black box democracy

The movie Hacking Democracy involved a woman set out to discover the truth about electronic voting machines. She traveled to controversial polling places like Florida and Ohio. Both of these states had troubles with electronic voting machines during the 2000 and 2004 elections. Bev Harris is the main story teller in the documentary and it is her goal to expose the failures of electronic voting.  One of the worst cases was the computer system that calculated negative votes in a florida state election. It's frightening to look at the way these systems are kept behind closed doors as far as the ways they are produced and the methods used to count the actual ballots. It took Bev and her team around 5 minuets to hack into the machines and change the out come of any election. They did this in front of several different election judges and even brought one of them to tears because of the possibility of unfair elections. It seemed so simple to have such a massive effect on the outcome of important decisions in american history. It has a very eery tone throughout the entire documentary alluding to the idea that any decision in our government may have been controlled by private interest and people with a knowledge of computers. Black Box voting is determined to counter act the current process of our democratic process of voting. They are determined to expose the current ways of private interest control over voting.