Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections and the Power of One
I had eagerly awaited David Earnhardt’s sequel to Eternal Vigilance: The Fight to Save Our Election System, which was released last year. Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections builds on his earlier film, examining the 2006 mid-term elections and looking beyond to 2008. Earnhardt patiently weaves his tapestry, using archival footage as well as many new interviews, to place this fight for fair elections within its national and historical context. Those interviewed include members of Congress, journalists, investigative reporters, computer programmers and scientists, community organizers, activists, historians, lawyers, poll workers, and outraged voters. This broad base of Americans demonstrates that this is an issue that transcends partisan lines and touches all of us.
Earnhardt did an excellent job of selecting people and episodes to amply illustrate the perilous state of our electoral system. While the 2006 election results seemed to indicate that we are back on track, in fact, quite the opposite is true. Jonathan Simon, of Election Defense Alliance and co-author of “Landslide Denied: Exit Polls vs. Vote Count 2006,” comes straight to the point,
Election 2006 is certainly not telling us that pre-election concerns were overblown and it’s safe to go back in the water. It gives us no reason to assume that our elections will be run fairly and honestly. Just the opposite. Look at the pattern of the past few elections. We have every reason to believe that the 2008 election is going to be manipulated. And we have a hell of a lot of work to do in a very short time to safeguard our next election and by extension all the elections to come.
Election theft comes in many guises, as Harvey Wasserman well knows. He’s senior editor for The Columbus Free Press, a journalist, and a historian. Wasserman co-wrote several books and many articles on the 2004 elections that focus on Ohio, where he lives and works. At the time he was interviewed for this documentary, he had already identified 36 different ways that legal voters in Ohio were kept from voting. He fully expected to reach 50 by the time his investigation was completed.
Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, following Katherine Harris’s example in Florida in 2000, ran the Bush/Cheney state campaign as well as Ohio’s election, an egregious conflict of interest. On Election Day, while voting problems were bountiful across the country, Ohio was Ground Zero, generating over 50,000 complaints. To add insult to injury, 56 of the 88 Ohio counties have since defied the law by destroying some or all of their election records, making a complete and thorough investigation of the 2004 election virtually impossible.
Most of the disenfranchisement methods focused on keeping minority voters from the polls. Or, if they got to the polls, making sure that their votes were not counted. As Wasserman explains,
The targeting of people of color and of people without means is very political and very computerized. What they’re saying is, “Black people who are voting are Democratic. Poor people who are voting are Democratic. Therefore, we want to eliminate their votes.” It’s an easy matrix to work from; they’re identifiable and so if a Republican wants to win an election, [they] can start with the people of color.
Rep. John Conyers bluntly claims, “Computers are the new twenty-first century threat to fair and full and democratic participation in the voting process.” While it’s not the whole problem, it’s hard to disagree that computers have revolutionized our elections, and jeopardized the voters’ connection to their vote. Our votes have been reduced to unrecognizable bits and bytes and are easily shifted around, multiplied or erased entirely.
How’d we get here, anyway? Andrew Gumbel, U.S. correspondent for Britain’s Independent and author of Steal This Vote, says about the 2000 election,
So there were all these situations which, had they happened in some other emerging country from the former Soviet Union, the U.S. probably would have been front and center in denouncing these things as evidence of corruption, and suddenly it’s happening in the world’s most powerful country.
Instead of real media coverage, complaints and questions about what happened were pooh-poohed, and concerned citizens were marginalized.
Gumbel continues,
The 2000 election illustrated that there was a real problem. The patient was sick; American democracy was not in a good way. The doctors came along and they really made the wrong diagnosis. They said the problem is the machines; if we have better machines everything will be fine. So there was an almighty rush to believe that computers were the solution.
The subsequent passage of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 led to the spending of almost 4 billion of our federal tax dollars on these computerized voting machines. Gumbel elaborates,
One of the insidious things about touch screen voting machines is that if there is foul play it can, at least in theory, be perpetrated invisibly. You can cover your tracks completely. With these machines you can alter the outcome of a national election undetectably in a way that is just unprecedented in terms of its reach and the power to really play around. For those reasons we should be much more careful of these machines than we’ve ever been in the past. And the evidence is actually we’re being less careful [emphasis added].
Jonathan Simon, of Election Defense Alliance, sums it all up,
This issue really is the hub at the center of all the other concerns that people have. And you see people, whether it’s “Save the Whales” or “Save the Forests” or “Save Social Security,” whatever it is, working very hard on these individual issues – and perhaps not recognizing that if elections continue to be rigged, their work is going to be for naught.
