I would say the most important thing to do is to pick a switch you think would be fun and then just pick the coolest looking keyboard that matches it.
The Keychron keyboards are a great starting point; They are pretty cheap so if you are unsure you won't be too upset if you want to later try a bigger or smaller layout.
I can't tell you my favorite layout unfortunately, I like 40%, 60%, full keyboards and even have a Kinesis (It helped me a lot with hand pain when I typed QWERTY. I recommend switching to DVORAK or another layout before spending so much money on a Kinesis these days)
Defcon 25 appears to be the first year of the voting village.
That said the late 2000s were full of discussion on voting machine security prior to the addition of the voting village. This was all old news by the time voting village was added.
This documentary explains where security was in 2006
I haven't watched this in a very long time but the hackers managed to procure source code from a public sever run by the company making the machines (Diebold I think) and faced some legal issues as a result.
They also illustrated a proof of concept attack where a counting machine was made to miscount votes to favor one person over another.
For people not in the know its very important to know that it is ILLEGAL for an independent 3rd party to perform penetration tests on voting machines without the manufacturer's consent and the code that runs these machines is not public in any way that would allow for a proper audit of the systems to ensure that even the manufacturer has not tampered with the machine.
Slave holding states wanted slaves to count for the census and free states saw that as un fair. So slaves got to count as 3/5ths of a person and everybody won! /s
Most computers I have used over the last 15 years will disable USB power if you short out the port (working with electronics you tend to replicate the "sticking scissors into a USB port" with some regularity)
Pencil lead I am sure causes other issues though... it gets red hot and melts eventually
All a matter of preference.
I would say the most important thing to do is to pick a switch you think would be fun and then just pick the coolest looking keyboard that matches it.
The Keychron keyboards are a great starting point; They are pretty cheap so if you are unsure you won't be too upset if you want to later try a bigger or smaller layout.
I can't tell you my favorite layout unfortunately, I like 40%, 60%, full keyboards and even have a Kinesis (It helped me a lot with hand pain when I typed QWERTY. I recommend switching to DVORAK or another layout before spending so much money on a Kinesis these days)