I watched most of the new documentary Hacking Democracy on Friday. The documentary covers the poor state of our new electronic voting machines, specifically focused on how easy they are to manipulate. The film also goes through some of the recent recount efforts in 2004, showing how recount laws prevent effective recounts from happening.

The movie clearly features Gore and Kerry supporters, but they make a clear effort to explain that it’s only the Republicans this time because they are the ones in power in the two states most directly affected by these vote count issues (Florida and Ohio).

The most surprising thing to me was hearing about some of the irregularities in the 2000 election. It was either the first time, or I have forgotten the same thing. The biggest was the negative votes given to Gore in Volusia County, FL. While the correct count was discovered and used in the final tally, the movie emphasizes that the investigation into the root cause ended when the recount effort ended.

In fact, my biggest takeaway was the importance of real recount efforts. I didn’t realize how much money and effort is only available when an official recount is underway. When the recount effort ended in 2000, the investigation stopped. When Kerry conceded in 2004, little was done to follow through on a recount investigation. Even when a recount gets underway, the actual recount process presents several opportunities for people to “rig” the recount so that recounts don’t happen, whether out of malice or simple mistakes.

I’m happy to see more people talking about these things. Katrina Vanden Heuvel has a decent article listing some reforms that would benefit both parties (and even third parties). Most of them are pretty interesting, but at a minimum, I would love to see a federal requirement that recounts must be possible by hand using ballots that a voter has personally verified. In other words, you can have electronic machines as long as they output a receipt that shows your votes that you then deposit in a box. The paper ballots, not the computers, are used for recounts. Or, you can just go back to pen and paper. They still do that here in Canada (I’m in Montreal this weekend) and it seems to work well.

You can learn more about reform efforts, including what you can do this election to help, at VerifiedVoting.org and Black Box Voting. This is a non-partisan issue, and one that should be important to us all.

(found the Nation article via Atrios)