A recently released report commissioned by California Secretary of State Alex Padilla details hundreds of security violations in the controversial new proposed barcode voting system for Los Angeles County, California's largest county, which a "vendor insider," an "election official insider," or a "poll worker" could exploit to hack the outcome of the all-important California Democratic Primary.

The race is currently neck-and-neck between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, with Elizabeth Warren dropping into third place in most polls.

The state's new proposed system has already been criticized for relying on barcodes which a human cannot read as the indicator of the voter's intentions.

The report is located at the California Secretary of State's website, at a page entitled Los Angeles County VSAP - Certification Information.

In describing one system vulnerability which involves bypassing the system's normal boot cycle, by utilizing an extraneous USB port, the mere presence of which is not compliant with state certification standards, the report opines:

"Because booting from a USB drive doesn’t use the operating system on the targeted computer, that computer is offline from the System’s perspective. As such, this approach defeats the ability of Carbon Black to prevent running unregistered executables. For the same reason, Snare, the logging system, will not receive any information while running from the USB drive. ... This attack could be conducted by an elections official insider or a vendor insider."

"Carbon Black" and "Snare" are part of the software's security system. The report declares that the system grants "excessive root access" and "the ability to boot the system from a USB port," which gives "access to the system by unauthorized individuals."

Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan has declined to answer questions about the new proposed system. The system vulnerabilities were discovered through the relentless investigative efforts of independent investigative journalist Brad Freidman of BradBlog.com.

Los Angeles County, which holds one quarter of the population of California, is crucial to the ambitions of any Democratic candidate for the presidential nomination. The state's primary has been moved up to March 3rd Super Tuesday, the earliest major wave of contests in the season. Historically California has come near the end of the season. With 494 delegates to apportion, it is the richest prize in the primary season, and will now weigh in early.

A poor showing in California will all but end the mathematical possibilities for the nomination for Sanders, no friend to the Democratic National Committee establishment. A candidate would have to amass a string of near-landslide wins in some or all of the states New York, Florida, and Texas to overcome the kind of defeat Sanders suffered in California in 2016, was he running neck-and-neck within 2 points of Hillary Clinton in the polls, but Clinton nevertheless emerged with a 10 point victory.

Although there were thousands of reports of irregularities and election department fraud, Sanders did not contest the seating of the delegates. In San Diego, Sanders poll watchers took film footage of election department workers covering over Sanders votes on ballots with white-out.

The VSAP Tally system ("Voting Systems for All People") proposed for Los Angeles County is already under fire by election integrity activists for its use of a barcode to transmit a voter's choices to an optical scanner vote-counting machine.

Los Angeles is far and away the most populous county in both the state of California and in the country. With a population of 10 million, it is twice as populous the next most populated county, Cook County, Illinois. The state with the next highest number of delegates to apportion behind California's 494 delegates is the state of New York, with 320. If the VSAP Tally system is successfully rolled out in California, it will likely be rolled out though the rest of California and in other states as well.

In the Democratic Primaries, California is the 800-pound gorilla.

In the proposed system, after the voter taps his or her choices out on a touch-screen ballot marking device, the device prints out a barcode onto a paper ballot, which presumably reflects those choices. But the barcode, more specifically a type of barcode called a QR code, is not readable by a human and could say anything. The QR codes may also be subjected to additional levels of encryption.

For example, the QR code below reads "Elizabeth Warren." But the QR code below that reads "Ha ha I just stole your vote."