"Uncounted" Shines Spotlight on Our Corrupt Voting System

By Marta Steele , OpEdNews.com. Posted June 18, 2008.

As a veteran voting rights activist, I learned little new from watching Uncounted, a magisterial history of the horrendous corruption injected into our electoral system since the rise of the Neocons in 2000, by way of Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris in Florida, among many others.

But I appreciated the review and am anxious to spread the word around to the large percentage of people in this country unaware that a large percentage of their votes in the last eight years haven't been counted or, in many cases, been counted backward to subtract from the totals of the candidates they favored.

David Earnhardt's expertise in choosing the right moments in the last eight years to highlight served another purpose in my life: it rekindled my anger and inspired me to keep fighting the fight.

Though it occurs to me that the half of the voting-age population in this country refuse to vote, so disaffected they are with the system or so uninformed of their rights, they may be further scared away from participating in such a corrupted process.

I don't meet such people too often but when I do, I urge them to register. The film medium may reach out to them better than the printed word, so that all in all we accomplish more by getting the word out than remaining silent as our rights slip away.

Earnhardt's film reviews the highlights of the last eight years and finds one of the constants, despite the nonpartisanship of the election rights movement: the Republican party is connected with the corruption, by way of large donations to their candidates by the large voting machine manufacturers, by way of the Republicans in power who have aided and abetted the ethical violations that have handed the Bushocracy the White House twice, unfairly. The details?

• The Supreme Court absconding with the right of the Florida Supreme Court to determine how to handle the conflicts in their state that postponed the election result in 1960; the double role of Katherine Harris as Florida's secretary of state and head of the committee to elect Bush; the complicity of Bush's brother, Governor Jeb, who promised his state's vote to "W."
• The rush to purchase the disastrous electronic touch-screen and push-button "DRE"'s that were so easy to corrupt and manipulate in countless ways, including "vote hopping" from Democratic to Republican candidates by way of manipulating the proprietary coding [read: no one could check the programming to be sure that it was functioning reliably].
• The purposeful racism leveled against third-world citizens bound by large percentages to the Democratic party and therefore kept away from the polls by intimidation, misinformation, manipulation of paperwork, denial of rights on flimsy grounds, purposefully undersupplying to precincts where they voted, or supplying dysfunctional machines in stark contrast to the treatment of affluent communities bound to vote for Republicans.
• The control of the key battleground state of Ohio in 2004 by Kenneth Blackwell, also both secretary of state and leader of the committee to re-elect Bush; the long lines at the polls in pouring rain that forced many with limited amounts of time to leave without voting -- those who persevered were forced to wait as long as 16 hours. The faking of a terrorist scare at another precinct. All that and much more crippled our rights in 2004.

Diebold is the case in point Earnhardt uses to exemplify what has gone wrong in this country since 2004 (activist groups have formed since then to fight the corruption; more on this below). A large and powerful Republican-connected manufacturer of paperless DREs, Diebold is responsible for dispersing dysfunctional machines in huge quantities -- machines that have been proved hackable in less than a minute. The key to the programming so resembles a luggage key that anyone can open a black box in that short a time and infect the machine to produce votes for the candidate of choice.

See more stories tagged with: corruption, voting, 2000, uncounted

Marta Steele is a writer, editor and blogger.