Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections

Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections

"UNCOUNTED is a journey through our dysfunctional election process – exploring the many different ways that our vote doesn’t get counted. Everything from the intimidation of minority voters - to voting machines that don’t work - to voters being denied the right to vote – to a national media that ignores and even makes excuses for what is wrong with the election system."

-- David Evanhardt, Producer and Director of "Uncounted"

The issue of voting enfranchisement and how votes are counted in American elections came to the forefront in the 2000 election. Since that time, a scattered, determined group of advocates have fought for transparency in voting machines and for opposing Republican efforts to suppress Democratic votes.

The latter efforts by the GOP has taken place on a variety of fronts (including "caging lists," voter ID laws, phone jamming, voter intimidation at the polls, etc.). In fact, this "rig the vote" scheme was integrally related to a large part of the DOJ ProsecutorGate scandal. (One of the ironic techniques to bolster the call for state legislative voter ID laws was to have partisan Bush U.S. Attorneys indict Democrats for non-existent voter fraud, while ignoring large-scale Republican voter malfeasance.)

BuzzFlash has reported regularly and posted articles on the long-term Republican effort to steal elections through a combination of "propietary" electornic voting machines and the multi-faceted suppression of Democratic votes.

It is often a difficult topic for readers to follow, because it has so many facets -- and the electronic voting machine issue often gets bogged down in technicalities. Furthermore, advocates have branched off into different camps in so far as rallying around one solution to the electronic voting machine issue.

Frankly, as far as the latter is concerned, BuzzFlash advocates for completely transparent electronic voting machines owned by the public, without any propietary software. Furthermore, paper ballots should be issued, initialed by the voter, and dropped in a box, so if there is a recount required, the paper ballots can be counted and not the electronic tabulation.

This is more or less the process championed by the late Athan Gibbs, featured in "Uncounted," who invented a voting system called "TruVote."

Suffice it to say, we were mightily impressed with how clear and understandable the just released "Uncounted" makes the problem of the widespread GOP effort to steal elections. It's a difficult subject to put your arms around, but "Uncounted" succeeds by making a lucid and compelling case that democracy is at risk when the very process of voting is under assault.

From the producer:

Like many Americans and others around the world, filmmaker David Earnhardt spent Election Night 2004 watching the results come in. The exit polls earlier in the day had indicated an easy Kerry victory with George W. Bush’s popularity ratings at an all-time low. But as the night went on, the official results started turning toward Bush – and by midnight, it appeared that Bush would win. After John Kerry conceded early the next day, the national media never questioned the results and turned a deaf ear to the many questions being raised by the public:

• Was there a concerted effort to suppress votes?
• Were the votes correctly counted?
• Did the rise of electronic voting and its documented lack of security allow for easy manipulation of the vote total?
• Why were the exit polls, which had been pinpoint accurate for 40 years, suddenly wrong in predicting a Kerry victory?
• Why were nearly 2 million people who tried to vote, told that they were not on the voter registration rolls?
• Perhaps most important – why was the national media, almost without exception, ignoring these serious and substantive issues in the months following George W. Bush’s election?

These questions fueled a two-year journey for filmmaker David Earnhardt that led to the 2006 mid-term election where many of the same illegal and unethical tactics remained unchecked by election officials and by the media. UNCOUNTED tackles these critical issues that threaten the very core of our democracy – our vote.

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

Learn More >>>

http://www.buzzflash.com/store/items/913

ENDS

© Scoop Media