Hacking Democracy: film about voting machine fraud

If you have HBO and care about voting, you will want to watch Hacking Democracy, about how the new electronic voting machines can be used to perpetrate undetectable vote fraud. Bev Harris started researching voting machines in 2002, when her county got touch screen machines. She stumbled upon a server at Diebold that accidentally exposed the computer software that ran the machines. She sent the code to a computer scientist, who said that the voting machine's software was not secure against fraud, and then proceeded to cast fake votes. Harris then started the website Black Box Voting to expose these facts.

This movie is Bev's story. It's also a demonstration of how to conduct vote fraud. These machines are used across America, and around the world. They were mandated after the fiasco in Florida in 2000, by the HAVA act, to make voting more accessible. The problem is, all touch-screen voting, whether it has a "paper trail" or not, can be faked, because the act of touching the computer does not translate directly into a vote on paper. The electronic signal doesn't visibly become a permanent, physical mark on an official ballot. The "official" count remains ethereal, an electronic signal in a circuit, or on a disk.

For more information, go to Black Box Voting.