mind your vote! (scary stuff, but please still vote!)

information from Emmy nominated 2006 "hacking democracy" documentary on HBO (this is taken from an IM convo i just had, so please excuse the choppiness):

• the organizations, such as Diebold, that tally the electronic votes aren't required to share their methods and programming.
• and a regular ole grandma was looking up information online about the voting process and stumbled upon their ftp. after 40 hours of downloading, she had downloaded the basics of the software and system. so, she took it to some computer science folks. they decoded it and realized how many ways it can be hacked.
• AND each district gets a little printout of the # of votes to doublecheck ballots against (as a failsafe) and the printouts could be hacked.
• AND the official printouts from the district had inaccuracies (date, title of the printout, time, etc).
• basically, they save everything to a memory card, and if you hack the memory card. for instance, installing dormant software on the memory card so that on election day, the memory card automatically has -20k votes for obama, and +20k votes for mccain, it will zero out and not be able to be detected.
• AND one of the biggest companies that implements the software for the government has records that show that they didn't test for security on the machines or the memory cards.
• in 2000, a county in ohio had gore having -16,022 votes. not sure how anyone has negative votes.
• and they recorded the recount on video and the people in charge of the recount said that it was “just for show” and that because they only technically have to recount 3%, they had already handpicked "randomly" the votes that the citizens would recount.

to learn more, netflix "hacking democracy," or go to: http://www.blackboxvoting.org