"Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections" (2020 release; 91 min.) is a documentary that (re)examines how secure electronic voting in the US really is. As the movie opens, we are introduced to Harri Hursti, a cyber security expert from Finland who specializes in elections security: "Everything is hackable", he bluntly states (and then later proves it), despite assurances from government officials at all levels that voting in the US is "secure"... At this point we are 10 min. into the documentary.
Couple of comments: Harri Hursti is universally recognized as one the world's top experts in these matters, and in fact this movie can be seen as a sequel of sorts to the 2006 documentary "Hacking Democracy", where Hursti was seen how easily he breached a voting machine right there in front of local government officials. Get this: that very same voting machine which Hursti breached back then is still scheduled to be in use in the 2020 elections in no less than 20 US states! It simply blows the mind. The 3 remaining North American manufacturers of voting machines are shown along the way as still being way too vulnerable, and apparently having little interest in fixing the issues. Later on, the documentary looks in detail at what happened in the 2018 elections in Georgia and Alaska. You simply can't make this stuff up. Surreal doesn't even begin to describe it.
"Kill Chain: The Cyber Wars on America's Elections" premiered recently on HBO and is now available on HBO On Demand and other streaming services. I am sure that this documentary will be dismissed by a certain segment of the US population as yet more "fake news" but the facts once again are clear and get exposed by the film makers. Let this movie serve as a reminder that there is work to be done to shore up the vulnerabilities of electronic voting in the US.
