by crafty

Tired of hearing about voter fraud? Check out this documentary about the much more serious and likely issue, electoral fraud.

Filmed over three years it documents American citizens investigating anomalies and irregularities with electronic voting systems that occurred during the 2000 and 2004 elections in the U.S.A., especially in Volusia County, Florida. The film investigates the flawed integrity of electronic voting machines, particularly those made by Diebold Election Systems, exposing previously unknown backdoors in the Diebold trade secret computer software. The film culminates dramatically in the on-camera hacking of the in-use / working Diebold election system in Leon County, Florida - the same computer voting system which has been used in actual American elections across thirty-three states.

Several of the insinuations made by the filmmakers indicate Diebold is a pretty shady company; the fact that they are trusted to perform such an important task while given such little oversight seems like a terrible misjudgment. At one point they tried to find the people responsible for auditing these "black box" systems, and the hidden camera showed this one guy who was very evasive and said some pretty damning things.

If you watch to the end, the hacking demonstration was pretty surprising. To summarize what it showed, I'll give a little background. Most electronic voting machines hold the votes for a precinct on a memory card, which are then collected up and tabulated by software used by a county election official. For the demonstration, a hacker was given access to the memory card prior to the county's chain of custody; he was able to "preload" an equal number of positive and negative votes for candidates such that the memory card passed the pre-election verification test, while the final count produced by the machines, including the paper-tape trail, was clearly inaccurate. The final tabulation software also flagged nothing suspicious about the memory card. The election official doing the demonstration said that the system gave no indication that the votes were tampered with and had that been an actual election, he would have signed-off on it as being true and accurate. You can read more about the "Hursti Hack" here.

I'm of the cynical opinion that there isn't a significant difference between the two mainstream parties when it comes to most economic and foreign policy issues, but I think this highlights that even if/when there are real significant choices faced by voters, there are simply more mechanisms for subverting the will of the people. I've read that some people say a blockchain type technology could be more secure, but I'm not sure how exactly that would work.