Remember the 2000 election? Many pundits labeled the problems with the Florida vote as the beginning of a “constitutional crisis.” And then we were all led down the path of hanging chads, federal and local lawsuits and counter-suits, Burberry “riots” and the ultimate intervention by the Supreme Court in handing the (p)Residency to Bush. In their final say on the matter, the prevailing Justices concluded that counting all of the votes in Florida would disenfranchise too many other voters who’s votes oridinarily would not be counted. Talk about twisted logic.

As a flourish to the end of the Florida debacle, the news media imparted it’s deeply analytical message that “the system works” noting that there were “no tanks in the streets”. They concluded that the electoral process was orderly after all, just as it had been intended by the framers. And then almost everyone got over it.

But the U.S. Congress could not rest when the fundamental infrastructure of democracy was at stake. In record time, (it took them almost 2 years) they passed legislation meant to insure that another Florida would never happen again. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 was the best that could be produced by a Republican controlled Congress. It gave funding to the states to update their voting equipment (no more hanging chads) and there were also numerous provisions for Republicans to pursue their pet fear of stopping voter fraud.

It was all well and good that HAVA would fund a significant upgrade to America’s voting systems. The problem was that there was no standard to certify the accuracy of these systems. Initially, the majority of states purchased computer touch-screen systems, most of which could not produce a paper backup. These systems were purchased despite the advice of numerous computer scientists who warned that they were easily hackable.

In 2004 and 2006 an increasing number of citizens would vote on such systems. In each of these elections there were reports that the touch screens produced voting irregularities. Voters would chose one candidate only to have their vote flipped to a different candidate. There were numerous races where the reliability of the vote was called into question. In most of these cases the suspect systems produced no paper trail and accordingly the accuracy of the equipment could not be verified.

By 2008, there had been a trend to discredit touch screen paperless voting for its many inconsistencies and lack of transparency. And yet in 2008, eight years after Florida, at least a third of the electorate will cast ballots using these machines. In essence this means that a third of the vote is potentially subject to manipulation by third parties.

Also this year, the Republican party by way of HAVA has succeeded in purging millions of voters from voting roles often for minor discrepencies in their registrations or other technicalities. This year saw a huge rise in voter registration among those who chose affiliation with the Democratic party, with ACORN alone registering over 1.3 million new voters. The question is, how many of these voters will actually get a chance to cast a ballot?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast have written a supurb article on this subject for Rolling Stone and more recently on the dubious allegations against ACORN for the Huffington Post. These are basic primers on how the vote might successfully be suppressed once again in this election, eight years after Florida.

HAVA may have been well intentioned by at least some of its authors. And yet, it has produced a system that is perhaps even more flawed than the one in place in 2000. One could hope that there will be such an overwhelming majority in this election that it will make the disenfranchisement of 2008 become just one of the many historical footnotes. And then hopefully by 2012 or 2016 we’ll all have a voting system that really works. One can hope.