Well Diebold and the other e-voting machine companies must be pissed. For those ninjas that actually embrace democracy however, this is great news. Remember when those historically democratic districts with these machines mysteriously went for Bush in ’04, and in other districts with the machines the exit polls didn’t match the "official" reuslts? Hmmmm…

WASHINGTON (AP) - Paperless electronic voting machines in widespread use across the country may be vulnerable to errors or sabotage and cannot be made secure, a draft report by a federal agency said.

The report by researchers at the influential National Institute of Standards and Technology said the paperless voting machines - essentially notebook computers programmed to display ballot images and record voter choices - "in practical terms cannot be made secure."

"Many people, especially in the computer engineering and security community, assert that the (voting machines) are vulnerable to undetectable errors as well as malicious software attacks," the report said.

A key weakness is that there is no audit mechanism or paper trail to verify election results other than what the machine itself reports, the report said.

"Potentially, a single programmer could ‘rig’ a major election," the report said.

Couldn’t they have saved some hard-earned taxpayer money and instead of doing a study/report just used some common sense? Actually, that would’ve been way too much to ask…
Story via The Guardian/AP

Read the actual National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report here

Further Reading:

Great Slate.com article, "Rage Against the Machines"

If you want to get yourself real angry, read this article too (it’s from 2003, but still good ish)
Oh, and if you want to learn how to rig one of these voting machines…