Presumably they settled because they expected to lose the case and expected to be found liable for around a billion dollars in damages. Fair enough.
But stirring up an insane unfounded panic about electronic voting security would be one of the most productive things the US cable news have done in the last 20-40 years. It is one of the best aspects of a democratic system to be paranoid about; something goes wrong there and it probably isn't recoverable. And for US corporate news it is much more in character to be up on stage strategically ignoring how every other war turned out terribly while mumbling sweet nothings about how good the next one will turn out and how justified this new one is unlike all the others.
The danger (which we've seen play out) is that this gets used as a pretext to ignore unfavorable election results, and then all those objections are forgotten when the election results are favorable. This "panic" had no intention of improving anything, nor did it.
But stirring up an insane unfounded panic about electronic voting security would be one of the most productive things the US cable news have done in the last 20-40 years. It is one of the best aspects of a democratic system to be paranoid about; something goes wrong there and it probably isn't recoverable. And for US corporate news it is much more in character to be up on stage strategically ignoring how every other war turned out terribly while mumbling sweet nothings about how good the next one will turn out and how justified this new one is unlike all the others.