Hacking Democracy (Artifact Two)

http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/hackingdemocracy/synopsis.html HACKING DEMOCRACY was directed by Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels; produced by Simon Ardizzone, Robert Carrillo Cohen and Russell Michaels; executive producers, Earl Katz, Sarah Teale and Sian Edwards; edited by Sasha Zik. For HBO: supervising producer, John Hoffman; executive producer, Sheila Nevins.

This movie is a recent documentary on HBO after watching this movie I decided to dive further into this topic and this movie really was my inspiration to do this. "In the 2000 presidential election, an electronic voting machine recorded minus 16,022 votes for Al Gore in Volusia County, Fla. While fraud was never proven, the faulty tally alerted computer scientists, politicians and everyday citizens to the very real possibility of computer hacking during elections." This is one of the many interesting fact that they brought up during this documentary. They also went into Florida Central Office and found out in one of the poling area Bush had received minus votes also.

Bev Harris after asking some voting officials about some of the information on some of the touch screen when the refused to answer her question she decided to find out for herself. "In the course of her research, which unearthed hundreds of reported incidents of mishandled voting information, Harris stumbled across an "online library" of the Diebold Corporation, discovering a treasure trove of information about the inner-workings of the company's voting system." Bev Harris a normal citizen with no real computer experience was able to find this very classified information.

"Harris brought this proprietary "secret" information to computer security expert Dr. Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University, who determined that the software lacked the necessary security features to prevent tampering. Her subsequent investigation took her from the trash cans of Texas to the secretary of state of California and finally to Florida, where a "mini-election" to test the vulnerability of the memory cards used in electronic voting produced alarming results." These systems with such huge gaps in security are the ones that are used a crossed thousands of counties and a crossed 32 states. David Dill a computer science professor at Stanford University said ""lots of people involved in writing the software, and lots of people who could have touched the software before it went into that machine. If one of those people put something malicious in the software and it's distributed to all the machines, then that one person could be responsible for changing tens of thousands of votes, maybe even hundreds of thousands, across the country."

"Ultimately, Bev Harris' research proved that the top-secret computerized systems counting the votes in America's public elections are not only fallible, but also vulnerable to undetectable hacking, from local school board contests to the presidential race. With the electronic voting machines of three companies - Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia - collectively responsible for around 80 percent of America's votes today, the stakes for democracy are high. " This flaw is huge flaw and now no one knows how they will do it but voters and candidates alike are ready to see what will happen in 2008.

Now I ask you and myself....

Do you think that by 2008 we will have a system that will be flawless for the election?

If not when do you think that they will have a flawless system?