The folks* at Ampolo invited me to be interviewed for their website. Here is theirshort video "A Vote with Confidence?" on voting integrity, the upcoming elections and what ordinary citizens can do. They distilled about ninety minutes of the interview into a few moments, and I think they did a good job.
Please pass this around to anyone you know who might be interested in the state of our elections and wants the short version or doesn't have more than a few minutes.
*From the Ampolo website:
Ampolo is the word for light bulb or electricity in the universal language of Esperanto, and right here at Ampolo.com is where we are broadcasting new episodes each week featuring a wide range of ideas with the hope that viewers like you will not only be entertained and informed, but might also be inspired to turn them into realities—or as we say: "take them and run with them," free of charge.
...we invite you to share creative ways to help make the world, or at least one's community, a better place. It's our hope that viewers who learn of such initiatives by cities, citizens, and not for profits will be inspired to duplicate them in their own communities to make life a little better.
Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which exists for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. We aim to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Electronic (computerized) voting systems are simply antithetical to democratic principles.
CER set up a lending library to achieve the widespread distribution of the DVD Invisible Ballots: A temptation for electronic vote fraud. Within eighteen months, the project had distributed over 3200 copies across the country and beyond. CER now concentrates on group showings, OpEd pieces, articles, reviews, interviews, discussion sessions, networking, conferences, anything that promotes awareness of this critical problem. Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005.
The only quibble I'd have is that I don't think it's possible (even in theory) to build a machine without the "holes" you reference in the video. All known machines feature nontransparency the minute they are faster than the human eye , because speed creates de facto invisibility, and if not faster than the human eye, what's the point of the machine???? It seems the entire point of machines is to be faster than humans/the human eye -- isn't that the moral of the old story about Joe Henry, the steel driving man, and his epic battle with the machine that could work faster than humans?
Another reason machines and especially computers are impossible specifically in elections (and unlike other areas of society) is that, unlike the Apollo program where every person on the team genuinely wants the same thing ( i.e. the astronauts to come back alive) with elections we all have agendas that vary widely and are quite opposed to each other, because we support different candidates and issues and thus have widely varying goals as to what constitutes a successful "mission" so to speak. Thus, in elections, we can not "work together" and instead we have what economists call extreme "moral hazard" risks (a term economists used to describe unstable systems characterized by unequal information or likelihood of cheating).
But that little quibble based on a few words in the video does not hamper my enthusiasm for the video as a whole!!
Paul Lehto
by
Joan Brunwasser (139 articles, 3424 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 597 comments)
on Monday, November 19, 2007 at 8:22:52 PM
Joan, your vision is bigger than what this short video reveals. As with all of us Hand-Count Paper Ballots advocates, we no longer believe simply writing mainstream press or our legislators will get the job done. Politics-as-usual isn't working.
It's time citizens take back their democracy and count the damn ballots ourselves. Enough with these secret vote-counting machines, that scientists repeatedly find hackable.
Elections belong to the people - not to private, for-profit corporations, nor to politicians!
RecordRat (AKA Rady Ananda)
Columbus OH
by
Joan Brunwasser (139 articles, 3424 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 597 comments)
on Tuesday, November 20, 2007 at 2:36:45 PM
i agree with you, rady. it wasn't my gig and in the shrinking down of a lot of material, a lot got lost, including the need to shun secret vote counting and go back to a system we can adequately observe and monitor.
as you pointed out earlier, it's also impossible to read the pin i'm wearing which proudly states: Avoid Unwanted Presidencies, Say no to secret vote counting!
thanks for your input. we're all in this together.
by
Joan Brunwasser (139 articles, 3424 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 597 comments)
on Tuesday, November 20, 2007 at 2:39:12 PM
You came across wonderfully - clear, articulate, professional, reasonable - just what needs to be projected - that this is a cut and dried situation (our election system) that just isn't working, why it isn't working, and what we can do as citizens to fix it. Kudos!! Nice work!!
Yea, Joan!!!
David Earnhardt (writer, director, producer of Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections)
by
Joan Brunwasser (139 articles, 3424 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 597 comments)
on Tuesday, November 20, 2007 at 9:39:33 PM
asking people to put too much time and energy into it?
I think you come across as a really solid person, which is very good, since so many people who are concerned about voting machines come off as flaky. My only "complaint" is that you end by asking everyone to do all the things you do (reading, writing, contacting reps, etc.), which may turn off people who are not ready to put that much time and energy into it.
Not sure this is what you wanted to hear...:-(
RL
by
Joan Brunwasser (139 articles, 3424 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 597 comments)
on Wednesday, November 21, 2007 at 7:54:00 AM
no matter how you slice it, people do have to expend at least a little energy getting familiar with the issue. otherwise, they can't begin a dialog with anyone. no one has to do all of those things but if they read two articles and watched the documentary, they'd be up and running and spread over a week or two that's a few minutes a day (even counting the documentary). while i agree that many people's attention span is short these days, you get what you pay for and if we even add another layer of activists to what we've got so far, then they can go out and bring in others, people they know, that they see every day and that old chain letter effect can kick in. that's really the only way. the press is AWOL in a criminally negligent way. we have to take over that role ourselves and a few dedicated people is simply not enough.
thanks for taking the time to fiddle with the video and give me your feedback. if i want mindless flattery, i know where to go. i depend on you (and others) to give me the honest skedooley.
by
Joan Brunwasser (139 articles, 3424 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 597 comments)
on Wednesday, November 21, 2007 at 7:56:01 AM
Joanie, I hope you and your family have a wonderful, delicious TDay. You were (not that I am a bit surprised) extremely poised and articulate on Ampolo.
PS
by
Joan Brunwasser (139 articles, 3424 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 597 comments)
on Wednesday, November 21, 2007 at 4:50:09 PM
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