Hacker Cinema
Hacking Democracy
2006 · Film · documentary · 82 min
Directed by Russell Michaels, Simon Ardizzone
Documentary film investigating allegations of election fraud during the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Electronic voting machines count approximately 90% of America's votes in county, state and federal elections. The technology is also increasingly being used across the world, including in Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe and Latin America. The film uncovers incendiary evidence from the trash cans of Texas to the ballot boxes of Ohio, exposing secrecy, votes in the trash, hackable software and election officials rigging the presidential recount.Ultimately proving our votes can be stolen without a trace "Hacking Democracy" culminates in the famous 'Hursti Hack'; a duel between the Diebold voting machines and a computer hacker from Finland - with America's democracy at stake.
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7 comments on Hacker News
There is also the Emmy Nominated HBO Documentary "Hacking Democracy", from 2006.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy
HBO follow-up to their 2004 documentary, Hacking Democracy.
HBO 2006 documentary 'Hacking Democracy' on Youtube https://youtu.be/iZLWPleeCHE
'The film investigates the flawed integrity of electronic voting machines, particularly those made by Diebold Election Systems, exposing previously unknown backdoors in the Diebold trade secret computer software. The film culminates dramatically in the on-camera hacking of the in-use / working Diebold election system in Leon County, Florida - the same computer voting system which has been used in actual American elections across thirty-three states, and which still counts tens of millions of America's votes today.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy
Same company in 2018, same issues
When people vote, the machines they use record votes electronically and on tape. However, when summing up the votes, only the electronic portion is tallied up by removing a physical memory device and plugging them in to another special machine that does the summation.
This woman wants access to the actual physical tapes which have been stored, in order to do a statistical sampling of them in order to say how statistically likely the electronic tally was. (Physically counting the tapes by hand is not practical)
The courts are considering barring her again from access to the tapes.
If the electronic portion was highly statistically unlikely, then there are a lot of places the vote could have been tampered: tallying machines, individual voting machines, memory cartridges, physical transport of memory cartridges, even the paper tapes themselves, etc.
For a documentary I recommend watching Hacking Democracy.
An interesting documentary is "Hacking Democracy" (2006) [0] that championed open voting machines and open election processes to help prevent election fraud. The documented fraud that occurred in the early 2000's really lifted some of my childhood innocence from my teenage brain.
When mistakes that happen are chalked up to "computer glitches", but it only takes such a few bugs in a few key locations to change the outcome of an election, the results can be game-changing.
The full documentary was pretty concerning, and I have carried very little faith in the voting process since.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qk95SVRdEo (Last minute contains the section where the grandmother "steals" proprietary Diebold Election Systems code off an open webpage)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy
There was a great documentary about it actually: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy
Don't call people stupid.
Documentaries such as "Recount" and "Hacking Democracy" have made me sick to my stomach - and for a while now I've been questioning the fundamentals of the 'Democracy' that we have been shoving down other countries' throats all these years.
I for one am thrilled to hear about something like this. I think it is long overdue and it has a number of benefits:
1) will save taxpayers money in the long term
2) will create a platform that many developers can review and audit, thus helping improve security and preventing fraud
3) will create a de-facto standard for how we vote, and hopefully over time become used by more and more counties
4) will provide a better level of technology so even poorer counties can (hopefully) upgrade to a high tech and more accurate voting system