Report: Ohio voting system flawed

CLEVELAND, Dec. 15 (UPI) -- Ohio's secretary of state says all of the state's voting machines should be replaced because the five systems in use can be easily corrupted.

"It was worse than I anticipated," Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said of a report on the voting systems. "I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to the others."

The state report found the five systems have critical flaws that could undermine the integrity of the 2008 presidential election, The New York Times reported Saturday. Ohio's electoral votes narrowly swung two elections toward President Bush in 2000 and 2004.

Electronic touch-screen voting machines are used in more than 50 of Ohio's 88 counties.

Teams working on the voting study were able to pick locks to access memory cards, introduce malignant software into servers and use hand-held devices to put false vote counts into machines at polling stations, the Times reported.