"These websites are so easy to hack we couldn't give them to adult hackers—they'd be laughed off the stage," Braun told ABC News. "They thought hacking a voter website was interesting 20 years ago. We had to give it to kids to actually make it challenging."
The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), meanwhile, sought to diminish the hackers' efforts. In a statement issued Thursday, the group called the conference "a pseudo environment which in no way replicates state election systems, networks, or physical security," and said the hackers were using voting machines "most of which are no longer in use."
The Voting Village, however, asserted in its statement Thursday that "Every type of machine that will be available at DEF CON is in use today," and urged NASS to come to the conference to participate.