Candace

Talmadge

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August 25, 2008

Uncounted: Documentary Explores U.S. Election Fraud

Is the integrity of our nation’s elections worth 80 minutes of your time?

Then instead of tuning into coverage of the Democratic National Convention, watch Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections, making its television debut tonight on cable channel Starz Edge with an encore Thursday on Starz Cinema.

After all, it does not matter whom the Democrats or Republicans choose for president or any other political office right on down to dog catcher if we the people are prevented from voting or the ballots we do cast are not counted.

Yes, election fraud occurs in the United States. It’s not just a third-world phenomenon. This country has a long tradition of votes by dead people, as just one crude example. Uncounted takes a close look at how partisans have changed voting outcomes in all of the presidential and congressional elections since 2000.

Unlike Michael Moore, this film by Nashville, Tenn.-based director David Earnhardt never shouts or pontificates. Instead, Earnhardt’s subjects make their cases in their own words, quietly and eloquently. That very approach gives the film its raw power. People on all sides of the political spectrum and from all walks of life are alarmed that the integrity of this country’s elections has gone missing in action.

As just one example, Bruce Funk is a lifelong Republican. In 2006, he had been the elected county clerk of Emery County, Utah, for 23 years. But county commissioners fired Funk after he questioned the security of the electronic voting machines that the commissioners had purchased. The machines were made by Diebold Election Systems, now known as Premier Election Systems.

Then there’s the disturbing tale of whistleblower Steve Heller, who in January 2004 was a word processing clerk in the Los Angeles law offices of Jones Day, one of whose clients was Diebold. While transcribing a recording made by one of the firm’s attorneys, Heller realized that Diebold had been installing unauthorized software on its electronic voting machines in the state of California and lying about it to California election officials.

Heller went public with that transcription and every other document he could find about the Diebold machines. As a result, California decertified the Diebold machines and the company paid a $2.6 million fine to the state. Heller’s reward was to face criminal charges.

After wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on electronic voting machines, states and counties are finally doing away with electronic voting machines and returning to ballots with a paper trail, according to a recent Associated Press news story.

Electronic voting machines, however, are just one aspect of the larger problem of questionable elections. Uncounted also explores how elections officials can cause problems by misallocating machines, usually not leaving enough for urban areas, which results in double-digit hour waits to vote for largely African-American communities and those heavily populated by other minorities.

Other election problems the film recounts include voter intimidation, misleading phone calls or flyers and voter roll purges that nearly always affect primarily African-Americans, most of whom are eligible to cast a ballot but are denied that right at the polls or allowed to cast only a provisional ballot, which is far less likely to be counted.

The problem of under-votes was especially acute during the 2004 presidential election. An under-vote occurs when a person casts a ballot that then shows no vote for a certain office, such as president. Normally, under-vote rates range from 1 percent to 3 percent, but in the 2004 presidential election, some counties in Pennsylvania recorded as a high as an 80 percent under-vote (for president), while a 25 percent presidential under-vote rate in New Mexico was confined primarily to counties with large Native American or Latino populations.

Uncounted also notes that while the mainstream media laughed off legitimate questions about the 2000, 2002 and 2004 election outcomes, the 2006 fiasco with electronic voting machines was much harder to ignore. While the film does not say so, no doubt another reason the broadcast media began to focus on questionable election procedures and results was the fading popularity of President Bush.

If Uncounted is often infuriating, it is also triumphant when it shows how Americans across the political spectrum have united to take more active roles in assuring the integrity of the voting process and every voter’s right to cast a ballot in every election. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we the people are a lot more savvy and more alert these days.

“The vote is the core of democracy,” Funk says. “If our vote doesn’t count, how can we call this a democracy?”

Now that’s a darn good question, too.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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