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Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections

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A revolution is afoot in these United States. But unlike, say, the American Revolution, this one is not of the people. No, it's anything but. This revolution has silenced the people, strangled our democracy and made a mockery of Constitution principles. The revolution? The privatization of the American electoral system.

How did this happen? How did the concept of one man, one vote get so skewed that partisans interests now design machines to register and count votes, in secrecy, with `proprietary' equipment that can't be independently reviewed and verified? How did so many of us become disenfranchised - without even knowing it? It's mind boggling.

And it's at the heart of UNCOUNTED. The film gives historical perspective on how our electoral system was slowly given over to those who do not have the good of the republic in their hearts, but rather see how our system can be manipulated toward their own aims; it lays bare the idea that our elections are fair and reflect the true will of the people; and it proves in all too painful detail how this electoral revolution led to the installation of the most corrupt administration in our nations' history.

Buy it, watch it, show it to your family and friends and everyone you know who cares about our future. Because as UNCOUNTED shows, there is a tipping point, and we may have already passed it.

No conspiracy theory's here, cold hard facts, some of which have been voiced over and over in the past, but also new facts which beg the question: Why is no one being held accountable? This documentary cuts into the heart of America, exposing the graft and corruption that finally broke through the revolving door and blew it off it's hinges in 2000. Today we are suffering the end result of that breach, the final phase of a planned op that allows corporate control of our government. The recent supreme court ruling allowing corporate to spend limitless amounts for the promotion of their candidate of choice is the final result (to date, fasten your seat belts) of the last vestiges of democracy being flushed down the toilet. The strongest point this documentary made to me was the fact that traitorous crimes have been committed over and over since 2000, and the perpetrators should at minimum be in prison. Our forefathers would have hanged them from the lamp posts, yet not a single entity has been held accountable. This is a statement about who really runs this country, and a must see for anyone who believes in democracy.

Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections focuses on both confirmed attempts to rig elections and suspected attempts to rig elections right up to the national level of president. Of course, this is a highly charged and controversial subject; and it's primarily but not exclusively presented by Democrats who assert that elections were rigged using electronic voting machines, voter intimidation and other "techniques" to get a particular candidate to win a political election and thwart our cherished democracy. It is important to note that this film was made in 2007 before the recent presidential election. Therefore, this film does not criticize or praise the way the most recent presidential election was handled.

It is absolutely fascinating to see interviews with people who were victimized when they tried to blow the whistle on Diebold, a company that made electronic voting machines but then added extra computer code to "flip" votes. The idea of "flipping" votes is simple. If one candidate gets 51% of the vote and the other gets 48% of the vote, the machine automatically changes it so that the first candidate now has only 48% of the vote and the other now has 51%. We meet and see a computer programmer who testifies before a congressional hearing that he was required to write computer code to make that happen; and it was great to find out that he resigned and even rejected a million dollar bonus to stay with the company.

Another story that was particularly interesting was that of Scott Heller, a night shift word processor at a legal firm that represented Diebold. He discovered documents and information that proved Diebold was rigging votes using code in their computerized voting machines--and wow, how they punished him. At the time this was filmed he was a felon on parole for stealing evidence from the law firm; and of course he did make unauthorized copies of confidential information. On the other hand, however, his attorney points out that this sent a very negative message to anyone who wants to be a whistle blower out there. In addition, we get great interview footage with Bev Harris, founder of Black Box Voting, who campaigns tirelessly for fair vote counting if we use computerized voting machines.

We also meet Bruce Fink, a Republican in Utah who was an elected official--before he was kicked out of office. However, one flaw I found here was a lack of more detail about Bruce's story. I would have preferred the documentary to explain more about how other people were able to get rid of Bruce Fink.

Finally, we see voter intimidation specifically in the national elections of 2000 and 2004. For example, many people in African-American and Latino communities were told that if they didn't go away and park elsewhere they'd get a parking ticket; and in one predominantly African-American district there was no electricity in the building despite the fact that the building just across the street had electricity! Others had to wait up to fifteen hours just to vote when there weren't enough voting machines.

This documentary is somewhat skewed; it usually shows Democrats being shut out by Republicans as a result of faulty voting machines. On the other hand, it does make its point very well and it uses hard facts to back up its assertions. This film should stimulate some lively conversation about a very relevant topic fundamental to our democracy.

Massive irregularities in voting and in counting votes have been corrupting America's elections. Though mysteriously failing to make headlines, many of these problems have been well documented through books and film. A handful of outstanding documentaries have hit the screens, most of them focusing on Florida '00 and Ohio '04, but none gives so clear an overview, and none spells out so well what we are up against in 2008, as David Earnhardt's "Uncounted." If you only have time and energy for 80 minutes to understand the scope of the crisis, this is the one I recommend.

UNCOUNTED is one of the best overviews of the issues surrounding the creation of the Help America Vote Act and the permutation of our national elections both before and since then.

