I do believe that Harris means well but her “hacker” buddies, who probably are very qualified, either failed to bring up this fact, brought up these facts and HBO or whoever decided not to include them in the documentary or intentionally grandstanded for the sake of drama.

My assumption leaves more questions than answers, such as what type of security is employed throughout the country for these machines? The Software? Do they get read through a machine on a network? That would be asinine. Does Diebold have any standard security recommendations for the environment their program should run under? Is there multiple layers, if you will, to not just the software’s security but are there multiple layers of security on the operating system and general operating environment with the machines used to read these results? These are important questions, which the documentary fails to ask itself but I feel will ultimately force others to voice after review and critical thinking.

Overall, I feel the ball isn’t dropped with this documentary. Despite the overkill on drama, the smug smiles and apparent/standard use of editing to enforce their perspective and general grandstanding, this still requires further public investigation.

Mrs. Harris did a great thing to the best of her ability. As you can probably tell, I personally detect a very “fake” and over dramatic tone from her and her party but I believe such was done to open people’s eyes and not to truly deceive.

That’s my two cents :).

Uhm, I disagree. From what I understood, the kid that changed the vote counts had seen the code because the lady who had downloaded the source code for the voting application and brought it to him to review. With that information he knew what to change and where. That makes a hell of a difference.

I build/support financial services software and I’ve never seen any serious system implemented like the ones that were used in the documentary. If someone ran my company’s software application on a local machine with no security or oversight then, sure, anyone could change its important values. Actually, I don’t know of any software application that wouldn’t be deemed “hackable” under those circumstances.

As far as I could tell, the guy who hacked the memory card had used no internal application knowledge or passwords. He started from scratch much like any hacker would. I do think it would have been more effective to have the demonstration witnessed and checked by Diebold. A statement from Diebold saying “You can’t hack the system in this environment” followed by the hack would have been much more effective.

Either way, I don’t agree with your logic in assuming this sample was too simple. If you can exploit this basic aspect of the system, its hackable. Period. I wouldn’t assume hackers aren’t clever enough to grasp the complexity of multiple instances of the exact same A/B style polling. What is so much more “complex” about the real world situation?

I worked for several years as a developer for a Health Care company and our security systems were so far above and beyond Diebold’s that its not even comparable. If our systems got hacked, it could sink the company. I’d expect that any software handling such sensitive information as our national elections would be held to the same standards as healthcare and financial companies.

I watched the whole thing and I saw them:
1 – change the count values for a high school class election on a local machine using some voting software for which they had studied the code, and MS Access as their database
2 – change the results of a made up election scenario they dreamt up, which had only 1 vote on it with a possible yes or no answer, by replacing the machine’s card with one they had created to alter the results

Neither of those scenarios proves to me that in a real world voting situation with a much more complicated voting scenario (including a dozen things to vote on, several with more than two possible answers, with interface parameters very few people could possibly know, along with some security and checks and balances) could be manipulated anywhere near with the simplicity of the documentary’s “made up” scenarios.

They’re basically demonstrating that in a model office (testing) environment with no controls (checks and balances), no security, with a simple voting scenario with the interface requirements known, that the voting data can be easily changed. I don’t see why that is some major revelation or how this is demonstrating democracy has been hacked.

Now, if it can be proven that local governments are running their elections as sloppily as these scenarios demonstrated in the documentary than this is indeed frightening and needs to be rectified, but this documentary didn’t prove ANYTHING remotely close to that. It was all hype.

This does not mean that I don’t take the accuracy of electronic voting seriously, because I do. I believe that knowing the will of the people is absolutely essential. For me, I think more checks and balances should be implemented to alleviate the public’s concerns. One example of this would be to implement the two receipts suggestion I mentioned above.

This is NOT hype. Hackers take advantage of this sort of flaw every day. The GAO report on Ohio in 2004 was not conclusive, but suggested strongly that this sort of hacking occurred in at least some precincts. A programmer in Florida in 2000 was approached to WRITE such a program by Republican allies.

Not only that, but several machines currently in use have been PROVEN to have easily hackable security flaws. These aren’t the tortuous routes used to break into MS Windows, but stupid mistakes any high school hacker could use to break in. These companies are barely performing any security checks on their equipment, and they’re not using independent outside agencies to validate their systems. The only real, secure answer is to use the machines as a user interface, but only to print out a machine-countable paper ballot that is used as the official vote.

I view this situation as far more of a threat to democracy than either terrorism or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The threat is real, and it needs to be dealt with immediately.

The show seemed more like hype than reality. BUT with that said, I would like to see a lot more checks and balances around electronic voting. I think there should be 2 printed receipts – 1 for the voter and 1 for that could be crossed referenced with the electronic votes.