Hacking Democracy

A documentary following Bev Harris and her group as they test whether the results of electronic vote counting machines can be altered. It opens on allegations about the 2004 American presidential election and runs from discarded documents in Texas to the ballot boxes of Ohio. Its high point is an intervention carried out on a working Diebold optical scan system in Leon County, Florida, known by the name of Harri Hursti: negative votes are fed into the system and the result is reversed. A distinction is worth keeping: the vulnerability was independently confirmed, and a university report commissioned by California stated that the attack does work. That an election was actually stolen, on the other hand, has not been established; that part is the film's allegation. Diebold asked for the broadcast to be pulled and the channel refused.