“The American electoral system is rotten and we need to deal with that,” Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida, told Mother Jones Radio. Sancho and Bev Harris, founder of Black Box Voting, point out the vulnerability of our voting system in an HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy, airing November 2.
The film follows Harris and Sancho as they stumble upon Diebold’s software on their FTP site, dig through trash and find illegally discarded voting records, and stage a mini-election with a computer hacker. In that election, the outcome of the vote is opposite the votes cast: 7:1 instead of 2:6.
As Sancho points out, this is not just a Diebold problem. It is a problem with all electronic voting machine companies: “The other companies are just much better at keeping secrets.” Hacking Democracy should cure anybody of trusting electronic voting machines that do not have a paper trail.
