Children Hacking Vote Machines

In Las Vegas, this week, young people participated in the much more wholesome activity of hacking voting machines. As part of DEF CON, a cybersecurity conference, children aged 8-16 tried to hack replicas of state election websites. The event was designed to draw attention to the vulnerabilities of digital-age elections, and an 11-year-old made headlines by changing election results on a replica Florida state website in less than 10 minutes. None of the contestants managed to break into a heavily protected voter registration database, but we can expect more experienced hackers to spend  time working on that problem.