The major international oil company that I worked for banned all USB drives from the company over 7 years ago. They even disabled the ports on all company owned computers because the security risks of USBs was so great.
To have USBs involved in our election process is knowingly fraudulent. Any IT person who would allow this is either happy to have insecure systems or so poor at their job that they should be forced to change professions. USBs are fine for music in a car, a home computer even, but absolutely wrong in any environment that is sensitive or needs to be secure.
Hey, you recall the Stuxnet virus?
It was a virus that got into the Iranian nuke program because some engineer inserted a memory stick into the USB drive.
But hey, what kind of creep would do that to a voting machine?
Exactly !
Very well said !
Spot on...even our town senior center disabled the USB ports on their public computers....15 years ago.
Of course they were more worried about gray beard hackers and geezer porn...;>)
Most of the tabulating machines are not online and the only way to get ballots/vote totals from them is some type of memory card. If they aren't networked I'm not sure how else to do it.
In this case it sounds like the servers also didn't have a network connection the laptop could access.
The same thing with the banks I've worked for. The USB ports were locked down on all computers.