Hacking Democracy on Google Video

Last night I watched a remarkable documentary on Google Video, called Hacking Democracy. The documentary was telecast on HBO on Nov 2nd 2006, and here's the HBO Synopsis. You can play the documentary in the Google Video Player embedded above, or you can watch it here.

The United States of America is perhaps the country which sees the highest usage of newer computer technologies - software & hardware - at all levels, be it personal, private, public or government. It is not surprising that America would resort to new technology in its election process to record and tally thousands of millions of votes.

What is truly surprising, almost unbelievable, is the rotten system America uses to run its elections. A mix of hardware and software systems which suck big time, and an inefficient and corrupted bureaucracy which does not strictly follow due processes and regulations, have truly hijacked the 'greatest democracy in the world'. This kind of rot in any other aspect of American life, especially if it involved money, would have resulted in quick and highly publicized prosecutions. The responsible people would have been held accountable, heads would have rolled and asses would have been hauled off to prisons for very long stays. Most importantly, the system would have been reformed to put sufficient checks and balances in place to prevent the recurrence of such incidents. This is the America we have read about, come to know and respect. The America which is exposed by this documentary is a country where the most important and sacred democratic process, namely the election, has been corrupted quite blatantly and absurdly.

It all starts simply enough : a 'grandmother' (the documentary mentions this more than once) and writer named Bev Harris from Seattle, sets out to find out why her county acquired electronic touch screen voting machines and if they are reliable enough. When she is not satisfied by the answers she gets from the officials, she tries to find out more. From there, through the course of the documentary, she manages to uncover a rot which spreads across the country, from coast to coast. But the remarkable thing is that, the story remains consistently simple through the entire 80 minutes of the documentary. There is no evil mastermind bad guy at work, there is no clever and complex conspiracy which is hard to detect, there is no ingenius and daring moves by the good guys to catch and expose the bad guys. There is not even the terrorism and violence that goes with election corruption and hijacking in some countries.

It is all so absurdly simple and silly : Bev Harris is not some lady James Bond or a hot-shot investigative journalist. She is just a regular lady from next door, who is running around the country, with a camera following her, asking questions and accepting help from whoever offers to help. All she has to do is search the Net to find the "secret" software code behind the voting systems, the code which is not even shared with the government, and is discovered to have a lot of security holes in it; all she has to do is dig through the garbage of election officials to discover how they are not following the processes and the regulations as they are supposed to; all she has to do is let loose a couple of techies on the new voting systems which were bought by the government for millions of dollars, and within a few minutes they show honkin' huge holes in the systems. Some of these systems do not even have password protection to the databases which store the count of votes. They show the most basic bugs and simplest hacks by which election results could be completely manipulated and changed. All this is done right in front of our eyes, on film. And this is the silly system which is used to elect local politicians to national ones, including the US President himself. This is the system which influences the fate of an entire nation, nay, nations, and changes the course of history itself!

It is amazing! I have spent the entire 10 years of my career taking care of software systems for American companies, systems which process people's monies, which do hundreds of thousands of financial transactions involving thousands of millions of dollars. I have seen how these systems account for every single cent of the thousands of millions of dollars they process. The transactions can be anything from simple arithmetic to complex billing and accounting, but not a single cent is lost. The only money that is usually lost in these systems is the money not paid by customers who go bankrupt or cannot be traced. Even this money is not technically lost. It is well-accounted for upto the last cent, collection actions are initiated and it is written-off only when it is deemed to be unrecoverable. These software systems are built by relatively modest teams, in the IT departments of American companies, and the vendors from whom they source their software systems and services. Countless such systems are used by banks and businesses across the country, quietly and efficiently processing mind-boggling amounts daily. I find it to be truly amazing that the world's greatest democracy is not able to get sufficiently robust and reliable systems to do the simple yet most important task of recording and tallying its votes.

The last two presidential elections in the US were controversial because of this very reason. There are many people who believe that George W Bush never truly won either election. Despite the questions and controversies hanging over the election of the president himself, not much has been done to improve the voting situation. As this documentary shows clearly, the system continues to be rotten. Is it because of corruption or the lack of political will? Or the fact that the general public is not very savvy about the whole issue? It is very important that every American watche this documentary and take action to ensure that his/her vote is recorded and counted right, and does not get thrown in the garbage or lost in the holes of half-baked computer systems.

Related link: Blackboxvoting.org, the non-profit organization started by Bev Harris.