Investigative journalist Greg Palast, author of the current best-selling Armed Madhouse and of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, introduces the documentary and also provides staggering information in the body of the film about the RNC's purposeful and targeted strategies for disenfranchising millions of minority voters across the United States, including African-American soldiers serving in Iraq.
Others appearing include Congressman John Conyers, Jr.; attorneys Cliff Arnebeck, John Bonifaz, Robert Fitrakis, Joseph Geller, Peter Peckarsky and Susan Truitt; President/CEO of Common Cause Chellie Pingree; computer science expert Professor Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins and Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D., the leading public-advocacy investigator of voting fraud in the 2004 Ohio presidential election; statistical expert Professor Steven Freeman, Ph.D. of the University of Pennsylvania; consumer advocate against electronic voting Bev Harris; Franklin County, Ohio Director of Elections Matthew Damschroeder; and Ohio poll workers, concerned citizens, and community activists.
In addition to the RNC's nationwide campaign to disenfranchise American citizens from targeted minority groups, several other clearly fraudulent activities are identified: 3,600,780 votes were cast for president but never counted; in Ohio, forensic evidence has been uncovered of ballot switching in selected rural precincts and of double punched ballots used to invalidate legitimate votes in specific urban precincts; and there is strong statistical evidence that as many as five million votes nationally were shifted, subtracting five million votes from Kerry and adding five million votes to Bush to produce a swing of up to ten million votes in the officially reported result.
The outcome of this series of sickening schemes is that the wrong candidate was sworn in as President of the United States. The evidence presented in this documentary, "Commander 'N Thief," should be seen as a warning that our democracy is now in peril and that ordinary citizens must act quickly and forcefully to restore honesty, transparency and verifiability to the American electoral system.
The documentary also cites the absence of any comprehensive or sustained media investigation or coverage of the evidence of serious election-day problems and, with the notable exceptions of Greg Palast (BBC, Guardian/Observer) and Keith Olbermann (MSNBC), there has been no significant attention paid to this unsettling story in the national media.
Former U.S. Senator, Ambassador and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern provides a powerful closing statement for the documentary pointing to the need for citizen action to insure a transparent, accessible, easy-to-use and entirely verifiable voting system that will protect and preserve our democracy over the long future.
