Guest Blogged by Mary Mancini of the Uncounted Blog
Everyone has different tastes, and hey, if you aren’t moved after watching Uncounted that’s your prerogative. But an uniformed and half-assed review that tries to nail the 80-minute movie on one ten-second factoid – like the one delivered to Mother Jones readers by former MJ Senior Online Fellow and current TPM Media News Editor, Justin Elliott – is inexcusable.
In the review, Elliot references the following that briefly appears on screen: “Two voting machine companies — ES&S and Diebold — electronically counted 80 percent of the votes in the 2004 presidential election. Both companies have extensive ties to the Republican party.†He then runs the 80% number by Kimberly Brace, “a respected voting expert with the consulting firm Election Data Services†who calls it “totally wrong.†And that’s it. Proof by assertion. No follow up. End of review.
You can, of course, read the rest for yourself at MotherJones.com, where you can also read the comments of some very smart MoJo readers who recognize not only Elliott’s shoddy work but also the importance of the bigger issue – that our democracy is at stake because of bad electoral practices.
You’ll also find Uncounted’s filmmaker, David Earnhardt’s response, which I am also printing in its entirety…
Had he actually watched the film, he could have written about the eyewitness accounts we had from whistleblowers – backed up by election experts – that revealed electronic voting machine security breaches, vote count manipulation, and illegal behavior by a major voting machine manufacturer which all threaten the integrity of our elections. He might also have written about the story of a computer expert who testified under oath that he was asked by a now-sitting congressman to program a voting machine to “flip votes†from one candidate to another. Or he might have written about one of any number of Democrats, Republicans, business leaders, elected officials, and rank and file voters we featured who are part of a growing movement in America that recognize, and are working hard to fix, an election system gone bad.
Instead, Mr. Elliott, using a tactic out of a hyper-partisan’s playbook, chose to try and discredit the entire film by presenting his one sources’ opinion as fact. The reality is that by 2004 our elections had been privatized to such a degree that it had become detrimental to the democratic process.
ES&S’s own website claims its company alone “counted approximately 56% of the vote in each of the last four presidential and congressional elections.†(http://www.aboutus.org/Essvote.com.)
And a Diebold spokesman told veteran journalist and election integrity expert Lynn Landes that they had counted 35% of the total vote in the 2002 election. (http://onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html)
Journalist Bob Fitrakis, who has written two books and numerous articles investigating irregularities in the 2004 election, adds an additional perspective:
“When you say that 80% of the votes in 2004 were counted by Diebold and ES&S, I think that is actually a conservative figure. You have to remember that it’s not just the voting machines with secret software that count our votes. It’s also the central tabulators where the final counting is done. And these central tabulators are also owned by private companies, like Diebold and ES&S.â€
And, according to Robert Kennedy in his landmark Rolling Stone Magazine investigative report “Will the Next Election Be Hacked?“, it hadn’t gotten that much better by 2006:
“The United States is one of only a handful of major democracies that allow private, partisan companies to secretly count and tabulate votes using their own proprietary software. Today, eighty percent of all the ballots in America are tallied by four companies – Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic.†(Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “Rolling Stoneâ€, September 21, 2006)
I’m worried, as are most of the people who have seen UNCOUNTED in the 35 cities I have traveled to with the film since last January, about the integrity of our elections, particularly as we look ahead to November. And so Mr. Elliott’s unwillingness to examine all the issues presented in UNCOUNTED was a real disservice to Mother Jones readers. Further, his typical corporate media response – which has always been to laugh, roll their eyes, or throw spitballs and move on – could spell disaster for our democracy.
David Earnhardt
Director, Producer & Writer
UNCOUNTED: The New Math of American Elections
Again, like the movie or hate it, that’s up to you. But you do a disservice to your readers when you dismiss an entire piece of work and, by extension, an extremely important issue, by analyzing one microscopic piece of the content to imply implausibility.
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Mary Mancini blogs on behalf of the documentary film Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections. She lives in Tennessee and has not yet had her vote go uncounted in tomorrow’s state primary election.
My favorite part of the “revie” was when, in one paragraph, he says the movie relies less on fact than on score. Then in the next paragraph of his “review” he tells the reader to just ignore any facts in the movie because they couldn’t possibly be true.
How can facts not be true? And how can he say the movie doesn’t rely on facts but then turn around and tell people to ignore the facts that are in the movie?
And yes, his review contains no actual reviewing. It is just 4 or 5 paragraphs of him sticking his head in the sand because the facts are too inconvenient, and dark in implication, for him to think about. So you know…just ignore them.
Maybe he found out he could be on “the list?”
More likely, he’s signed himself up and is testing out writing creative articles while participating in the new LSD MK program.
Justin Elliot’s is an arrogant little child.
He knows nothing of electronics, physics or programming as his degree is based on history and classics. He might know how to type “the words” or “edit” but he doesn’t know a thing about election integrity.
Electronic logic doesn’t give crap about “instincts.”
If you can watch a movie like “Uncounted”, and the only thing it makes you think about is how to discredit it, that doesn’t make you look very smart. Is this shill a former employee of “The Washington Times?”
Anyone watched Olympic boxing? I guess, Es&s, diebold, etc… are in charge of the new computer system of counting the boxing matches. I mean, the computer only counts what the counters want it to count? Wake up sleepy giant!!!!!!!!!!!
These corporate shills are using the law to break the law. The machine owners could come tight out and say “yes, we are flipping votes to the highest bidder. If you want your candidate to win better start bidding now. You can’t prove it because your own laws prevent you from proving it so STFU”.
What are you gonna’ do about it? What can you do about it? We bitch and complain and demand and they hold up the law like some crooked movie sheriff saying you got no choice. When the law and those upholding and writing the law are all complicit there is only one way out. We need an army of poll workers to stand outside of polling places and get voters to re-vote as they leave so we have a record for comparison. What would happen if the voting machines were all broken the night of voting…what would be the emergency fall back process for collecting and counting the votes where these machines suddenly malfunction.
We either fight to prevent the theft of the 2008 presidential election or we will be fighting the results of a stolen election. Either way it’s a fight to save our democracy that we must win.
“Armed revolution cannot defeat the US military but it can effectively eliminate its political leaders”-Anonymous
We’re pretty much into peaceful revolution around here, bjobotts, and while arms are very effective at eliminating people, it has a tendency to turn one’s country into Pakistan. Besides, I think threatening to eliminate political leaders that way is against the law…. So, while it’s nice to vent our outraged senses of patriotism and our frustration with crooks, we really don’t want any advocacy for violence here.
99, if you re-read that, he was quoting “-Anonymous”
We’re all smart enough to know our country isn’t at that point.