HOUSTON -- Is Harris County gambling with your vote? Are electronic voting machines used here and across the county an open invitation to election fraud?

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'Ballot Bandits' Could Steal Your Vote, Election

According to Rice University professor and often-quoted critic of electronic voting Dan Wallach, e-voting leaves too much to chance.

"Elections could be stolen," Wallach said. "The question is not, 'Can I hack the eSlate machine?' The question is, 'How hard is it to hack?.'"

On the other side of the issue is Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman. The chief election official says electronic voting machines are even more secure than the older paper-ballot system.

"I'm not interested in a lot of hypothetical theory that the academics are working with," Kaufman said. "Someone is not going to meddle with the process without there being readily available evidence of it."

However, Wallach says that is just not true and that electronic machines easily be hacked without leaving any evidence.

To prove his point, Wallach put his computer science students to work setting up a mock electronic voting system -- one that mimics the eSlate system used in Harris County. One group of students was assigned to hack and corrupt the system; the other group was assigned to catch them.

During the class, the hackers successfully tampered with the machines without leaving a trace 50 percent of the time.

" I actually thought most people would find the hacks. When I saw they only found four of the eight, that was really scary," Rice University graduate student Anwis Das said.

In class, each undetected hack could have changed the outcome of the mock election, according to Wallach.

"In the systems being used here in Harris County and elsewhere in the United States, there's no reason that they wouldn't be vulnerable to the same problems," Wallach said.

Beverly Kaufman says there is no way an outsider can tap into the system electronically and says no one inside would do it if they could.

"If something unusual were to happen with my voting system for an election, I think the first place I would ask the district attorney to look are those people that keep predicting dire circumstances," Kaufman said. " We don't have a desire or the ability to go in and change the logic that is built into these systems."

Wallach and other researchers contend electronic voting machines are inherently susceptible to fraud because they do not leave a paper trail of the votes. In a close election, like the 2000 presidential race, there could be no hand recount because there would not be any verified paper ballots.

"I don't think adding a piece of paper to the process at the polling place on election accomplished anything other than killing a lot of trees and adding another level of administration for an already, very heavily-burdened election judge," Kaufman said.

In November, 50 million people will cast their votes electronically.