Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Hacking Democracy.

Hacking Democracy is a documentary made to bring awareness to problems surrounding our voting system. With the formation of new technologies, voting ballots have been started to get counted electronically. This has raised some serious questions about voter fraud and election rigging. In the film they found about that the company in charge of all the electronic voting machines, Diebold, had terrible security measures on their software. In fact, hackers were able to change vote totals within about a minute. They didn't even have to use a password to log in and change to totals. There were simply ways to work around the log in, which is a very scary to think about. While this is a concern, it would be relatively easy to pick up on if the voter total didn't match the amount of votes cast. That's why this next part is the most frightening bit of data. The memory cards that are used for the voting machines can be manipulated to take votes away from one candidate while giving the other more. So to make sure it doesn't effect the total votes they simply would just take say 5 votes away from one candidate and give the other 5 additional votes.

I am downright stunned. Yeah everyone makes mistakes, but when you run a business that is responsible for tallying the votes for presidential elections, this is inexcusable. Either these guys are really dumb and don't know what their doing or it has been done on purpose. I'd like to think that our government puts sufficient thought into contracting people for the job. It appears they dropped the ball on this one. Diebold needs to be held accountable. They need to secure their software so that the votes are tallied correctly and aren't open to outsiders to potentially hack and change the results of an election. This shouldn't even be an issue we should have to talk about.

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