Hacking Democracy
November 7th, 2006
No doubt, HBO programmed this documentary about voting machine fraud near the elections to be “timely,” but it’s obvious it should have been made, say, four years ago. Hacking Democracy doesn’t really tell you much that you couldn’t have read for yourself on the Internet a long time ago, but it tries its damnest to jazz up the dry source material about memory cards and negative voter totals with cheesy “rockin’ road trip” interludes and dramatic late-night web surfing sessions (”Then I clicked a link!”)
The cheese is well worth sitting through for a final experiment with wide-ranging implications. To see a gleeful hacker by the name of Harri add an excecutable file to a memory card and effectively throw off vote totals with no way to retrace or prove that there was tampering is absolutely shocking, no matter what you’ve read. Diebold’s record of stonewalling and lies isn’t exactly news to anyone who’s paying attention, but seeing the spinmeisters at work is always more infuriating than reading about it in the second-to-last paragraph of a news story.
No matter what happens today, it’s obvious that American Democracy has been broken for a while now, and that the results of US elections cannot be trusted–and that goes for 2006, 2004, and 2000.
- Talking Points Memo is following events & problems today closely, especially the developing robocall scandal.
- Black Box Voting
- Watch Hacking Democracy in its entirety on Google Video
[tags]politics, tv, documentary, voting, fraud, diebold, elections, democracy, 3 stars[/tags]
