Debra Bowen, the newly elected Secretary of State in California, has done what should have been done in every state across the country (especially Ohio): she got computer scientists to do a top-to-bottom review of computerized voting machines that will be used for California elections. What did the computer scientists find out? The answer may surprise you.

None of the voting machines were secure. Every one of the voting systems had flaws that would allow anyone with a bit of know-how to change the vote records. That's not surprising - we've heard for years about the problems of secure computers (they don't exist) and the necessity of a paper receipt for votes to back up the computer systems What is surprising, however, is just how awfully bad the security systems are on these voting machines - machines which were already certified for use!

The leader of the investigation, a computer science professor at the University of California, told the Chronicle that he was "surprised" by the weakness of the security system in the voting machines. "The security seems like it was added on," he said, rather than built-in to the system's design from the start. His team of hackers broke through security barriers both at network hubs designed for election headquarters and also in voting machines at deployed at individual polling places.

You'd think that such a damning report would make elections officials all across California shocked, angry, and demanding answers from the corporations (like Diebold) about why their voting machines were so easily compromised. Nope. Instead, you've got elections officials sounding more like Diebold PR people. The line of the corporations and their supporters goes something like this: the test wasn't fair, the machines will hold up in "real world" conditions, and we already gave Diebold and other corporations millions of dollars, so we can't turn back now.

Contra Costa County clerk-recorder and head of the state Association of Clerks and Election Officials, Steve Weir, is among the California elections officials willing to give the voting machine corporations a pass on making their machines completely reliable. He says that the computer scientists were given too much help (in the form of access to computer manuals and the like) in their attempts to break the locks on the machines. Computer experts disagree.

According to Ars Technica, a computer enthusiast publication, the testing was actually done with limited access to computer manuals, and the researchers had extreme time constraints - less than 30 days to test and then write up a full report to Bowen's office. The tests and reports were further constrained by non-disclosure agreements with Diebold. Still, the researchers were easily able to find numerous vulnerabilities - both in the physical and the technological design of the voting machines.

The bottom line is that we shouldn't be using voting systems that aren't secure. Thank goodness we have a secretary of state in California that's actually doing her job, instead of trying to get a job at Diebold.