Votes can be stolen from Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) using malicious programs, it was proved by US scientists at the Electronic Voting Technology Workshop 2009.

A team of scientists from the Universities of California, San Diego have researched that the voting machine can be manipulated during their study of ‘return-oriented programming’.

Speaking on this, Hovav Shacham, professor of computer science at UC San Diego's (UC-SD) Jacobs School of Engineering and study, co-author said, “Voting machines must remain secure throughout their entire service lifetime, and this study demonstrates how a relatively new programming technique can be used to take control of a voting machine that was designed to resist takeover, but that did not anticipate this new kind of malicious programming.”

The professor stated that a program can be used to steal votes from the machine which will take control of an EVM. The scientists also said that there is no need to access the source code to inject the malicious program into the EVMs.

As a result, the professor stated that paper-based election is the only solution. In order to speedup the results, an optical scanner reading paper ballots can be used, says Shacham.