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The infection could also be detected after an election, during an investigation.

Horse. Barn door.

If in a particular election, some machines are found to have been compromised and the number of voters who used those machines exceeds the difference between the vote tallies the top two candidates received elsewhere, how can the election be salvaged?

Of course, at least in Washington State, such a thing wouldn't matter so long as the Democrats win. But not all states have such attitudes.

BTW, why use WINCE? I've designed graphical systems on 'bare metal' that would be entirely adequate for use in a vote entry device. Such a system can be constructed to account for every byte of RAM or flash usage. Can the same be said for WINCE?

Horse. Barn door.

Just like ANY election tampering technique, it can only be detected after the election.

It was postulated in the 2K election that the guy caught with the ballot boxes and voting machine was taking it to a location where people would take bundles of voted ballots and punch the Gore chad out, 5, maybe 10 at a time. This would convert the Bush votes to null, the gore votes don't change, and the undervotes go to Gore. In so doing some chads would not get punched and be dimpled.

This turned out to be untraceable and, because it was all one party in control of the county infrastructure, unprovable. And much easier to manage than loading super-spec'd software into hundreds of machines so that even a forensic expert could not discover it.

As for recovery, once the forensic guys get a copy of the code, they can decompile the vote swap algorithm and recover the votes, if it's a D that lost. If an R lost, nothing can be done, sorry.

I get stuff from the DEA Forensic Computer Lab and it's pretty cool what they can do. Once and a while they get help from NSA. I have an interest in protecting IP from compromise when you must release proprietary code to folks who'd love to unlock it.

I don't know why they'd use WinCE. At the Make/Buy gate, they went Buy COTS rather than try to develop their own operating system.

Gates probably offered it for free so that he could use the secret backdoor Windows features to make sure that the mayor of his town was the one he wanted.