Hacking Democracy

Plot Summary

PLEASE NOTE: This documentary was created using a wide variety of media, including sources such as off-air and amateur recordings. We feel that the importance of the information more than compensates for the occasional lapse of image quality. The disturbingly shocking HBO documentary Hacking Democracy bravely tangles with our nation's ills at the heart of democracy. The film the Diebold corporation doesn't want you to see, this revelatory journey follows tenacious Seattle grandmother Bev Harris and her band of extraordinary citizen-activists as they set out to ask one simple question: How does America count its votes? From Florida and California to Ohio and Washington State, filmmakers Simon Ardizzone, Robert Cohens, and Russell Michaels starkly reveal a broken system riddled with secrecy, incompetent election officials, and electronic voting machines that can be programmed to steal elections. Equipped only with a powerful sense of righteous outrage, the activists take on voting machine industry, exposing alarming security holes in the America's trusted voting machines. They even go dumpster diving at a county election official's office in Florida, uncovering incendiary evidence of miscounted votes. But proving our votes can be stolen without a trace culminates in a duel between the Diebold voting machines and a computer hacker from Finland--with America's democracy at stake. Hacking Democracy takes a nonpartisan, clear-eyed look at the secrecy, cronyism, and incompetence of elections in present-day America as it captures a citizen's movement intent on taking back elections--and democracy itself. "It is hard to imagine...a documentary this season that is more important to the civic life of the nation--let alone one that is so compelling and ultimately moving" (Baltimore Sun).