Hacking democracy

I just finished watching the documentary Hacking Democracy. The basic story is of one woman's efforts in founding blackboxvoting.org in order to uncover various ways that election results can be incorrectly (accidentally or purposefully) tabulated.

The documentary has some flaws - I think a lot of documentaries about "conspiracies" have an uphill battle because the point they are trying to prove can't be "proven". If they could legally prove some of the claims they make in a court of law, then this documentary wouldn't be necessary - the courts themselves would be exposing the fraud in our elections. Instead you are left with some hand-wavey arguments in certain areas of the film.

However, the underlying message of the documentary is very powerful - when you keep secrets, the potential for abuse of power becomes big. When there are no secrets, people might still try to abuse power, but they are easily caught.

The film focuses on how easy it is for computers to be reprogrammed to change election results. Although this has been proven to be true time and time again, I feel this is primarily a scare tactic and one used to make the story more dramatic. The real issue is that once you cast your vote in an election booth, there is no guarantee that your vote will be counted correctly. This doesn't matter whether it's computer tabulated or hand tabulated.

I suspect one of the reasons we keep our election votes secret is so that people cannot be attacked for how they vote. This is an important protection. However, this same secrecy makes it impossible to trace whether or not votes are counted correctly. Exposing the system to public scrutiny as much as possible is the right direction to move towards - public records of votes, people should be able to recount the votes at any time, examination of voting machines, etc.

On a related note, when I took a cryptography class in college the first lesson we learned is that if you develop a crytographic algorithm privately, most likely it will be quickly broken. If you develop an algorithm publicly, publish it to the community before you start using it, give people an attempt to break it, and only after it survives public scrutiny then you use it, you'll end up with something much more solid and trusted. It seems like our voting process needs to go through the same sort of scrutiny. Unfortunately, for privately owned businesses (such as the ones who develop election machines), this sort of model is often disregarded as it would expose their "industry secrets".

Maybe this documentary is wrong, maybe our election results are 100% correct. But if they are, then exposing the inner workings of our voting system shouldn't hurt anything, and it would at least put all our conspiracy theories to rest.