The school's Center for Information Technology Policy, which studies computer technology's affect on society, posted the report online Wednesday. The computer scientists who worked on the research, said they were able to create vote-stealing code that can be installed in a minute on Diebold hardware and change vote counts undetected, according to a statement from Princeton.

"We have created and analyzed the code in the spirit of helping to guide public officials so that they can make wise decisions about how to secure elections," Edward Felton, the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, said in the statement. "We found that the machine is vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces."

The devices are also susceptible to computer viruses "that can spread themselves automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity," he claimed.

For its part, Diebold hotly disputed the report. According to David Byrd, president of Diebold Election Systems, the TS machine used by the Princeton researchers had security software that was two generations old and is no longer even in use.

"Normal security procedures were ignored," he said in a statement Wednesday. "Numbered security tape, 18 enclosure screws and numbered security tags were destroyed or missing so that the researchers could get inside the unit. A virus was introduced to a machine that is never attached to a network"