Before Argentine Congress, Macri's e-ballots shown to be vulnerable to hacking via smartphone.

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2. Well, sure.

But if a ballot is being to designed to be scanned this easily, like one might scan a receipt with a barcode, that's a problem.

For starters, it violates voters' right to a secret ballot (Article 37, in the Argentine Constitution). According to Smaldone, a political operative would only need to wave his phone in front of the ballot box to upload its entire contents - and possibly alter the ballots themselves.

The tabulation process itself, by the way, was also shown to be easily hacked. Last year's mayoral election in Buenos Aires was, in fact, shown to be hacked from New Jersey and Texas (!), as well as domestically. Only close monitoring by specialists from NGOs and the University of Buenos Aires, for instance, prevented over 20,000 extra votes from being counted for Macri's candidate in one district.

Macri, I might add, retaliated by trying to have those expose the vulnerability jailed. Wouldn't you know it, his hand-picked candidate (a kind of Paul Ryan of Argentina) defeated his opponent by just 2.7% in the runoff.