OUR VIEW: With Bowen's review confirming that vulnerability, she has little choice but take the machines offline, at least for the Feb. 5 California presidential primary.

In the next two days, California's top elections official will decide whether a dozen counties around the state can continue to use the electronic voting machines that have either brought elections into the modern ages, or subverted the democratic process.

When she was campaigning for the post last year, now-Secretary of State Debra Bowen promised a top-to-bottom review of the machines made primarily by four manufacturers and used in most of the state's largest counties. That review was completed last week and -- unsurprisingly -- found that all of the machines were vulnerable to multiple hacking attempts by computer experts.

The results were unsurprising, because a variety of experts has long been decrying the lack of security and transparence surrounding the machines and there have been numerous successful efforts -- in laboratory conditions -- to hack into the machines and alter their functioning.

With Bowen's review confirming that vulnerability, she has little choice but to take the machines offline, at least for the Feb. 5 California presidential primary. The larger question remains whether the machines, which have cost the various counties hundreds of millions of dollars, can be salvaged in time for either June 2008 statewide primaries or the November general election in which the state may play a key role in choosing who succeeds George W. Bush as president.

And that answer will depend heavily on the response by the manufacturers of the machines, who until now have continued to bury their heads in the source code, insisting their machines were impervious to any reasonable Election Day assault.

But their insistence defies reason. Just because it has never been demonstrated that a machine has been hacked in an election doesn't mean it hasn't happened, or that it couldn't -- only that it hasn't been proved.

An executive for Sequoia Voting Systems, which makes the machines Riverside County uses, blasted Bowen's test, saying that all of the methods used to hack the machines would be tracked by the paper trail that is now required (largely at the insistence of the vote-machine critics, incidentally).

But the executive, Steven Bennett, seems to be discounting the incredible sophistication of malicious code these days. One in particular that Bowen's team used could actually turn itself off and "hide" if a voter went back in and changed his or her picks after an initial review. The code was programmed to assume that such a step indicated the voter had noticed a change on the ballot.

One need look no further than the virus-of-the-day on the Internet to realize how easy it would be to infect a voting machine, given even a short opportunity. And most of those are created just for some warped sense of fun. With elections, there is much more at stake.

Machine manufacturers insist that the opportunity isn't there in the short window a voter has during the standard voting process, but that also discounts the typically lax security that surrounds the machines in the days leading up to an election. County elections officials have said they will cut down the amount of time those machines are left overnight at polling places, but sheer logistics demands some be delivered at least a day or two before the election. That opens a number of windows of opportunity right there.

But the real prize would be infecting the central vote tabulator, where all the votes cast in the county are counted. With the sophistication of viruses today, how hard would it be to slip a malicious code into a voting machine in the hinterlands that rides all the way into Riverside and "wakes" when a card is plugged into the tabulator, potentially altering the entire county's results for one or more races?

It's unfortunate that if Bowen makes the expected call, Riverside County may have to mothball some $30 million worth of equipment and go back to 20th century technology. But unless and until Sequoia and the other manufacturers -- and elections officials themselves -- can guarantee a much more secure machine, a return to the fill-in-the-bubble type ballots is the only answer.