Edward Snowden has revealed how a common model of voting machine – used in a variety of voting precincts in the US for the presidential election - can be rigged.

He tweeted a video to his millions of followers produced by a cybersecurity company that showed how by physically accessing the machine – a Sequoia AVC Edge Mk1 voting unit – the number of votes could be altered and the names of candidates changed.

The company, Cylance, showed on the video how it manipulated the data produced by the machine by altering its software with a PC memory card that costs just $30 (£24).

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Edward Snowden has revealed how a common model of voting machine – used in a variety of voting precincts in the US for the presidential election - can be rigged

Snowden tweeted Cylance's video showing how it hacked a voting machine to his millions of followers

The firm was even able to rig the back-up paper trail.

The machine was used for vote-counting in California, Florida, and New Jersey, or 8,170,477 registered voters in 22,368 precincts.

Cylance said: 'The video shows how they [the researchers] were able to reflash the firmware with a PCMCIA card, directly manipulate the voting tallies in memory, and cause a vote for one candidate to be credited to another by altering elements of the device's screen display.

'Additionally, the video demonstrates how tallies can be manipulated on both the Public Counter and the Protective Counter, which was designed to act as a redundant verification system to ensure results are valid.'

Cylance urged officials to closely monitor hardware and software errors and it provided details of the vulnerabilities to both the manufacturer Sequoia and government authorities.

Cylance showed how it altered the number of votes cast and the names of candidates

'We believe that both the public and the appropriate regulatory agencies needed to be made aware of these issues immediately so that appropriate measures could be taken to better secure these voting machines,' said Cylance CEO and President Stuart McClure.

'We also hope that the information we provided to the manufacturer will assist them in developing better devices moving forward so that we can ensure a secure election process.'

Snowden tweeted: 'Little time to patch this vuln, but can still forbid use of this model, run statistical analysis after polls close on rest to ID outliers.'

Donald Trump, a billionaire first-time candidate whose political debut was initially seen as an ego-stroking circus act, bested 16 other Republicans for the right to face Hillary Clinton in the US election, who has lived and breathed campaigns and elections for more than 40 years and had only one serious intra-party rival.

Snowden tweeted: 'Little time to patch this vuln, but can still forbid use of this model, run statistical analysis after polls close on rest to ID outliers'

Clinton was one of the first in line on Tuesday morning as she and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, voted in their hometown of Chappaqua, New York.

Trump cast his vote at 11am on Tuesday, voting at a New York City public school with wife Melania, daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. His granddaughter Arabella also tagged along.