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A lot here about hard drives and voting machines.
The electronic voting machines typically don't have hard drives. They use ROM, FLASH and battery backed RAM for storage both their firmware and for storing votes. (chips, not disks)
In some machines there is no capability for removing programming. When 'firmware' is distributed on ROM, PROM or similar read-only chips, the machine can only read the program, it can't change or erase it. (11% of votes in Ohio)
Newer systems use FLASH or similar non-volatile read/write memory. These can be written by the machine much like a hard drive, so code could be erased or changed pretty easily. But it is stored electronically, not physically like a hard drive, so you do not have magnetic traces of earlier data like you would with a hard drive. (5% of votes in ohio)
These systems are all called DRE Direct Record Electronic, because they record the voted directly to memory devices. Even when the programming is stored on non-writable memory, the votes are stored on writable memory. Typically the writable memory is removed from the machine in a cartridge and taken to a machine which reads it in.
The machine which reads the vote-cartridges does usually have a hard drive and run 'normal' software like DOS or Windows. It also has access to the writable vote cartridge and could conceivably change the votes stored in there. Most voting machines store at least 2 copies of the data so that a bad cartridge does not result in lost votes. You would put a 'good' cartridge into the voting machines and it would copy it's backup memory of the votes onto the cartridge. An audit should compare the backup of votes on the voting machines to the data from the removable cartridges to check that they match.
From this point on, the processing is similar for paper-ballots like optical scan and punch cards. A more 'normal' computer is used to collect vote data from the 'reader', total up votes and so forth. These 'tabulator' programs are where BBV, Rubin and others found most of the blatant hackability and security holes. But the tabulation is pretty easy to double check. If you confirm machine-level vote counts, or precinct-level optical or punchcard counts, you can add them up by hand if need be, or with a computer program thats known to be clean.
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