By Deb Feyerick and Bob Ruff

The notion of stealing votes is as old as, well, voting itself.

With the advent of computerized voting, some are concerned that e-voting may be susceptible to tampering. University of Michigan Prof. J. Alex Halderman, along with colleagues at Princeton University, decided to put that question to the test.

First, they legally purchased government surplus voting machines, then they tested them to see if they were vulnerable to vote theft.

For Halderman's crew, getting into the machines was as easy as picking a cheap lock. Once in, the researchers were able to reprogram the memory card inside the machines, set up a mock election and then steal votes at will.

Princeton researcher Ariel Feldman, showed us one of the hacked machines: "We were flipping votes from one candidate to another to keep the total number of votes the same." And, just to nail the point home about how simple it is to alter the computer's memory card, they replaced the election software with the classic video game, Pac-Man.

And there's more:

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