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It's election day. Do you know where your e-vote is?

Jon Skillings Editorial director
Jon Skillings is an editorial director at CNET, where he's worked since 2000. A born browser of dictionaries, he honed his language skills as a US Army linguist (Polish and German) before diving into editing for tech publications -- including at PC Week and the IDG News Service -- back when the web was just getting under way, and even a little before. For CNET, he's written on topics from GPS, AI and 5G to James Bond, aircraft, astronauts, brass instruments and music streaming services.
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Jon Skillings
2 min read

As you head to the polls today--and Blogma strenuously urges that you vote--the blogosphere is buzzing again about the HBO documentary, "Hacking Democracy."

e-voting

The 90-minute film on electronic voting machines debuted Thursday on the cable network and now can be seen on the Internet revival houses known as YouTube and Google Video. This will likely do nothing to settle the , which sees the documentary as nothing more than journalistic mudslinging.

You can understand Diebold's reaction--true to its title, the HBO film shows computer security types fiddling around with the innards of a voting machine and making it behave most unreliably. Diebold has long been under fire for its e-vote technology and for the company's politics.

Bloggers have been watching the video (or at least making reference to its Internet availability). While no one seems to be much concerned with hanging chads and problems with other, older forms of voting technology, a number of them aren't happy with what they're seeing.

Blog community response:

"It was distressing. Depressing. The woman who is the head of Black Box found some computer guys to break into the Diebold system, demonstrated how they did so, and confronted the Diebold people with their security problems, and were stonewalled by 'It's not a problem.' And local election boards, with the full knowledge of what this woman was pointing out about the machines, went ahead and bought the machinery anyway."
--Ginamariewade

"Be sure to go out today and VOTE!!! Although, after watching Hacking Democracy, I was a little leery of whether or not that vote will be counted."
--Silentkid

"See with ATMs there's trust on all parts except the final operator. The ATM trusts the bank fully and does whatever it says. The bank could lie to the ATM and say you had no money, or tell it you had money you didn't. However they have no reason to do that since the amount they could steal that way is peanuts and they'd be shut down over it...

So that's actually part of the problem here. Diebold just kinda decided to apply their ATM design to voting machines, but that doesn't work because voting machines are a much harder problem."
--Sycraft-fu on Slashdot