The power of one While Uncounted paints a dismal picture of the hijacking of our elections, it has a parallel, more positive aspect. That is the ability of one person to bring about change, or what I call The Power of One. Brad “BradBlog” Friedman describes the phenomenon well in the extended interviews (which can be found in the film’s extra footage included in the Bonus Features).
The problem, if you look at it, does seem absolutely massive and as if it cannot be defeated. Well, I will tell you this: in all the years now that I’ve been working on this, the only time that I’ve seen things actually change, it’s because one person, one citizen stood up and took a specific action.
Whether it’s showing up at their County Election Commission and asking questions, whether it’s making a public records request. You know, so much of this is available to any citizen who makes a public records request: “I would like to know, how did you make the decision to buy this machine?” Or a poll worker speaking up and saying, “Here’s what I saw happen on Election Day.”
One person makes a difference. You’ve got to take action.
Earnhardt features four individuals who stood up for the American voter and voting integrity.
Steve Heller, while clerking at a law firm, stumbled upon documents that showed that Diebold Election Systems Inc. was defrauding the taxpayers and the State of California. “When I saw those documents, I had to do something. If our elections are crooked then our democracy isn’t there anymore. And I’m just not willing to let that go. I’m not willing to let liberty and freedom go.” For exposing this criminal activity, Heller was charged with three felonies, racked up huge legal bills, and faced financial ruin and jail time.
Clint Curtis was a Republican computer programmer in 2000 when he was asked by Tom Feeney (the incoming Speaker of the Florida House and one-time running mate of Jeb Bush) to create software to flip votes for Florida’s elections. Disillusioned, he took his story to Congress and the media. Feeney is now a U.S. Congressman.
Bruce Funk, also a Republican, served as County Clerk in Utah for 23 years. He dared to examine the security flaws within the Diebold voting system used in his county. “I can’t think of anything more important to do with my life than to try and save our democracy because the vote is the very core of that democracy.” Funk was locked out of his office and forced out of his job.
Athan Gibbs was a Tennessee auditor, accountant, and entrepreneur who became horrified and angry as he saw a million votes go uncounted in 2000. His dream was for every vote to be counted as cast, and he worked tirelessly to invent a machine that went a long way to reaching that goal. He was tragically killed in a car wreck right after he finally got some press coverage, but before he could bring his TruVote system to the market.
Eternal vigilance Robert Koehler is one of the few mainstream journalists who has written about our election mess. He reports,
There is more passion on this issue than anything else I’ve ever written about. Once you get bitten by the truth that the elections are not fair, you’re not going to stop believing that…If what I believe is true, it can’t go away. It just plain can’t go away unless we just give up on the country. That’s, I mean that is what is at stake. I just want to keep doing my part. I’ve never felt closer to the whole cliché, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” That always seemed like bullshit to me. Suddenly, it’s foremost in my heart – eternal vigilance.
Where YOU come in • Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections is available for purchase. http://www.uncountedthemovie.com Extra credit for passing your copy on to your friends, neighbors, and colleagues. • Instead of heading for the Multi-Plex for an evening out, invite some friends over to watch Uncounted. Talk afterwards about what you can do to help address the problems with our elections. • Keep the buzz going by talking to everyone you know about how our elections are being compromised and therefore, the entire foundation of our democracy is teetering on the verge of collapse.
Some inspiration • Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.” • Margaret Mead long ago discovered the Power of One. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever does.” • Read The Impossible Will Take A Little While by Paul Rogat Loeb. It’s a compilation of essays by activists of all stripes, cutting across political, gender and geographic boundaries.
Here’s the account of someone who attended the Nashville premiere of Uncounted a few weeks ago.
One of the last people to stand up to the microphone was a young (and very nervous) Iraqi war veteran (hair still cut military-short) who said that, until that evening, he had not been aware of all the illegal, immoral, and anti-American acts that had been perpetrated to subvert the consent of the governed in the 2004 elections. At that moment, he said that he was angry as hell. He ended his statement by saying that when he joined the military, he had taken an oath to defend this country against all its enemies "both foreign AND domestic.”
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.
Two people are doing federal jail time for their actions in subverting the Ohio vote count in 2004, yet almost noone knows this salient fact. The Democratic Party, arguably the target of almost all the fraud committed, seems to be blithely unaware that they very well may have been cheated out of the White House and several seats in the Senate and House in the last two national elections. Even in 2006, where a landslide was predicted for the Democrats, many exit polls were, yet again, seemingly wrong about the results. These very same polls were always almost entirely accurate as to the pending results, up until the 2000 election that is.....
If there is a more important issue in this nation than free and honest elections, ones that do not fraudulently exclude thousands of Black Americans by placing them on lists as felons without the right to vote, miscount the votes of many thousands of us, many many apparently, then I am unaware as to what it could be......Yet where is the hubbub, bub?
by
ardee D. (6 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 2377 comments)
on Friday, November 30, 2007 at 5:55:12 PM
If voting could change things - they'd make it illegal.
