Bianca, an 11-year-old sporting a brown curly bob and leggings, wanted me to know that democracy is in danger. She had just hacked into a replica state election website to show how easy it could be to change the vote tallies on polling day.

“I did it for America and all of the world. If kids can hack a voting system, you need to change something,” she said. “If we don’t fix the present, the future will all be destroyed.”

Bianca was one of 50 kids aged six to 17 who attempted to attack the websites at this summer’s Def Con hacker fest in Las Vegas. Bent over small laptops, they pored over papers instructing them how to do an SQL injection — a simple way of inserting nefarious codes into applications. When they succeeded, their changes appeared on the website, projected on to a large screen: one candidate’s vote count jumped to 12 billion, another’s name was changed to Kim Jong Un, and another’s to Bob Da Builder.