Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
 

Hacking Democracy (2006)

Director: Simon Adizzone, Russell Michaels

Average user rating
No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

Touch Screen Voting Machines, Independent Testing Authorities, Optical Scanning Machines, Memory Cards with Executable Programme Software… This compelling HBO documentary investigation into the vulnerability to error, manipulation or untraceable vote rigging of America’s new generation of electronic voting systems – coming soon to a polling booth near you! – involves enough jargon to make the ‘hanging’ and ‘pregnant’ chad rumpus of 2000 seem quite quaint. The central Erin Brockovich-like campaigner here is comforting grandma Bev Harris, a literary agent who co-founded advocacy group Black Box Voting in 2001, concerned by a Florida County voting mechanism that registered 16,000 negative votes for Al Gore in the previous year’s Presidential election. ‘Hacking Democracy’ follows her group’s endeavours to prise open the secrecy surrounding the private ‘vendors’ of the equipment, garnering machine code and passwords from the internet, obtaining signed ‘voter tapes’ from pan-American garbage heists, employing security hackers and enlisting Congressmen and Senators in their efforts to expose this threat to democracy. As a movie, it may be structurally unsophisticated, but the questions it raises are fundamental.

Author: Wally Hammond 2007-04-17 12:12:20

Time Out London Issue 1913: April 18-24 2007

  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Hacking Democracy

Cast & crew

Director: Simon Adizzone, Russell Michaels

Producer: Simon Adizzone, Russell Michaels, Robert Carrillo Cohen

Genre(s): Documentaries

Duration: 82 mins


Features

Making a name for himself

Making a name for himself

Sin Nombre's Cary Joji Fukunaga learned his lessons well.

To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.

Fool's gold

Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.

We are the championed

Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."

A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

True romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

Playing in the dark

MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.

Junk bonds

Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.