Brewed Fresh Daily

Encryption of sensitive data is spotty, they said, allowing outsiders to reach into the system and change election tallies. A lack of oversight in the development process could allow programmers to create secret 'back doors' for tampering as well, they said. Though the system relies on credit card-style "smart cards" for authentication, voters can easily create their own bogus cards to cast multiple ballots, or administer larger changes by posing as a poll worker, they said. While such bugs are common in commercial software used to run desktop computers and websites, voting systems should be held to a higher standard, they said. Diebold should open the system up for public scrutiny to uncover other flaws, or at least design a paper trail to guard against electronic tampering, they said.