Why would reverse-engineering not be "the area for kids to be playing in"? That's a great way to learn. And doing it on a real-world system is even better than

Why would reverse-engineering not be "the area for kids to be playing in"? That's a great way to learn. And doing it on a real-world system is even better than some mockup. As for the intent of the conference, it appears it's to shed light on how poorly designed these voting machines are. They are mostly "happy path programming" and previous attempts at clarifying the edge cases & vulnerabilities have been met with hand-waving and dismissal from both the vendor and the officials who purchases them.