Over the weekend I watched the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy. The documentary follows members of the group Black Box Voting as they travel across the country to monitor elections, inspect elections procedures and reveal significant security flaws in e-voting machines.

One reason that this documentary appealed to me is that it focused very heavily on the elections in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland). Everyone who lives in Northeast Ohio knows that Cuyahoga County is completely incompetent when it comes to running an election. It has gotten so bad in Cuyahoga County that just several weeks ago the Ohio Secretary of State stepped in and demanded that the entire Elections Board resign or face removal. But that won’t fix the problem… because they use Diebold touchscreen voting machines.

Deibold, a local Northeast Ohio company, staunch supporter of the Republican Party and all around hater of democracy is featured very prominently in the documentary. To put it simply, their voting machines are crap and easily compromised. Unfortunately they’re also one of the most widely used e-voting machine companies in the US.

Back when Ohio switched over to e-voting machines I was very pleased that my county (Summit County) chose optical scan voting machines as opposed to touchscreen machines (which Cuyahoga County bought). The reason I preferred optical scan is because there is always a hard copy of the original vote, unlike touchscreen where at best you have a machine printed receipt of the vote. Optical scan also added another benefit - scalability. If more people than expected showed up to vote all you had to do was set up another table for them to sit at to fill out their scantron sheets. With touchscreen voting you are limited by the number of machines in the precinct, which can cause big delays.

But even with the benefits of optical scan, I was shocked by how easy it was to hack the vote count on one of these machines. Black Box Voting developed a program that adjusted the vote count prior to an election even starting. For example, if the race were between Bush and Kerry they would set the vote on the memory card to +100 Bush and -100 Kerry. By adding and subtracting equal amounts it ensures that the total vote count still comes out the same. Shockingly, the machine reported that the vote was 0-0 when the card was inserted, but after running test ballots through gave an incorrect final vote (off by the preprogrammed number of votes). Now, you could always find the error by conducting a manual recount, but if the vote was thrown off by a large enough margin, no one would even bother.

The thought that an election could (or already has) been thrown by simple manipulation of the voting machine is very troublesome. Maybe we should just go back to the old method of marking your vote on a sheet of paper and manually counting them. Sure, it would take a few days longer to get results, but do we honestly need them five minutes after the polls close anyways?

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