I finally watched the HBO documentary entitled Hacking Democracy. In short it is, in my humble opinion, a fantasy constructed by a bunch of wild-eyed conspiracy nuts. The filmmaker says at one point that she “wants to take America back”. Of course, she means that Democrats are entitled to be the leaders of America and must recapture their power from Republicans. Notice that the cries of voter disenfranchisement and calls for scrutiny quietly disappeared after Democrats retook the Congress this past election cycle. Make no mistake. This woman and her co-conspirators are twisting the facts to fit their agenda and trumpeting some clever computer hacks in order to back her argument.

The premise of this waste of celluloid is that a negative vote count somewhere in Florida was the act of mischievous tampering and not a computer error. A computer error was never ruled out. Instead the film makers constructed a conspiracy theory and attempt to justify it.

All of the anomalies in film were found on paper records. At one point we have to accept the film maker’s count as accurate (and the county’s records as suspect) without question. After all they are doing the “will of the people”. How many “impartial” parties do you know that appear on TV alongside Howard Dean? Let me hear you scream.

The movie did confirm one thing I had already read elsewhere. Diebold, the company that makes the election machines and software, is incompetent. The company they hired to do their testing is also questionable.

A college sophomore could probably design better software security. I mean, it is pretty clear that the software system uses an unencrypted database probably on Microsoft Access. Having code on the memory cards that collect the votes is a miserable security flaw. There are other security flaws I have read about elsewhere. This raises the question though. Could the source code for the software be public and the system still be secure? I think the answer is yes. If it is true that the software swiped from Diebold’s public website contained embedded passwords, then the software authors really know little about writing secure software. Pity.

Elections officers were incompetent. They did not handle the loony protagonist very well. Worse, they tried to dispose of public records and tried to do so without shredding them. In scenes that made me feel sleazy the “activists” dived into the dumpster to retrieve trashed documents. I hope the election people do not go on to careers in the banking industry.

The woman responsible skirted the law snatching a trash bag from a public employee, ripping it open and grabbing its contents. She also swiped proprietary documents from Diebold’s public FTP site. Don’t get me wrong. Leaving confidential source code and documents on a public web site invited the kind of scrunity an independent third party company should have given. But the protagonist should be prosecuted for grabbing and using the software without a license, in my opinion. I mean, if someone were to do the same thing with Microsoft software, which is also secret ohhh, then the BSA would have federal officers knocking on that person’s door and confiscating their computer equipment.

So, is there somebody out there rigging elections? Probably not the electronic ones. Is paper a good backup as a record for an electronic system? NO! Watch the film again if don’t agree. Can we guarantee a secure system that is a proprietary secret to a private company? I certainly think it’s possible. The current system of quality control and testing shows how NOT to do it. Would it be possible to have a secure system based on publicly available source code and design documents? YES! But to be clear the keys used for encryption should be tightly held secrets and changed frequently. I think this is the future of electronic voting. Could a hacker be responsible for a negative vote count? Probably not. The first place I’d look is an overflowed integer. Of course, that wouldn’t serve the wild conspiracy theories.