Does a voting station contain a hard disk?
Not necessarily. It is possible to construct a voting station so that it boots and runs from a CD-ROM that has been certified by the authority in charge of the election. Such CD-ROM based systems are quite common – for example take a look at the Knoppix version of Linux. Voting stations do maintain log files that record certain administrative and trouble-detection information – such as the number of voters who have used the machine and the number of ballot pages sent to the printer. The amount of data in such logs is small enough that they would easily fit onto a commodity USB flash memory (“thumb drive”) device.