Every candidate - actually, every voter - should see this film.

An amazing film. WATCH THIS FILM AND WORK TO PROTECT OUR ELECTIONS IN NOVEMBER! Seeing the clips from Ohio in 2004 brings tears to my eyes everytime.

UNCOUNTED is one of the most important films of the past decade bringing to light many of the verified cases of voter suppression and vote count irregularities that threaten our very democracy. It features powerful, testimonials from insiders and documents facts the corporate media would never touch. Documentaries such as UNCOUNTED are the only way to create broad awareness of the critical issues needed to motivate the public to demand corrective action. But don't be discouraged - VOTING is still the most powerful weapon we have. It's much harder to steal a landslide so VOTE!

This documentary verifies every thought I had about these elections, and then some! It should be required reading for every American. Correcting the flaws, and establishing a "one citizen, one vote" form of varifiable voting in this country's elections could go a long way towards returning us (if every we were truly there) to honest elections.

It is astonishing to me that even today a huge number of people are unaware of the huge number of problems that occurred in the 2000 and 2004 elections. As one of the interviewees in this documentary explained, there were over fifty tactics used in Ohio in 2004 to alter the outcome of the election. The evidence is overwhelming that the election outcome in both 2000 and 2004 was manipulated. The result was that George W. Bush "won" both elections. Actually, the efforts in 2000 would not have been successful had the U. S. Supreme Court not intervened to stop the recount in Florida. One of the most underreported news stories of this decade is that the Republican appointed judge in Florida was going to order a recount that took into account all under votes and over votes. The result, based on the NORC analysis of the ballots, would have been a several thousand vote victory for Al Gore.

The documentary does a good job of outlining several ongoing problems that affected the outcomes of the 2000 and 2004 elections. These can arise again if two things happen. First, there have to be enough states in play to make stealing votes a viable strategy. In 2008 Obama had way too great of a lead over McCain to make it possible to steal. But there is a second major consideration. The Right (and every bit of evidence indicates that the vast majority of the vote stealing is generated by the Right) did not really embrace McCain. If in 2012 Obama has less of a lead and the Right has a candidate that it likes, they will engage in the kind of ruthlessness (ruthlessness justified by the Manichean view of the world whereby they see themselves as the forces of good able to do anything to defeat the powers of evil, even if it means thwarting the popular will and stealing elections) that they did in 2000 and 2004. The film details such strategies as undervoting (where someone votes for other offices but not for president, which in some states resulted in huge vote losses for Democrats, like in New Mexico in 2004, where over 20,000 undervotes occurred, in a state where Bush won by only 5,000 votes -- but remember, this is only votes stolen by undervoting). What they did not fully explain in the documentary is that these tactics can usually only succeed in states where those stealing the votes also control the State's Attorney's office. This was a major factor in the Republicans winning, despite exist polls, in Ohio in 2000 and 2004, but not in 2008, when the exit polls and the final vote tallies corroborated one another. Key state officials, most notoriously Ken Blackwell, were accused of disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters and his office was responsible for the distribution of electronic voting machines. This meant providing large numbers of voting machines for predominantly GOP voting districts but exceptionally few machines for Democratic districts. The film shows the long, long lines of the 2004 election in Ohio, lines that were created by Ken Blackwell. In 2008, however, with a Democratic Secretary of State, there was a more equitable distribution of voting machines.

The film explains some of the problems with electronic voting machines. Their lack of clarity is terrifying. The New York Times did a great column a few years ago contrasting electronic voting machines with slot machines in Nevada. The article went into great detail about the tests that state officials submit the machines to. They examine the source code in excruciating detail, while Diebold has not allowed anyone to examine their source code. Diebold and other electronic voting machines are intensely secretive and do not allow their machines to be examined in detail, in contrast with slot machines, about which we know virtually everything.

What is scary is that the documentary barely touches on vote suppression techniques, such as the constant purging of voter rolls. The GOP strategy in the past decade has been to form a coalition of special interest groups, enough to get close to the margin needed to win, while trying to disenfranchise as many likely Democratic voters as possible. Republican Secretaries of State across the U.S. engage constantly in huge voter purges, without informing those removed from the rolls that they have been so removed. When they show up to vote, they are unable to. The trends of the two parties has been very different. Democrats want to enfranchise as many people as possible and get them out to vote, while Republicans want to turn out their base while reducing the number of registered voters likely to be Democrats. There have been a long string of such stunts by the GOP, while relatively few on the side of the Democrats. The biggest controversy being the registration of people either already registered or nonexistent by ACORN paid workers, though there is no evidence that the falsely registered voters actually voted, leading most observers -- though not fringe journalists like Glenn Beck -- to conclude that these ACORN workers were simply trying to get their sheets filled up so that they could break off work more quickly. But what is lost in the ACORN controversy is the huge disparity in numbers. The number of invalid ACORN registrations ended up at around a couple of thousand, while nationally hundreds of thousands of voters beyond expected numbers have been purged from voter rolls. The GOP strategy has been obvious: reduce voter roles, dissuade people from voting, limit their ability to vote by not placing sufficient numbers of machines in heavily Democratic areas, and steal votes both by use of software (such as the counties where Bush received more votes than there were voters by an 8 to 1 margin) and manual means. The result is a strategy of undermining the will of the people.

