If all that was at risk was a night in police jail and a slap on the wrist, it would be done, but reading the sentences one faces for election tampering is really chilling.

I would not risk it for a million, I will certainly not risk it for the lulz. Plus, in most cases, it involves (laughably weak) physical security. I am less confident on how to hide my tracks there and I suppose many would-be hackers feel the same.

It doesn't matter what gets done, it matters how it's portrayed. Such a hack would just be used by the media to vilify their target-of-the-week, and politicians to institute ever-more-prominent centralized electronic controls that don't grant any related protection, but allow them to expand their personal influence and institutional surveillance surfaces (see also: TSA).

In fact, the media is already trying to CYA, and the state is already trying to expand control, by claiming that such a hack was perpetrated by a nation-state in the 2016 election, and that that's why they were so egregiously wrong in everything they said about Clinton/Trump in the preceding 18 months.

At defcon this year they had a bunch of the popular electronic voting booths set up, and they were all hacked within 6 hours. A big problem is having physical access to the booth. All of the hacks involve picking a lock.

Given that the voting computers sit in some warehouse between elections, that's not really a big hurdle.

Yep, here's the post from Science Friday: https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/hacking-the-vote-how-...

Unfortunately it would need to be a hack that purposefully gets itself caught in order to drive any point home. I can imagine the risk vs reward on something like that would be very undesirable.