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I watched the section you highlighted, and yeah that was bad. The witness to me like someone who knew he fucked up and was trying to give technically correct answers. To play armchair lawyer for a sec, I think the lawyer, rather than trying to get the witness to speculate on why X happened, I might have phrased it as "In a typical scenario what measures are taken to prevent X?"
As far as some of the other anomalies, as a team lead and someone who teaches a lot of board games, you can teach someone something but they don't know it until they've done it. You're in a situation you don't really know how to deal with and you're trying to avert a crisis which leads to more fuck ups. And they can't just do a redo of the election.
An audit definitely seems called for here. Who set the machines should be pretty damn traceable. I'm not convinced it was intentional rather than incompetence because that would be pretty damn brazen. It would be very easy to end up with a target on your back.
You think so, but what odds do you want to give on the password for the laptop being a shared admin password that 20+ people know?
I have unfortunately seen a lot of stuff like this while working in IT. There was one school district that stored all parent passwords in the clear on a csv file.
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