Scary thought here.

Firstly, have you seen the movie Hacking Democracy?

Seriously. If you haven’t, get the hell off your ass and go see it. No excuses.

Okay. Now that we’ve gotten the pressing issues out of the way, let’s take a look at exactly the kind of thing they were talking about in the movie.

In a ruling that shows how a judge seems to believe that business trumps democracy, the candidate who is suing over what appears to be a case where e-voting machines lost thousands of votes in a very close race, a judge has found that the candidate cannot have access to the e-voting machines’ source code, because that would expose “trade secrets” the company holds. Frankly, this argument (which has been used before) makes no sense. This isn’t rocket science here. These machines are supposed to count votes and make sure people don’t vote more than once. There’s no “trade secrets” involved in that at all.

It sure does sound a lot like common sense, doesn’t it?

You would think that, at the very least, the Democrats who were so devastated by their loss to George W. Bush in 2000 would be all for more transparency including requiring voting machine manufacturers to use open source software. Instead, a process as simple as tallying votes is apparently so veiled in secrecy that no one can see the damn source code unless they can somehow prove there was a miscount.

Blows the mind.

At one point in Hacking Democracy, they were talking about John Kerry getting his ass handed to him in 2004. At one point someone who worked the campaign was talking about overhearing John Kerry saying he knew they didn’t lose New Mexico (or some other state; the state itself is inconsequential at this point) but he was resigned to the fact that it was the way it was and he wasn’t going to fight it.

Not exactly the drive and determination you’d hope for from someone who just had a presidential election looted from them (according to their words).

The problem is that as of right now we can’t fight back. We can’t get the source code because counting is a trade secret. We can’t fight the election results because we don’t have concrete proof.

What can we do?

We can start with hoping that some judge somewhere will wake the hell up and stop leaving our elections in the hands of private corporations who shroud our Democracy in secrecy.

Source

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