I watched Hacking Democracy on HBO tonight. The show is about the potential pitfalls and perils of electronic voting. I'm left wondering if every topic must undergo Geraldo-ization in order to be make it in to the mainstream. The activists come off looking like vigilantes, and the corporate suits look so slick that you're left thinking they must be criminals. I'm not buying it. I blogged on voting last week, but watching this show got me thinking about the right way to boil down the problem. This might not make for good TV, but here goes:
For democracy to work, we have to count votes in a transparent way.
That's no mean feat from a technical perspective, but I think the biggest problem is that people mistake the relative tranquility of their lives as a signal that our election system really is functioning properly. If there's a way to game the system, sooner or later the system will be gamed. We don't need to look beyond our own history to see that.
