The simplist explanation is that corruption is the problem not the technical aspects of these voting machines. These errors wouldn't be tolerated with ATM machines because the public seems to care a lot more if their bank account is fraked with but not so much their vote for some reason... That's the only real way to clean up the corruption; get the public to put real pressure on the entities involved in the voting process.

Yeah, their headlines are pure sensationalism. And if I'm not mistaken what your saying is actually demonstrable.

I'm sick of the stupid headlines I've been reading about the so called projects of MIT students lately... I mean, clearly an 'immortal invulnerable program' is impossible at least for practical purposes by definition(they're dependent on the underlying OS, on other softwares and last but not least on the hardware integrity). Other recent headlines about their CS students claiming to be able to tell who's gay based on their facebook friends.... pff omg, when did it all get so preposterous. Why aren't they more honest about the reach of their ambitions. If you take these teachers words to the letter it seems like they don't know what's theoretically sound and what isn't...

but by 'aliens' I mean any life form.

Full Human-level AI is extremely unlikely at least till the next 200 years(the current state of art and evolution pace in AI is, if compared to our dreams, pitiful), therefore discovering aliens is more likely, since I believe aerospacial engineering will reach the necessary advances till the end of this century.