'We Need To Go To Paper Ballots': Director Sarah Teale Talks 2020 Presidential Election Ahead Of HBO Doc 'Kill Chain'
(CBS Local)-- The 2020 presidential election is less than eight months away and there are still major concerns about the country's election technology.
A new documentary from HBO called "Kill Chain: The Cyber War On America's Elections" follows hacker and cyber security expert Harri Hursti as he travels around the world to expose the issues with America's voting system. Director Sarah Teale has been following this issue since the mid 2000s and not much has changed since her first documentary "Hacking Democracy."
"We did the first film in 2005 and it came out in 2006. It got nominated for an Emmy and thought it would institute and awful lot of change and nothing changed," said Teale in an interview with CBS Local's DJ Sixsmith. "In 2016, here we were facing attacks from outside the US, which was very scary, and still wide open. Coronavirus presents its own particular challenge because potentially for the primaries, people are not going to be able to go to their local precinct. In a way, it's quite good because it would lead to paper mail in ballots."
Teale says that many of the voting machines used around the country haven't been changed since they were put into place in 2002. The filmmaker and her team were in Georgia during one of the most controversial elections of the past few years between Governor Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams.
"All of the cards were down, nobody could vote," said Teale. "If it was a glitch, maybe one or two cards would've gone down, not all of them. People waited in line for five or six hours and amazingly some people stuck it out. This happened in three different counties in Georgia and all of them majority black and that raises some serious questions. The race was decided by less than two percent and makes you think."
"Kill Chain: The Cyber War On America's Elections" premieres March 26 and Teale hopes this can educate Americans all over the country.
"Democracy is worth fighting for and our way of life depends on being able to pick the people who make the decisions that govern our lives," said Teale. "It is important to defend it and in order to do that we need to go to paper ballots."