e-Voting is DestroyingAmerican Democracy?

Is e-Voting the best weapon against the American democracy?

A few months before the United States presidential election, a documentary called “Stealing America” zooms into the essential question of of e-voting, whose viability was disputed in 2004.

Contested as it is, e-voting is still much more efficient than traditional voting. While it took weeks to tamper with thousands of votes, the same operation only takes 5 seconds with e-voting!

Released in the U.S. on August 22nd, this documentary enumerates the troubling dysfunctions that were observed during the election that then set John Kerry against George W. Bush. It then openly asks whether a country in which numerous citizens see their right to vote denied can still be called a democracy.

“Your Vote Was Rejected”

e-Voting appliances shut down, switch the voter’s choice or even ignore the majority of votes… In the end, some 40 U.S. states have known technical breakdowns, which disturbingly appeared to favor the Republican candidate, even contradicting the polls that were taken outside the voting booths.

“Too Expensive”

The huge price of these machines leads to under-equipped voting booths , especially in popular districts, which are often populated with African-Americans or Latino-Americans, and where it is not unusual to wait for three hours to vote, causing many voters to abstain. These coincidences are too common for the director, Dorothy Fadiman, who seeks to establish, through her film, the need to revert to traditional paper-based voting in the United States.

Alongside the documentary, the internet site “Stealing America” invites Americans to defend the value of their vote, advising them to ensure that they have not been removed from lists by a system that incomprehensibly denies thousands of citizens the right to vote, every time.

This movie might come too late to the United States but may come in time for France, where e-voting is gaining acceptance.

If elections are still played out in urns, it would be preferable that the urns do not decide the outcome, themselves…