How Safe Is Your Vote? HBO’s Hacking Democracy

A billowing American flag against a pitch background opens this compelling story of a Seattle grandmother, Bev Harris, who started asking questions after presidential candidate Al Gore managed to get negative votes (-16,022, to be exact) in Volusia County, Florida in 2000.

After a media distraction over "hanging chads" and other discrepancies, the overall results in Florida effectively lost the election for Gore.

As simplistic as it sounds, Harris made a search engine find on the web (under “voting machines” and “glitch”) of an FTP site that held more than 40,000 files of the software specs, user manuals, hardware drawings and even passwords of the technology responsible for approximately 80% of electronic voting in the United States. On the internet, people. She, of course, made copies, including one that remained in a safety deposit box during her investigation.

Through dumpster diving and connecting with others across the country who had the same query about the fallacy of the electronic voting system, Harris managed to stir up enough trouble to have the Secret Service visit her house and was even served cease and desist orders by the corporation under fire. Harris' pleas to elected officials went unanswered, as apparently questioning the system that got you elected in the first place is more self-sacrificing than any of them wanted to be.

This intriguing documentary culminates in a “test” of the accuracy of voting cards, or the diskettes that are extracted from voting terminals, manipulated in the manner they suspect the ones in Volusia County might have been.

You can watch the documentary in its entirety, thanks to Google Videos:

[Google Video: Hacking Democracy]

[HBO Interviews the Filmmakers]

[HBO Schedule for Hacking Democracy]

[Black Box Voting Website]

Image by TopTechWriter on Flickr.