One machine, One vote?

The polls have been open for but a few hours and already there are tales of woe from the ever popular voting machine states. For whatever reason, Americans have decided to try and complicate the rather simple process of picking a representative from a list of candidates.

The reports of voter machine troubles will probably be a story you will hear a lot about as the day progresses and the voting results are provided when the polls close later tonight.

Now to be fair, the reason they use the voting machine and the various other versions of the same is due to the number of proposition initiatives, school board elections and such that they tag onto election day. But still, when you make it rather hard to vote, you tend to find the voter participation rate drops off.

Besides the obvious confusion at the polls with the machines, there is always the possibility of electoral fraud. HBO has put together a documentary movie called Hacking Democracy, which aired last week on Movie Central here in Canada.

HBO premiered the film on November 2nd and begins the films regular run today, election day. It offers the chance for Americans to learn more about their voting system right through until December 26th. The documentary has quickly become the buzz of the blogs and political websites so powerful was its message.

For those that can't wait you can even watch it through the Google video portal, which apparently is what a good number of Americans are doing right now.

Voting machines count roughly 87% of all votes cast in American elections, and when you consider the battles of Florida and Ohio in the last election, the question about reliability is surely one that must be asked. It starts out examining the events of Florida in 2000 an election that Al Gore lost amid some strange happenings with the electoral machines in that state. The documentary takes a look at the potential opportunity to hack into those machines and arrange the results to an ending more to your liking.

The movie follows the quest of a Seattle grandmother for information on why her district and state had decided to go with the voting machine. In the course of her search, she stumbled across an on line log of the Diebold company makers of one of the more common voting machines The log in addition to providing hundreds of incidents of mishandled information, also provided an in depth look at how the machines work, which if in the wrong hands could surely result in some troublesome hours at the polling stations.

At one point in the States, there had been attempts to have the movie withdrawn from HBO’s schedule, due to its controversial topic matter. Dixie Chicks and Voting tricks they seem to touch the hot buttons down in the States these days.

HBO kept to its guns and have kept the show on its schedule. And so it should, the movie raises some serious questions about the basic reliability of the democratic process, a sacred thing in the US. The onus should really be on the voting machine companies and those electoral process organizers to prove that the system is not only reliable but secure and honest.

Diebold has posted what they call a point by point response to the issues raised in the documentary such was the concern over the issue after the movie was completed. Ironically, there seem to be some computer problems with their site as the link to the repsonses doesn't always seem to work. (Givng the site something in common with some of the machines we guess)

Regardless of those replies, in the end it will be the American people who will have to decide how they feel about their system.

Today, Americans can go cast their vote and then wonder if it really counted in more ways than one!