It took me around 10 minutes to crash the upcoming midterm elections. Once I accessed the shockingly simple and vulnerable set of tables that make up the state election board’s database, I was able to shut down the website that would tally the votes, bringing the election to a screeching halt. The data were lost completely. And just like that, tens of thousands of votes vanished into thin air, throwing an entire election, and potentially control of the House or Senate—not to mention our already shaky confidence in the democratic process itself—into even more confusion, doubt, and finger-pointing.

I’m 17. And I’m not even a very good hacker.

Story Continued Below

I’ve attended the hacking convention DEF CON in Las Vegas for over five years now, since I was 11 years old. While I have a good conceptual understanding of how cyberspace and the internet work, I’ve taken only a single Python programming class in middle school. When I found out that the Democratic National Committee was hosting a security competition for kids and teens, however, my interest in politics fed into curiosity about how easy it might be to mess with a U.S. election. Despite that limited experience, I understood immediately when I got to Las Vegas this year why the professionals tend to refer to state election security as “child’s play.”

The Voting Machine Village at DEF CON, where attendees tackled vulnerabilities in state voting machines and databases, raised plenty of eyebrows among election boards and voting machine manufacturers alike. It’s a hard pill to swallow for the public, too: No one wants to believe that—after waiting in a lengthy line, taking time off from work or finding a babysitter in order to vote—their ballot could be thrown away, or even worse, altered.

Consequently, people started to take notice as reports came in from both the intelligence community and organizations like the DNC, a co-sponsor of the Voting Village, about the ease with which a foreign power could potentially do such a thing. Since electronic voting was introduced in the early 2000s, leaders in both Washington and our state capitals have repeatedly failed to keep up with rapid advances in information technology and cybersecurity.

The replica state election websites used in this year’s competition were built on MySQL, a database management system that stores data in simple tables containing columns and rows. By inputting a command into the search bar to see all the website’s tables, I could then see all of its data, including vote tallies, candidate names and tables of basic website functions. Once someone has that kind of access, they can do plenty of damage. The organizers instructed us to double candidates’ vote tallies, for starters. Then, with the assistance of volunteers, some of us easily changed the names of candidates or even their parties, or inflated the vote tallies to ridiculously high, Putinesque numbers.

The entirety of the hacking came down to entering no more than two lines of code: the first to display all columns and rows for the site, the second to alter the vote tally. Of the few dozen participants, most completed the very simple hack assigned by the instructors. About a quarter figured out how to rename or delete other candidates and their parties from the list.

But even after doing something as relatively tame, from a computer science perspective, as messing around with a few numbers, I wanted to see how much damage I could do without the competition’s instructions or staff assistance. First, I wrote down the IP address of the server hosting the competition, no different than the first step a foreign agent would take. Then, I accessed the DEF CON website from a secure Wi-Fi spot and Googled a list of common MySQL commands. The whole thing, from search to shutdown, took me less than five minutes.

To take down the entire website, all I needed to do was enter a command to drop the table—to remove it from the database entirely, in other words. This caused the page to return an execution error, which took a reset of the website’s host server to fix. Essentially, I had crashed the website, similar to the denial of service attacks more familiar to the public, but more direct and even more effective.

This is where the staff got a little bit confused, as the competition’s instructions had told us only how to change the number of votes. I had to crash the website again, right in front of them, before they believed I had anything to do with it.

The fact that someone as untrained as myself could bring an election to a screeching halt with nothing but a quick Google search should be a wake-up call. While inflating Gary Johnson’s vote tally to over 90 billion is good for a laugh, a more malicious agent—not to mention a team of well-funded and highly skilled hackers—could do real damage. A close congressional race could be flipped by the addition of a few hundred extra votes, the installation of malware, stolen security credentials, or the shutdown of a website during the final tally, like my DEF CON escapade last week. The possibility, or even the likelihood, of such an event is precisely why the chief security officer of the Democratic National Committee, Bob Lord, interviewed me and my fellow competition participants to see what kind of defense those without experience could potentially develop.

I didn’t quite know what to expect when I started the competition, but I know it shouldn’t have been that easy. Someone with my skills wouldn’t have stood a chance against a professionally protected website. Anyone with a Wi-Fi-enabled device could theoretically have done what I did to the mock election database.

Unfortunately, the people who have the power to do something about this issue are in denial. But that doesn’t change the facts on the ground. America is supposed to set a world standard for free and open elections—the idea of “one person, one vote” is part of our identity. The failure to address such a widespread and well-documented effort by foreign powers to compromise that principle puts our democracy, and our position of leadership, at risk.

I’m still not particularly interested in a tech career, but one day I hope to be in a position to prevent something like this from happening in real life. After the competition, both the staff and the competitors agreed—we need a tech-literate government with the resources and the will to secure our elections. Or at least one that can stop a 17-year-old with basic command line skills and 10 free minutes between classes from electing Gary Johnson president-for-life.

After another day of deliberations with no outcome, reporters and lawyers have settled into a time-killing routine.

ALEXANDRIA, VA— The throngs of journalists gathered at the federal courthouse here on Monday included five bookers from ABC News, standing at the ready for a verdict in Paul Manafort’s criminal trial.

