No danger in our county
Well, if I came up to a terminal that announced itself as "WinVote" I'd avoid it like the plague. Its going to be hackable.
The machinery we use is a lot older and its not networked so its really difficult to hack. Most voters vote using optically read cards. The reader not only tabulates the votes but stores the cards so that we've got a check on the actual numbers if we need it. We do have electronic terminals, they're quaint and appear to be based on an ancient laptop running vxWorks. They not only tabulate the votes but keep a printed record of each vote. I could detail how everything is sewn up so that actually tampering with the results would be difficult, if not impossible, but its a bit long winded. Suffice to say that the memory packs in the optical readers are about the size of a pack of playing cards with a decidedly non-standard interface. The touch terminals are a bit more modern, they've got a PCMCIA memory card. I might have some junk somewhere that could read it but the chances are that the card's not formatted in any way that's recognizable to standard equipment. (But then......I can't get the pack out without breaking seals, I can't take it off to a corner and work on it because there's always more than one poll worker with the equipment and votes at all times.....and so on.......)
(Statistics and exit counts are the easy way to check up on voter fraud. Its just a bit sophisticated for the rubes that get their daily does from Fox and the like.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
