The attempted Hursti hack, as allowed by Sancho, moves forward throughout the film. By the time it was completed (in pitifully short order), the e-voting world would be turned on its head. Hursti succeeding in exposing that both optical-scan systems and touch-screen voting systems manufactured by Diebold -- and apparently tested by no one -- could be hacked, an election result completely flipped, and no trace would be left behind. All that was needed was a US$100 memory card reader bought off the Internet and about 60 seconds of access to the machine's memory card. RadioShack or Best Buy has all the necessary tools, in fact.

To repeat: It's not just Diebold's DREs that can be hacked. The Hursti hack targeted the memory card. Not only DREs but optical-scan units can record their information to memory cards. In either case, they're vulnerable. The ability to have an election flipped, and to do so with a small number of people involved, was no longer a "theory."

So, what exactly did happen back in 2000 with those negative 16,022 votes? How do you vote a minus, anyway? Sancho, who used the exact same optical-scan machines in his Leon County election, believes he knows. "In the 17 years that I've been an election administrator, my experience is that that kind of subtraction cannot occur accidentally," he explains. "Someone consciously tried to affect that computer system and consciously tried to perpetuate a fraud to steal votes," he concludes.

If Sancho is right, where else might votes have been stolen with these infernal black boxes? In Florida, we'll likely never know: A new state law makes it a crime to even examine any part of a paper ballot by hand once it has already been counted by a machine. And never mind those counties that use entirely paperless touch-screen systems (made by Diebold and others), where there isn't anything for a human being to examine at all. In the wake of the Hursti hack, the Sunshine State has moved to exclude anyone but state preapproved, "authorized" inspectors from examining voting systems.

By law, even a man like Sancho, elected by his constituents to administer free and fair elections, is no longer allowed to independently inspect the machinery that the state now forces him to use. "Election directors must be more demanding," Sancho says of his colleagues around the country who have done little more than take the voting machine companies' word for it that their equipment is safe and secure and performs as expected.