Their mission: to track down and sign up the jurors for television appearances in which they might explain how they reached the most eagerly-anticipated verdict in recent political memory.

Story Continued Below

They’ll have to wait for another day.

The third full day of deliberations in Manafort’s trial left the media and political worlds in a continued state of suspended animation, as reporters, legal experts and various other gadflies here speculate about how much longer the jury might take—and whether, as Manafort’s lawyers have suggested, the fact that they are still talking is good news for the defendant. (Many legal experts disagree, saying several days of deliberation are normal in a case this complex, with Manafort facing 18 counts including tax and bank fraud.)

In the meantime, no event was too small to escape the scrutiny of an army of bored reporters. Last week, when jurors were first spotted outside the courthouse on smoke breaks, reporters mulled the significance of the sightings. Perhaps it was a sign the jurors were stressed out?

On Monday, at a quarter past noon, a network television intern spotted a cart full of sandwiches being trucked into the jury room and being trucked again out empty. Lunch, it was safe to conclude, had been served. What that might have to do with a verdict was unclear, but everyone seemed to feel a little better knowing about it. It was something.

The day had begun began with a perfunctory 9:30 hearing. A clean-cut Manafort entered the courtroom flanked by U.S. Marshals and smiled at his wife, Kathleen. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s taciturn spokesman, Peter Carr, looked on several rows behind her.

Despite disclosing on Friday that he had himself received threats related to the case, District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III had not taken the extraordinary step of sequestering his jury over the weekend. On Monday morning, after the jurors filed in, Ellis asked them to affirm that they had not discussed the case or undertaken independent research since leaving the courthouse on Friday.

He also acknowledged the arrival of two fresh-faced new law clerks, who, he said, had walked straight into a “maelstrom.”

Ellis noted the absence of lead prosecutor Greg Andres, with whom he’s clashed over the course of the trial and expressed the hope that Andres had not fallen ill. (He hadn’t). Two of Manafort’s five lawyers were also missing from the hearing, but Ellis did not pause to note their absence.

After the hearing adjourned, Sherine Ebadi, the lead FBI agent on the case, conferred outside the courtroom with Uzo Asonye, an Alexandria-based federal prosecutor working with Robert Mueller’s team.

Then, the waiting began. The fact that jurors had been given nearly two hours’ worth of instructions by Ellis – and that they could only review those instructions on an audio cassette player – did nothing to hasten their deliberations.

Inside the courtroom, where electronic devices are forbidden, print media ruled: newspaper crossword puzzles, magazines, paperbacks and games of solitaire.

Over the course of the morning, the judge held two brief sidebars with the attorneys, and little else happened.

But it could have, at any moment. And so television networks convened large teams of junior staffers ready to run from the 9^th floor courtroom and an overflow room three stories below and deliver the news of the verdicts on each of the counts that Manafort faces.

About 50 members of the media camped out in the small plaza in front of the courthouse with dozens more in the lobby of the Westin across the street and in the hotel’s restaurant, where a cheeseburger ordered “rare” came back brown in the middle, just the way the president likes it.

Manafort’s wife, his spokesman Jason Maloni, and his defense team held down what has become their usual corner table. Last week, the defense team waited out deliberations by playing five-card draw. On Monday, they read. Manafort’s lead attorney, Kevin Downing, who cuts the profile of a pro football quarterback, paced the lobby and made small talk with reporters.

Finally, in the early afternoon, a hubbub erupted in the courtyard. A verdict? No, just a middle-aged woman shouting racial slurs at various passersby. She retreated to a bench where three policemen interrogated her, and eventually slinked away.

Later, inside the courtroom, a baby appeared in the gallery.

Just before 5 p.m., when the doors of the courthouse close to entrants for the night, Manafort and lawyers for both sides returned for the courtroom. Manafort’s lawyer’s Jay Nanavati plucked a wintergreen lifesaver from a bowl and handed it to his client — a tiny distraction as he awaits a potentially grim fate.

Ellis announced that the jury had asked to extend their deliberations later than usual, to at least 6:15 p.m.

Did this signal a verdict was imminent? On the one hand, as one reporter asked aloud, why not just resume deliberations in the morning unless they were nearing a verdict? On the other hand, for a case of this complexity the jury had sent very few notes to the judge seeking guidance, so perhaps there was more to work through.

At 6 p.m., the lights in the lobby outside the courtroom went out.

The bailiff entered the courtroom with a sheaf of papers in hand and handed them to the clerk.

The verdict? No, jurors’ orders for tomorrow’s lunch, it appeared.

Lawyers filed back into the courtroom. In the gallery, Maloni hugged Kathleen Manafort and she adjusted his pocket square.

A few minutes later the judge announced that deliberations would resume at 9:30 on Tuesday morning.

“I told you so,” Kathleen Manafort whispered to Maloni after the hearing adjourned, though was not clear what she had told. A few minutes later Manafort’s lawyers were back in the Westin’s lobby, drinks in hand.

Meanwhile, in an elevator down from the courtroom, a healthy and upbeat Andres joked with reporters from the New York Times, which reported last week on his penchant for the fast food burger joint Shake Shack. “We’re lucky to be alive, given the diet we eat,” he told them. “As you know.”

Stephanie Murray contributed to this report.