Hackers infiltrated the District of Columbia’s online voting system last week. They changed all votes for mayor to Master Control Pro and elected HAL 9000 the council chairman. The blaring University of Michigan fight song played whenever a new ballot was successfully cast.

The hackers, a team of computer scientists from Ann Arbor, Mich., were capable of damage far less sophomoric. When the District’s Board of Elections and Ethics issued an open invitation for hackers to find vulnerabilities in a pilot system to allow overseas and military voters to cast ballots over the Web, it took about 36 hours for J. Alex Halderman and his students to break in. They found a document containing the names and 16-digit passwords of all 937 voters who were invited to use the system during the real election on Nov. 2.

The team could have used the data to “vote in the name of every real voter and keep the real voters from voting,” Professor Halderman told the Council of the District of Columbia on Friday.

He said he also saw signs that computer users in Iran and China were trying to crack the system’s master password  which his team obtained from an equipment manual. (Network administrators had never changed the four-character default password.) He said that the foreign hackers were probably not specifically trying to break into the District’s voting system, but that they represented a threat nonetheless.