I watched the Hacking Democracy movie tonight. If you haven’t seen it or heard about it, it’s a very interesting movie that explores the security vulnerabilities of electronic voting machine software, in particular, the software from Diebold. I’m not much into the whole conspiracy theory stuff, but I was very intrigued by the exploration into securing our votes or how insecure they really are.
In the case of the Diebold software, it seems like the voting card (looked like a compact flash card?) seems to be easy enough to be tamper with. Not to mention, the voting information is stored in on a central polling machine in a Access database which can be easily modified — or so it seemed from the movie (they really didn’t cover the actual specifics on how they tampered). The movie didn’t cover the security measures that surround the voting memory card and how it is cleared prior to a vote or how it is transferred from a voting location to the central tallying machine, but I’d imagine it doesn’t include Brinks Security and an armed escort. These systems are being used by lots of counties all over the U.S. and its probably regular people like you and me.
The possibility of tampering with votes has been an issue since probably the first time we ever took a formal vote. And it’s only a matter of time before electronic voting moves from the current physical electronic boxes to using the internet so we can all vote from the comfort of our home or office. So how do we really insure the integrity of the data … voting data or other? How do we ensure the public that our votes are really being tallied correctly? Maybe we can’t? Maybe the further we get removed from the vote and the counting system, the less sure we are that our votes are being tallied correctly. Seems like we still have a lot of work to do.
Anyhow… it was an interesting movie and will definitely make me think during my job.
[Update]I wanted to add that I found it extremely humorous during the movie when the representative from Ohio voted to reject the Ohio vote and then we saw statements from several other senators, etc basically saying in Congress we shouldn’t question the system that elected them. I couldn’t agree more. If we are going to question the system that elects people, we really shouldn’t have those to stand to gain/lose the most to investigate.
