3 major problems with using decade-old voting machines in November

Imagine you went to your basement and dusted off the laptop or mobile phone that you used in 2002. What would happen if you tried to turn it on? We don’t have to guess. Around the country this election year, people are going into storage, pulling out computers that date back to 2002 and asking us to vote on them.

Following an election meltdown of epic proportions in 2000, the federal government provided more than $2 billion to update the nation’s voting infrastructure. More than a decade later, these voting machines are approaching the end of their expected lifespans. Experts estimate that a reasonable lifespan for electronic voting machines (which are computers, running mainly on laptop technology developed in the 1990s) is in the 10- to 15-year range. Read more...