The Security Mentor

California's Secretary of State, in a move that earns her a Medal of Cluefulness, ordered voting machine vendors to submit to a security review by outside consultants.

What made the papers, of course, was that the consultants succeeded in breaking into all or almost all of the machines.

The good news, buried several paragraphs down, is that they found no evidence of hidden features in the programming for the voting machines.

People are making a big deal of the fact that the security testers had access to "source code" for the machines. That simply means the program as the programmers wrote it, which should not be kept secret, not for a voting machine. Other critics point out that the testers had full documentation for the machines, which is another non-issue because it's right at impossible to keep information like that secret.

The bad news is that the security testers had less time and less incentive than a crooked politician's employees would have. The problem is actually worse than it appears.

San Francisco Chronicle report on voting machine testing
Computerworld has a more technical report about the California voting machine security tests