Hacking Democracy
This morning in my fever-befuddled delirium, I happened upon a new HBO documentary called Hacking Democracy . The film follows a grandmother named Bev Harris. In 2004, her county was going to buy new electronic voting machines, so she got curious and decided to find out some information about these machines. Most of what she found from the media were glowing reports of how fast, fun, and easy these machines were to use. Then something interesting happened. Harris googled "voting machines" and glitch, and found countless reports of voting machine error. What happened next was even more disturbing. Harris was browsing the website of Diebold (one of the major voting machine vendors in the United States), and found an FTP server with (oops!)all of the files and programs used in Diebold's voting machines. She downloaded them. After learning the programming code and taking it to some experts, they discovered that a person who didn't even know how the system worked could hack into a voting machine in about 10 seconds. What followed was a protracted fight between Harris' group, Black Box Voting , and various county election officials and Diebold. At the end of the documentary, the evidence seems pretty convincing that Diebold's systems are easily manipulated and have security flaws that the company takes great pains to cover up. I won't spoil the rest. I believe it's playing several times today, so TiVo it!
N.B. Harris also published a book about her findings, which you can read on the Black Box Voting website.
N.B. Harris also published a book about her findings, which you can read on the Black Box Voting website.