Electronic voting machines will be vulnerable to fraud this election season unless countermeasures are taken, according to a report issued last week by the New York University School of Law. E-voting devices, such as touch-screen or optical scan systems, are becoming more prevalent nationwide, and most of them are vulnerable to external attack, according to the report compiled by the school's Brennan Center for Justice.

he report was prepared over an 18-month period by computer scientists and voting machine experts working on a task force set up by the Brennan Center to examine voting system security. Larry Norden, chairman of the task force and an attorney at the Brennan Center, said that over the past several years, half of all manual voting systems in the U.S. have been replaced with electronic devices. Elections officials cite the need to meet the requirements of various federal laws and the need for improved accuracy in installing the systems. However, Norden said, "we've not necessarily adapted our [security] procedures to that new technology." The report cites some 120 potential threats to e-voting systems and notes that most states have no system in place to detect malicious software attacks.

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