"Hacking Democracy"

On Tuesday, 40 percent of voters will cast ballots on electronic touch-screens. If you're not worried already about the dangers of paperless voting, this HBO documentary will blow your mind.

By Farhad Manjoo

Read more: HBO, TV, Arts & Entertainment, voting, Reviews, Farhad Manjoo, Voting Machines, diebold, 2006 Elections, voting problems

Nov. 2, 2006 | "When people see what is really going on, there is no way we will allow this to continue," the crusading election-reform activist Bev Harris declares at the beginning of "Hacking Democracy," a documentary film about the flawed American election system that premieres on HBO on Nov. 2. It's a nice thought, one you want to believe: If only Americans could be made to understand the true, gut-sinking atrociousness of just about everything involved in U.S. elections -- from the gerrymandered districts to the undemocratic distribution of electoral power to the enormous influence wielded by partisan officials to the underfunded, overwhelmed local offices to, finally, the insanely dangerous technology we use to run the whole thing -- well, then, maybe folks would actually do something about the problem.

But it's been four years since Harris launched her campaign to expose the dangers of new voting technology -- and it's been six years since we witnessed a presidential election in which the winner actually lost, and two years since we saw one in which errors were so widespread that rational people are still arguing over whether what actually happened was historic theft or historic incompetence. Reports of voting irregularities are now a mainstay of the mainstream media, and politicians and political parties regularly vow to fix the problem. Still, in all this time, little has changed. Surveys suggest that many Americans will go to the polls on Nov. 7 feeling (justifiably) uncertain about the integrity of the vote. If you're not already among that number, watch this film.

"Hacking Democracy" follows Harris -- a middle-aged writer and literary publicist from Seattle who first became interested in voting difficulties shortly before the 2002 race -- as she travels the country to sound the alarm about what has become the most talked-about problem in elections, the dangers posed by the paperless electronic voting machines. Harris makes a grand subject for a documentary: Not only is she responsible for discovering some of the greatest vulnerabilities in touch-screen systems, she's a firecracker who's got Michael Moore's flair for sarcastic confrontation. The film captures Harris and a band of fellow muckrakers engaged in a spate of guerrilla media spectacles -- they spar with voting company representatives at official hearings, they storm into elections offices and demand evidence of electoral accuracy, they dig through garbage cans for proof of official malfeasance, they stage mock elections to show how quickly you can break into the nation's voting equipment.

People who have been following the debate surrounding electronic voting -- Salon and other tech and political outlets began covering the issue in 2002 -- might find much of "Hacking Democracy" a rehash. But if you're new to the dangers of electronic voting, the film is sure to blow your mind. In a nutshell, the case against touch-screen voting systems -- on which about 40 percent of Americans will cast their ballots this year -- boils down to this: You can never really know what's going on inside. In most other voting systems -- even those that use computerized counting machines, like punch-card and optical-scan machines -- paper acts as a record of last resort. If officials ever need to recount the vote, they can always examine the ballots by hand (provided, of course, that Antonin Scalia approves). But paperless touch-screen machines store their votes on hard drives and memory cards, rendering recounts impossible. If the computer hasn't recorded people's votes correctly in the first place, or if someone has weaseled into the database and shifted around the totals, the true count will be lost to all forever.

Next page: A parade of electoral ineptitude