The CIA has reported that in its monitoring of electronic voting in foreign countries, vote rigging has been observed in Macedonia, Venezuela and Ukraine – raising concerns on the vulnerability of voting machines to vote tampering.

In an US Election Assistance Commission field hearing Steve Stigall, CIA cyber security expert has suggested that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and allies may have tampered with and fixed the 2004 election recount results. This statement seems to only further deteriorate the relationship between the US and the Latin American leader. This may be a powerful lesson for the US, where electronic voting is being standardized, as this report may be evidence of using computers to tamper with democratic proceedings.

According to the report to the Election Assistance Commission, an agency formed by the Congress to modernize the US voting process, the computerized voting system are vulnerable at five different points in the process.

Stigall says that machines that are connected to the Internet can be hacked online, while those which are offline can be compromised using wireless devices. Wireless devices have already been banned at voting premises in eleven states, but officials are sometimes unaware that the machines may contain wireless capabilities.

While Stigall says he is not specifically addressing US voting issues, he believes this report will put into perspective various calls to shift voting to an Internet-based operation, particularly for soldiers and American citizens abroad. Most Web-based balloting systems have proven to be vulnerable to tampering according to Stigall.

The commission had already been criticized for immediately releasing $1 billion for buying electronic equipment without first setting standards of performance and security. Security experts have concluded that the voting systems can be hacked, and accusations of vote tampering in swing states such as Ohio and Florida have resulted in an initiative to have all voting machine produce paper-copy audit trails for comparison.

Stigall has studied electronic voting systems in almost three dozen nations and said that most of the machines generated a final paper ballot as a result of the electronic voting which the voter would then drop in the ballot boxes. But even these paper stubs cannot stop the cheating entirely.

Doubts regarding the security of Venezuela’s voting machines concern the US deeply. This is because the company that partnered with Chavez’s government, Smartmatic, is owned by the company Sequoia Voting Systems until 2007. This is the same company that supplied voting machines for use in 16 states and the District of Columbia.