper trail. And they can in fact be hacked (by jamming a pencil lead in the gears to block registration of votes on certain levers) -- though not, as e-voting critics point out, on anything approaching the economy of scale potentially achievable with e-voting hacks.