#38: Hacking Democracy and the Electronic Vote.

Last night, Nina and I watched a documentary on HBO called Hacking Democracy; you can view the trailer here. Given the outrageous amount of hacked votes we encounter on our site every day and--of course--the proximity of the midterm elections, it seemed a particularly appropriate blog subject.

Hacking Democracy is about a few different issues, but the dominant theme is how unsecure new electronic voting machines produced by companies like Diebold (who fruitlessly petitioned the cable network not to air the film) really are and how easy it would be for someone to use this proprietary technology to rig an election. Electronic was supposed to be the safeguard, but instead it seems to have only made matters worse.

While the documentary itself wasn't necessarily spectacular, it did raise a lot of important questions which all Americans should be concerned about, regardless of political affiliation. Particularly in a time when so many citizens feel as though voter suppression and voting irregularities have marginalized their impact at the polls, it is critical to take a good, long, analytical look at the systems we have in place... even if the voting software companies don't like it.

I wish the film hadn't had as much of a political bent as it did, although to a certain degree there is no way of escaping it. Elections, after all, are all about politics. For those of you who didn't catch it, here's a nice piece from CNN's Jack Cafferty that touches upon a lot of the points raised in the documentary:



You can also watch a video put together by Princeton University, whose researchers found massive security breaches with Diebold's hardware and used it to successfully hack a test election, or watch Lou Dobbs interview filmmaker-cum-voter-activist Bev Harris and security expert Hugh Thompson. The last clip is worth watching just for Thompson, who reminds us an awful lot of a young Professor Frink.

xoxox
Danny