A must watch video for anyone who cares about democracy.
Imagine there were no computers at all, and when you went to vote the voting booth was separated by a curtain, and there was a guy behind the curtain who writes down your votes. You just dictate, and he writes them down, and you leave without being able to look at the ballot. Most people in their right mind would not trust this process. The guy behind the curtain could be incompetent, he could hear your votes wrong, and record them improperly, or it could be the he doesn’t like you political affiliation, and would prefer to see your votes cast for someone else. -From the video
This is basically the system the US is using now, except that instead of a
guy taking dictation, it is a computer that may be running buggy software,
or may have been hacked, and there is no way for voters to know if their
votes are being accurately counted.
The movie is a bit overly melodramatic, and the suspenseful voice-over voice and background suspense music are unnecessary and (if anything) take away from the seriousness of the movie. At times the documentary also wanders a little too far into hinting at conspiracy theories in places they have no proof. However, what you actually see in the movie is a very good summary of many of the stories we’ve all seen over the past few years about problems with these machines. It shows what a marvelous job Bev Harris and Blackboxvoting.org have done over the past few years to both find out what’s going and publicize the matter (a tremendous effort). It also shows how some elections officials stonewall or ignore the issues while a few, such as Ion Sancho, did what was necessary. What the movie leaves out of the Sancho story in Florida is how Diebold first mocked the results of the hack shown in the movie and later caused additional problems as he tried to find replacements -TechdirtTake care,