Hacking Democracy
| Hacking Democracy | |
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The controversial electronic voting documentary
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| Directed by |
Simon Ardizzone Russell Michaels |
| Produced by | Robert Carrillo Cohen Simon Ardizzone Russell Michaels |
| Starring |
Bev Harris Kathleen Wynne Andy Stephenson Harri Hursti Herbert Hugh Thompson Ion Sancho |
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Release date
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Running time
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82 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Hacking Democracy is the 2006 Emmy nominated documentary film broadcast on HBO and created by producer / directors Russell Michaels and Simon Ardizzone and producer Robert Carrillo Cohen and executive producers Sarah Teale & Sian Edwards. Filmed over three years it documents American citizens investigating anomalies and irregularities with 'e-voting' (electronic voting) systems that occurred during the 2000 and 2004 elections in the U.S.A., especially in Volusia County, Florida. The film investigates the flawed integrity of electronic voting machines, particularly those made by Diebold Election Systems, exposing previously unknown backdoors in the Diebold trade secret computer software. The film culminates dramatically in the on-camera hacking of the in-use / working Diebold election system in Leon County, Florida - the same computer voting system which has been used in actual American elections across thirty-three states, and which still counts tens of millions of America's votes today.
In 2007 Hacking Democracy was nominated for an Emmy award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism - Long Form.
The documentary follows Bev Harris and Kathleen Wynne, director and associate director for nonprofit election watchdog group Black Box Voting, as they attempt to discover the extent to which it would be possible to alter results on the electronic voting machines of Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions). Andy Stephenson, an employee of Black Box Voting from July–December 2004, assisted with comparisons of audit documents in Volusia County and obtained a secret videotape of Harris interviewing a voting machine testing lab. Kathleen Wynne captured live video of Harris finding voting machine records in a Volusia County trash bag, and captured video of Cuyahoga County, Ohio elections workers admitting that the initial 3% recount ballots had not been randomly selected during the 2004 presidential election. Harris and Wynne then embarked on a series of five voting machine hack tests with Dr. Herbert Hugh Thompson and Harri Hursti in 2005 and 2006. During the course of the documentary, multiple methods of tampering with the votes are shown.
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