I completely agree that this should not be a partisan issue. I am opposed to all rigging of elections. While recent accusations of vote fixing has been overwhelmingly directed at the GOP, if the Democrats began doing it on the scale that the GOP currently has (I'm sure that some Democrats have done this on a local level, though there has been little evidence of anything significant recently). I want everyone who wants to vote to be able to vote and I want their votes to be counted. One reason I turned against Bush in November of 2000 (before that I bought his moderate rhetoric) was his opposition to any recount. This runs counter to everything that I believe as an American. I could have tolerated his winning if the recount had taken place and it had showed him the victor (ironically, under 8 possible recount scenarios in Florida, Gore would have won, the only one under which he would have lost being the recount that his team was requesting -- we know, however, that the judge in charge of the recount was not going to carry out Gore's recount, but a more wide ranging one that would have given him the victory).

There are so many things that we could do to make the nation a more effective democracy. I believe that all Americans should be automatically registered to vote. Tie it to social security. Have the voting machines run by the federal government instead of private industry and if the government buys privately produced machines, demand complete access to the source code and make sure it is safe. Have absolutely no voting machines that do not also have paper ballots. When hearing all these crimes against the democratic process, I keep wondering what someone like Thomas Jefferson would think. He believed that there could be no successful democracy without an educated citizenry. Now we not only have an increasingly unenlightened electorate but a corrupted voting process in which huge numbers of Americans are denied their right to vote. Until we demand a safe and protected voting process democracy itself is in danger.

Regardless of your politics, it's undeniable that national elections have become big business, and the greatest message presented by UNCOUNTED is that, arguably, a technology that accurately accepts, tabulates, and totals votes cast may yet be out of reach for the Great Society ... with the notable exception of good old-fashioned paper ballots ... and UNCOUNTED, a new documentary by David Earnhardt takes great strides through measured bipartisanship to present this possibly grim reality.

Thankfully, UNCOUNTED doesn't simply focus on the 2000 Presidential election's battleground states (Ohio and Florida), and I was presently surprised by Earnhardt's attempt to maintain a level of impartiality in presenting some (certainly not all) of the information here. I've read a wealth of material on the Florida elections, specifically, and I was expecting dramatic overkill or misrepresentation of people, places, and events already healthily explored by the mainstream media. (Yes, I'm comfortable admitting that I don't quite believe an election was stolen, but I'm always willing to be shown the error of my ways.) Some of what happened in Florida CAN BE chalked up to human error on both sides of teh aisle, and, after having watched HBO's recent political film exploring what was largely the Democratic perspective, I really wasn't up for more of the same. But UNCOUNTED surprised me to some extent. In fact, I feel UNCOUNTED works best when it is exploring the controversy associated to electronic voting -- what it is, how it works, how it's possible, etc. While I'm quite certainly a wealth of the information presented here was largely available via certain media outlets, there was plenty of data regarding machine errors and whistleblowing that I haven't seen anywhere else. (You can puruse my other reviews to see that I do frequent conspiracy literature!)

A reasonable person can easily conclude that voting fraud has happened, but I don't feel that UNCOUNTED significantly establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that any one party has perpetrated it. Honest questions are raised; associations are pointed out; a call to action is challenged by the director; and it's all handled with (mostly) professionalism and courtesy. Knowing what I do about organizations like ACORN and others, it's clear that there are other types of voting fraud not explored by this documentary, but the director never explores fraud issues before 2000 with any significance. 2004 gets some discovery here, and 2006 is largely passed over, except for the subtle message that exit polling data still didn't match actual vote counts. I also found it curious that, despite the possibility of electronic error in states where Al Gore won, there was no real examination of whether similar errors could have occured in states he won ... but that's a lesser point.

However, a reality check for Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, independents, and others still remains to be underscored at the film's end: despite the position taken by the national news organizations -- that being that the actual vote counts should match the respective news organizations' exit polling data -- is, debatably, pure farce. Research companies have already shown at great lengths that people are less inclined to be entirely honest with pollsters in matters of morality, preferences, and (yes, I'll say it ...) even race; and no exit poll previously created OR yet-to-be designed will ever account for this immeasureable variable. For many -- even those who don't worship 'the State -- feel that the casting of a vote is 'sacred,' and there will always exist in some folks the desire to keep that one simple act between himself and his ballot ... and perhaps that's best for all involved.