Hacking Democracy

I watched this documentary this evening called "Hacking Democracy" which focuses on the computerized election balloting in America. It was scary to see how easily an election could be rigged. While one of the main manufacturers (Diebold) continued to stand by the failsafe security of their system a small group of truth seekers united to test this claim. Their investigations which involved finding files on the internet containing security codes, finding paper results in the garbage (which is illegal---these results must be kept in safe storage) and testing the program for fraud found that the claims of Diebold were completely inacurrate. The memory cards used in Diebold machines were supposed to be program free to which Diebold execs and their head of engineering vow is true. Yet, when Harri Hursti (computer analyst)examined the memory card he found that it contained an executable program which would allow a person to configure the tally of votes any way they wanted to. When tested by the crew after Hursti had altered the programming on the memory card, the paper tally of 2 yes and 6 no votes came out of the computer as 7 yes and 1 no vote. They then attempted to see if the main computer could recognize the alteration and were surprised to find that no trace of alteration could be detected. In a nutshell; fraud was easily possible with no record of the real count to say otherwise. What was even more scary was the fact that Sen. John Kerry during his run for presidency new fraud had been committed, yet, even though he had gathered a panel of legal experts to challenge the election process, bowed out in the end with a whimper. Gore had one polling station in Florida count his votes in negatives with his final total at -16,022, yet he did not pursue a challenge of the election results. The trouble is they could not prove it without a doubt because the official paper records were corrupted. The question still remains, however, why have the Democrats not challenged this issue with more furvor?