"Hacking Democracy"

"Hacking Democracy" ends on a sour note, which serves as an apt metaphor for the entire election-reform movement. We see Harris and her hacker friends set out to prove that they can program a Diebold memory card -- the card that stores votes in touch-screen and optical-scan counting machines -- so that it easily steals an election. Their demonstration is so unmistakably successful you can't help feeling sick. Susan Pynchon, a member of the Florida Fair Elections Coalition who's present at the hack, breaks down into sobs as she sees the voting machine deliver manipulated results. "How can this be happening to our elections?" she asks.

But actually, the problem is even worse than the film suggests. "Hacking Democracy" does not mention the work of Ed Felten, the respected Princeton computer security researcher who proved, in a September report, that it's possible to install a kind of voting machine "virus" on Diebold's memory cards. Felten's study is a blockbuster: Conducted on the very same machines that will be used throughout Georgia and Maryland this year, Felten showed how attackers can secretly attach a vote-stealing program that spreads from voting machine to voting machine in a completely undetectable fashion. Robert Ehrlich Jr., Maryland's Republican governor, has since called for the state to scrap the $106 million Diebold system (purchased by Democratic elections director Linda Lamone), and he urged residents there to cast their votes this year on paper-based absentee ballots. But this idea has created another problem -- so many voters in Maryland have requested absentee ballots that the state now looks certain to face a shortage.

Also missing from the film is much mention of the voter-verified paper audit trail, which many in the election-reform movement have held up as the solution to problems posed by touch-screen voting. A VVPAT, as it's known among reformers, is simply a slip of paper that an electronic machine prints out when a voter casts his ballot -- this ballot proves to the voter that his selections were recorded accurately, and it can be counted by officials in the event of a manual recount. Twenty-two states now require electronic machines to produce a paper trail, and many voting firms, including Diebold, produce paper-trail machines -- which sounds like good news, until you learn how badly these machines have fared.

In April, the Election Science Institute, a nonpartisan election-reform group that studied the results of the primary election held in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, reported that at least 10 percent of the paper-trail ballots produced by the Cuyahoga's Diebold machines couldn't be manually recounted. Some paper trails were crumpled, some were torn, some were taped together, some showed long blank spaces of missing text. Diebold blamed poorly trained poll workers for the trouble, but other observers see the bad results as a sign that Diebold is deliberately trying to kill off support for paper trails.

Which brings us to Nov. 7, 2006. Unlike everyone else in the Republican Party, Karl Rove has lately been expressing bizarre optimism about the GOP's prospects in November. Of course, it's certainly possible that Rove knows something we don't -- that, as he says, he's looking at polls that none of the rest of us have access to. It's possible, too, that he's just aping optimism for cameras, and is dying on the inside. And you also have to guess that if Rove were planning on rigging the election, he would probably not be advertising his certainty now.

But the problem with how we run elections these days is that you just can't get the darker story out of your mind. Already, doubts are creeping in: In Jefferson County, Texas, early voters trying to select a straight-party Democratic ticket have reported their machines surreptitiously choosing Republicans instead. Voters have experienced similar trouble in Dallas; in Hempwallace, Ark.; and in Maplewood, Mo. Touch-screens everywhere, and not even a paper trail to save us. Whoever wins on Election Day, will it be possible for any rational person to look at the results and not at least ... wonder?

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