On the contrary, some administration officials have suggested that individual states could close down the elections, or instruct state legislatures to directly appoint the electors who officially cast the votes in the Electoral College for US president and vice president. The latter course would strip the state’s population of the right to vote for president.

Soaries, moreover, said his commission planned to meet with officials of the Department of Homeland Security next week to discuss how to handle an election-day attack. He added that his commission was, according to a Reuters dispatch, “gathering information from individual states to see if they had plans in place.”

These statements raise the possibility that Republican-controlled states, with the approval of the Bush administration, could preempt voting in order to swing the national result in Bush’s favor, or create sufficient chaos to subvert the election as a whole.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jul2004/usel-j14.shtml