New York

IN my old workplace, right next to the comfortable couches where we would take breaks, we kept a voting machine. Instead of using the screen to pick our preferred candidate, we played Pac-Man. We sent Pac-Man's familiar yellow chomping face after digital ghosts with the same kind of machine that had been used in 2008 in more than 160 US jurisdictions with about nine million registered voters.

This was at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, where researchers had been able to reprogram the voting machine without even breaking the "tamper evident" seals.