The Achilles Heal to the elite one-percent - one man's vote.
There's a reason 50% of eligible voters gave-up on the system a long time ago. If our elections were fair, we would have had peace, health care, jobs, clean energy, real education, affordable housing, freedom, and most of mankind's dreams answered long ago.
There's also a reason we're not hearing this on the M$M either.
It's their Achilles Heal. They'd have to fess-up as to how do you miss a story like this? And then a whole bunch of embarrassing questions come out.
Believe that this is what this country has been fighting for since the beginning. But never forget this, at the time the writers of the Constitution and Bills of Rights wrote them, only land-owning, men could vote and it wasn't until recently that people of color and women got the vote and all along the way those that think only white, male land-owners should still be the only ones who's vote should count have been in charge of seeing who's vote gets counted, or who's doesn't.
There have been some brief moments where the dream of one-person one-vote poked through and some good things were done. But that has all but been buried by the depth of the corruption. But if anything is going to draw the lines in the sand as fast as anything else - it's this.
I've collected a fairly good library of progressive DVD's and will soon be doing free screenings - I'm adding these two.
by
Mr M (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 12 diaries, 1426 comments)
on Friday, November 30, 2007 at 8:03:02 PM
Your compelling review was so good I forgot for a moment I was reading a movie review. You really make the movie come alive in your vivid descriptions of who said and did what, what needs to be done, and how we can go about getting it done. And the inspirational sayings were very, well, "inspiring". No wonder you're the editor - way to go Joan!
BTW, I've seen the movie and I highly recommend it to anyone. I'd say you can show it at a house party without even having seen it and have no worries about people not liking it.
by
Tom Courbat (11 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 12 comments)
on Saturday, December 1, 2007 at 1:41:09 PM
Joan, Absolutely beautiful review.. You are on my list of Power of One. I intend to do a screening of Uncounted here in LA, once I get my project, The Kudzu Effect, underway.
I LOVE the hope that you constantly emphasize, that is in this work we do. We must hold onto our vision of a real democracy, keep working HARD, and eventually, it will manifest. Onward, Sheri
There's a quote I keep above my computer: "Never hope more than you can work."
THIS ELECTION 2008 IS TWO FOLD, FIXED VOTES AND THE TOP TIER CANDIDATES FROM BOTH PARTY'S ARE GLOBAL PLAYERS, AND WILL FOLLOW THE GLOBAL ELITES AGENDA, IT TOOK THESE GLOBAL ELITE THE BETTER PART OF 100 YEARS TOO GET THE POWER AND CONTROL THEY HAVE , WILE WE ATE POP CORN AND WATCH TV WITH THE MASS MEDIA DECEPTION AND DESINFORMATION,THINKING EVERYTHING IS JUST FINE, AND NOW HOLLY SMOLLY WHAT HAPPEN, IF THEIR IS ANYBODY THINKING IN THEIR HEARTS THAT SOME HOW A GREAT AMERICAN HERO IS GOING TO RIDE UP ON A BIG WHITE HOURSE AND SAVE THE DAY, THE END MY FRI-END, BY BY MISS AMERICAN PIE. THE TRUTH IS WE ALL BETTER GO TO NIGHT SCHOOL, WAIT STOP FORGET THAT GO TO DAY SCHOOL BECAUSE YOU WONT HAVE A JOB ANYWAY AND LEARN SPANISH.
by
RICHARD SHADE (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 460 comments)
on Sunday, December 2, 2007 at 3:38:45 AM
HHHohooooo, Joan!! Another truly excellent piece! I just ordered UNCOUNTED/ can't wait to see/ Jonathan Simon is one of my favorite humans--SO glad his important work gets a chance to be heard. (I met him at the National Conference for Media Reform--filmed an EXCELLENT question he and Steve Freeman asked the DNC re: his 2006 research/ if they are planning an investigation before 2008. The answer he got STAGGERED me. I couldn't help a heavy, disgusted sigh that almost ruined the footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q40EOvo6jaE)
Lady, you sure can write. I'm going to send off this review to bunches of folks who might bristle (and have) when I bring up this subject. This is a great intro piece for family and friends.
"The impossible will take a little while..." LOVE that line. It's very important to remember. After all we are attempting nothing short of undermining a new world order. So much muck-y-muck!)
Keep up the great work, Joan! MUCH appreciated down here in silly Sarasota. Best, Jeannie Dean
www.videothevote.org
by
Jeannie Dean (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 10 comments)
on Sunday, December 2, 2007 at 3:54:00 AM
10 comments
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