A new report by the non-partisan Brennan Center has found that the all three of the nation’s most commonly purchased electronic voting systems are vulnerable to software attacks. According to the report, software attacks could “threaten the integrity” of state and federal elections where the machines are used. The report, “The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World,” found that:

All of the most commonly purchased electronic voting systems have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. All three systems are equally vulnerable to an attack involving the insertion of corrupt software or other software attack programs designed to take over a voting machine.

Automatic audits, done randomly and transparently, are necessary if paper records are to enhance security. The report called into question basic assumptions of many election officials by finding that the systems in 14 states using voter-verified paper records but doing so without requiring automatic audits are of “questionable security value.”

Wireless components on voting machines are particularly vulnerable to attack. The report finds that machines with wireless components could be attacked by “virtually any member of the public with some knowledge of software and a simple device with wireless capabilities, such as a PDA.”

The vast majority of states have not implemented election procedures or countermeasures to detect a software attack even though the most troubling vulnerabilities of each system can be substantially remedied.

The report was put together by the Center’s Task Force on Voting System Security. The task force consisted of government and private sector scientists, voting machine experts, and security professionals who examined the machines for over a year.