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Recent headlines have trumpeted details about the Bush administration’s “crackdown on voter fraud” and its links to the controversial firings of eight U.S. attorneys. On closer inspection, this so-called fraud has turned out to be mostly minor-league balloting errors by poorly informed immigrants and instances of convicted felons voting illegally. But what if voting fraud is real? What if the Bush administration itself is the result of such a fraud – only one perpetuated by voting machines, not people? That’s the notion explored by the rather scary documentary Hacking Democracy, which premiered on HBO in 2006 and is now out on DVD.
The subject is the vulnerability of electronic voting systems, which are swiftly becoming ubiquitous – computers now count 80 percent of America’s vote. Bev Harris, a Seattle grandmother, and a group of activists collectively known as Black Box Voting, devote themselves to finding out what happened in the 2004 election, when the electronic balloting results of key blue states like Ohio, Florida, and others, were called into question.
A movie about voting machines? You don’t expect to be drawn in, but you are. The camera follows Harris and her merry band as they go Dumpster-diving at a county election office in Florida, download sensitive material on the Internet that wasn’t supposed to be available, and confront voting machine makers at public hearings, in particular Diebold Election Systems. Is there a connection between the fact that in 2003, then-Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell promised, in a fund-raising letter to Ohio’s Republicans, to “deliver” the state’s electoral votes to Bush? Or that Harris discovered paper evidence showing that the local Republican political committee was among the company’s “accounts receivable”?
Already aware that voting machines in Volusia County, FL, had actually totaled negative votes for Al Gore, Harris went exploring on the Net and found codes for Diebold’s electoral software. She downloaded it – all 40 pages – and ran it by computer experts, who promptly hacked into the software in a matter of seconds. Harris and her Black Box partner, Kathleen Wynne, also Dumpster-dived to come up with an Ohio county’s Election Day records. “We wouldn’t have to do this if our system wasn’t secret and turned over to private corporations,” Harris says, in one of many expressions of frustration over how little election officials know about this software – because manufacturers won’t tell them.
The scariest moment is a demonstration by the Black Boxers to the supervisor of elections in Leon County, FL. During this scene, which is as tense as any movie thriller, a computer whiz hacks into voting machine software as the activists, with the elections supervisor looking on, vote in a mock election they’ve made up on the spot.
In the last scene of this fine documentary, an elections worker from Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, in tears, tells the filmmakers, “These vendors are lying
and saying everything is all right. And it’s not all right. How can this happen?” And almost simultaneously, we’re shown a scene of the unloading of
brand new Diebold machines for use in Ohio. Price: $22 million. Joan Oleck
April 16, 2007
