If HBO's new documentary gets even a fraction of the eyeballs it deserves, it's hard to see how it could miss having a profound effect on the electoral process. Then again, with the overwhelming evidence already available, it's unimaginable that next week we will actually be heading to polling places nationwide where more than 80% of America's votes will be tabulated by hackable, inaccurate, unreliable electronic voting machines using 100% secret software to record and tabulate our votes.

And yet here we go.

Hacking Democracy is the culmination of three years of work by filmmakers Simon Ardizzone, Robert Carrillo Cohen and Russell Michaels, who have documented some of the most mind-blowing moments in the short, storied and sordid history of American e-voting. Other films I've seen on the subject -- some released, some still in the works, many of them superb, even several of them in which I appear -- tend to rely on talking-head expert explanations or data-crunching facts and figures. Hacking Democracy makes its case by showing rather than telling. It's accessible and, by the time viewers see the worst hack of them all, it's gut-wrenching. It's a real-life detective story, with real bad guys sweating, evading, lying and misleading, only to be busted on camera as snake-oil salesmen.

In the film, election fraud investigators Bev Harris and the late Andy Stephenson of (BBV) travel the country to unearth firsthand evidence of democracy perverted. The access the filmmakers had on that journey is stunning. The cameras were there when Diebold executives baldly lied about the vulnerability of their products. They were there when investigators from BBV and other election integrity organizations went Dumpster-diving in Florida, Ohio and Texas to retrieve damning evidence from the eternal memory hole. And they got it all on camera. Even for a veteran observer like me, someone already familiar with most of the discoveries, seeing the results left a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I'm even now having a difficult time shaking.

Setting a tone of partisan dread early in the film are the fruits of a Dumpster dive early in the film outside the McKinney, Texas, headquarters of Diebold Election Systems Inc., where BBV's Harris discovers a line item and unexplained accounts receivable from the "8th District, Republican Committee." But another segment reveals a Republican candidate from Louisiana going from touch-screen machine to touch-screen machine in the bowels of a county elections warehouse demonstrating that on each one, her attempts to vote for herself result in a vote registered at the bottom of the screen for her opponent. That e-voting is not a partisan issue is one of the film's most powerful messages, counteracting one of the false and divisive impressions defenders of these indefensible machines have put forth. (Time for some more personal disclosure: I didn't vote for John Kerry.)