Hacking Democracy filmed over 3 years, first shown on HBO (a unit of Time Warner) in 2006 and released on DVD in 2007. The 80-minute documentary reveals many strange facts about paperless (or e-voting) systems that established during elections in the U.S.A. in the last years. It focuses on the story of Bev Harris, director of nonprofit election watchdog group called Black Box Voting, and her investigations of potential security flaws inherent in electronic voting. The disturbing effect of the upcoming premier have caused sharp critics from manufacturers of insecure voting machines. Diebold Election Systems president, David Byrd, in a letter to the HBO chairman and chief executive Chris Albrecht, said the film was so filled with errors that HBO should not show it. HBO says it stands by the film and has no plans to change its schedule. Today the good news about e-voting systems is that 27 states now require voting machines to produce a receipt which is some kind of guarantee that a vote was counted correctly. So when a voter casts a ballot electronically, he or she should receive a paper record that can be reviewed for accuracy. Those records should remain with the voting machine and become the official record of the vote - so if there is a conflict between the tally on the machine and the totals obtained by adding up the paper ballots, the paper-ballot tallies are the ones that are used to decide the election.

Posted 2 years, 5 months ago by alex |