There's a world of "maintenance" irregularities in New York's recent Democratic Presidential Party primary. Someone at the board of elections noticed how odd it was that no votes had been attributed to Barack Obama in most precincts in Harlem. In case you didn't know, Harlem is a predominantly black and latino neighborhood in New York City that was assumed by early polling to go to Obama.

In New Mexico the count took weeks to complete because most electoral counties had to use scrap-paper ballots to account for all the voters who didn't appear in the voter registration rolls.

In California, more than 50,000 independent voters will have their votes disqualified because they didn't fill out two "bubbles" in their ballots. Most are independent voters who, by early polling, favored Barack Obama.

And then there's New Hampshire, where tally discrepancies in two wards prompted one of the presidential candidates to finance a statewide recount.

Even though many considered the recount a waste of time, verifiable voting activists believed the system had to be tested for the sake of Election Integrity. Also for the fact that the Diebold "Accu-Vote" machines that were used to scan and count 80% of the votes in New Hampshire are the same machines that were infamously hacked by Finnish hacker Harri Hursti in the HBO Documentary "Hacking Democracy".

Electronic voting machines count about 87% of the votes cast in America today. But are they reliable? Are they safe from tampering? From a current congressional hearing to persistent media reports that suggest misuse of data and even outright fraud, concerns over the integrity of electronic voting are growing by the day. And if the voting process is not secure, neither is America's democracy. The timely, cautionary documentary HACKING DEMOCRACY exposes gaping holes in the security of America's electronic voting system.

In the 2000 presidential election, an electronic voting machine recorded minus 16,022 votes for Al Gore in Volusia County, Fla. While fraud was never proven, the faulty tally alerted computer scientists, politicians and everyday citizens to the very real possibility of computer hacking during elections.

In 2002, Seattle grandmother and writer Bev Harris asked officials in her county why they had acquired electronic touch screen systems for their elections. Unsatisfied with their explanation, she set out to learn about electronic voting machines on her own. In the course of her research, which unearthed hundreds of reported incidents of mishandled voting information, Harris stumbled across an "online library" of the Diebold Corporation, discovering a treasure trove of information about the inner-workings of the company's voting system.

Hacking Democracy may be the single most important documentary you watch before the general elections. The United States has loopholes in the implementation of national guidelines for the administration, accountability and protection of the electoral process. Part of the problem has been that the guidelines focused on satisfying the mandate set by the Help America Vote Act : It obligates states to use machines without levers, punch cards and other mechanical devices that may be difficult to manage by people with disabilities.

Enter electronic voting machines.

The companies producing these machines refuse to make the hardware or the software auditable. They claim they need to keep the information secret to protect themselves from unfair trade competition. In effect, just last year a Florida court ruled new laws would have to be implemented in order to "change the protection to those afforded code secrets" in favor of measures to protect election integrity.

Voting with machines created with proprietary technology protected by trade secrets is what has been termed as Black Box Voting and this is what "verifiable vote" activists consider a threat to the the electoral process and to democracy.

Watch the whole documentary (2+ hours) at Google Video.

Once you arm yourself with a good dose of alarm, scoot over to the following sites for more information about what you can do to protect your right to secure and verifiable vote:
Black Box Voting
Verified Voting
Vote411.org
Brad Blog

There is one bit of a silver lining in all of this: The US government agencies and workgroups in charge of evaluating the new voting machines seem to be coming around to the issue of unverifiable voting and have drafted studies favoring reform. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has already published two studies [PDF and PDF] in which they cited paperless and unverifiable voting "one of the main reasons behind continued questions about voting system security and diminished public confidence in elections."

Unfortunately, Congress decided not to push for a mandate that would have covered the 2008 elections.