December 29, 2005 at 23:22:30

Blazing A Freedom Path

By Vickie Karp, National Chair, Coalition for Visible Ballots, Posted by Joan Brunwasser (about the submitter) Page 2 of 2 page(s)

opednews.com Permalink

At about 10:30 I packed up my stuff and left for Barton Creek Elementary, for I still didn't know at that time what had happened with the police since no one had called me back to update me and I couldn't reach them by phone either. I was hoping that was not because they were all in jail. When I arrived there all was well and they had extra crew; they had two or three people acting as �greeters� which really helped bring up the participation numbers. I visited with them and heard some of their stories of the morning, and gradually made my way across town to visit each of our six locations, stopping to meet with Karen to pick up the tally sheets which she had just finished putting together at about 3:30 that afternoon! (talk about cutting it close!) We split them up to each deliver to three of our six locations, and I headed north.

At our next location at Brown Elementary I ran into the only journalist who cared enough to write up our story; unfortunately it was not the mainstream media, but still, an excellent journalist for the Austin Community College newspaper named Amy Czigan. She had already come to one of our meetings, followed up with a phone interview with me, and on that election day handed me her FIRST story about our effort which was on the first page of their new edition. She was there to volunteer and to take notes for a second, follow-up story.

I must interject here that I have learned a few things about media from my mentor Abbe Delozier, who helped put together our July 13th True Majority Day of Action press conference last year, and produced two world-class press conferences in D.C. last Fall where Bev and her team of computer experts demonstrated six different ways to hack an election on e-voting software. For our parallel election, I had written a sharp press release, tweaked by both Abbe and Karen, and with Abbe's help, we got it out three times to literally hundreds of mainstream media: N.Y. Times reporters, Washington Post, major newspapers all across the country; all cable news networks; the AP; UPI; Reuters; all major papers in all major Texas cities; all local TV news stations; three local papers; several radio stations; we faxed the thing all over the place as well.

The sum total of our press, (besides Radio Free Austin which promo'd us at every opportunity) was Amy's article in the ACC paper; a short blurb in an Austin weekly newspaper; and three radio interviews. A local news station sent a reporter out to one of our locations, but they didn't air the piece. The lack of coverage of this historical event is a sad and disturbing commentary on the state of our media. I can only take it as a compliment that they chose not to cover what we were doing. Someone must have thought it was too important, and didn't want other citizens to know about it.

The day zoomed by and soon I was at our sixth location, as they �closed shop� after 7pm and began counting ballots by hand by the light of little lanterns and car headlights. I left them to that task and went to reserve tables for us at a local restaurant, our meeting place where all results were to be turned in to me and Karen. (I made sure there was a bar!)

Soon our teams started arriving and turning over their ballot boxes, ballots, tally sheets, and registration books. I couldn't believe how excited and enthusiastic they all were, especially those who'd been up since before dawn. They were absolutely fired up about the whole experience and there was a definite air of celebration in the air. A few margaritas and beers were consumed as volunteers shared their stories of democracy in action at their various locations.

Of course there were details to clean up; three of our six teams didn't succeed in getting the official totals from the substations; and the teams had each realized during the day that they each had a certain number of ballots on which no precinct number was noted. I knew we'd get the official totals from the County officials later (which we did). We decided, due to the large percentage of ballots with no precinct numbers on them, to combine the totals for the two precincts at each location and compare them to the combined official totals, to get the most accurate read on our data. (Our volunteers came up with the solution to this one: next time, the volunteer in charge of the ballots hands the ballot to the voter only after personally writing their precinct number on it.)

Our plan is to meet with a local high school statistics teacher (tomorrow, the 17th, to hand over our data for statistical analysis. He is using our parallel election results as a class project! We don't know yet when we'll get their response, but we will post whatever they find as soon as we get it.

Though we are still organizing our data, we have realized that the absolute greatest value in the experience was in forming a synergistic group of dedicated volunteers who want to continue to work together on more and bigger voting projects; and in helping educate the public on the critical issue of electronic voting vulnerabilities. In all, about 600 people voted with us last Tuesday. It's not a huge number, but as Karen said, 600 more people now know a little bit more about the problems about electronic voting, and have had the experience of a �transparent� election with hand-counted paper ballots!

We had our first follow-up meeting last night, and everyone was bursting with ideas. We are definitely going to do this again during the Spring primaries. Also our very exciting plan: to put together an instructional video and prepare it as part of a systemized �package� of step-by step guidelines and downloadable forms and handouts for other election activists across the country who want to hold parallel elections in their areas. When it's ready, we'll announce it on the BBV and Coalition for Visible Ballots websites, and we'll set it up to be ordered through the VoteRescue.org website for the cost of the video and shipping. We plan on having it ready by early spring in time for parallel elections to be executed for the primaries ALL OVER THE COUNTRY!

With all the public speaking I've done to promote Bev's work and get the word out on vote fraud and the need for citizens to take back the election process from the corporations, this parallel voting project was the most rewarding work I've done so far. I know it's because: It's all about the PEOPLE getting involved in TAKING OUR COUNTRY BACK! More to come!

1 | 2