The film quickly reveals that the main culprits are the executives of Diebold, who commit and are caught in one fib, lie, misdirect and slur after another. For instance, after Harris stumbled (via Google search) on Diebold's supersecret software source code perched on a public FTP site, Diebold President Bob Urosevich in an open hearing tells technical advisers to California's secretary of state that "basically, the code was stolen." No, basically, the code was left sitting there for anyone to download from the Net. Of course, Urosevich -- who, along with his compatriots at Diebold, has gone to extraordinary measures to discredit Harris and others like her (myself included) over the years -- knows the difference. He simply appears not to give a damn, or to hope that listeners don't know or care.

The deception continued, of course, through the 2004 election and beyond. The film moves through a frightening number of incidents in 80 minutes. We get a look at the situation in Florida, where systems made by Global Election Systems (a firm purchased in 2001 by Diebold as an entree into the e-voting market) "malfunctioned" in 2000 by registering negative 16,022 votes for Al Gore, leading to his original concession. The Florida saga continued in 2004, with tech anomalies and procedural snafus that defy belief by reasonable people. We pass through Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where state law was circumvented to game a crucial hand count. "[The hand count was] just for the public to see," says one of the three Cuyahoga County officials who would later be indicted for the phony recount. But again, the deal was done -- though amazingly, the cameras caught it all.

If it were all bad guys, Hacking Democracy would be nearly unbearable. Fortunately, honesty in government isn't entirely a thing of the past: Enter our hero, the legendary Leon County, Fla., supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho. The official in charge of the county that includes Tallahassee was named in 2000 to oversee the eventually aborted-by-SCOTUS recount of the Bush-Gore election. When BBV came to Sancho in 2005 with the claim that his own Diebold optical-scan paper-based voting system could be hacked, he did what no other election director in the country had yet done: He allowed them to come in and prove it. And prove it they did, in the much storied (at least among democracy junkies) "Hursti hack" of December 2005 -- seen for the first time as the chilling climax of Hacking Democracy.

A note here: I mentioned optical-scan machines above. A lot of the uproar you've heard about in the mainstream media centers on the "paperless" DRE (direct-recording electronic) touch-screen machines. Optical-scan machines and DREs with VVPAT (voter-verifiable paper audit trails) haven't gotten as much criticism. After all, there's a paper ballot that gets scanned by those optical scanners, and a paper record left by VVPAT machines. Solves the problem, right?

Wrong. Finnish computer security expert Harri Hursti discovered that Diebold stored an executable program on the same removable memory card used to store the tabulated votes on each Diebold voting machine. "If someone had told me there was a modifiable, executable program in the same place where the most secured data was stored, I'd say you'd have to be misunderstanding something, crazy or lying," Hursti declares.