Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections
Ardizzone, Michaels, and Teale's HBO documentary on US election security through Finnish hacker Harri Hursti's vendor-by-vendor demonstration of how voting machines actually fail.
- Directors
- Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels, Sarah Teale
- Released
- 2020
- Writers
- Sarah Teale
- Runtime
- 91 min
- Language
- English
Available on
Watch this if
Anyone briefing on election security, voting-machine procurement, or the political-procedural infrastructure that surrounds democratic legitimacy. Hursti's hands-on demonstrations are the cleanest visual case study in the genre.
Skip this if
Viewers wanting nuanced bipartisan framing; the film leans toward an argument that the system is structurally unsound, and presents evidence with a clear thesis. Practitioners with election-security backgrounds will find the technical material accurate but compressed.
Key takeaways
- Election security is a procurement problem disguised as a technology problem; the film documents how vendor lock-in and underfunded county budgets shape what runs on election day.
- The Hursti Hack — modifying memory cards used in Diebold machines — is the canonical demonstration of why paper backups and risk-limiting audits are non-negotiable.
- The film's strongest segments are the local-jurisdiction interviews, where election officials describe the constraints they actually face.
Notes
Pair with the National Academies' Securing the Vote report and with Matt Blaze's congressional testimony for the policy backdrop. Hursti's continuing work at DEF CON Voting Village extends the film's reporting in real time. The companion legislation (HR 1, HR 4) and state-level reform debates are the live-fire context. Required viewing for anyone who works on, or argues about, election security.