Film Review: Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections
Arts: If at times facts presented in this film seem overly suggestive or downright implausible, trust your instincts.
August 14, 2008
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Long lines. Misallocated voting machines. Voters inexplicably purged from the rolls. Sound familiar? Through interviews with activists and policymakers, filmmaker David Earnhardt surveys these and other symptoms of America's ailing electoral system in the documentary Uncounted. While the film ends with sound advice—volunteer to be a poll worker; lobby against paperless machines, and support a national holiday on election day—the bulk of Uncounted relies less on facts to back its claims than on a canned, conspiratorial score.
If at times facts presented in Uncounted are often seem to you overly suggestive and or downright implausible, trust your instincts.
At one point the following text appears on the screen (accompanied by ominous cello notes): "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." Source: Baltimore Chronicle 12/09/04."
Click over to the Chronicle, an online newspaper, and you'll find that it did indeed run an article containing that 80 percent figure—as a directly quoted citation of the American Free Press. Click over to the Free Press, and you'll find a fringe-right conspiracist website. Click around their site some more, and what do you find? That one of their primary focus coverage areas is the nefarious influence of international Jewry. And that's just one of their favorite conspiracy theories.
Unsurprisingly, when I ran the 80 percent "factoid" by Kim Brace, a respected voting expert with the consulting firm Election Data Services, he called it "totally wrong."
Perhaps, as with voting itself, indictment of the voting system is an exercise better suited to print than to a screen. That way, viewers can more easily check the facts for themselves.
Justin Elliott is news editor at Talking Points Memo, and a former senior online fellow at Mother Jones.
The figure may be low.
ES&S alone has claimed 56% of the national vote in recent presidential elections:
http://www.aboutus.org/Essvote.com
"ES&S systems have counted approximately 56 percent of the U.S. national vote in each of the last four presidential and congressional elections, amounting to more than 100 million ballots cast in each election. In the election business for over three decades, ES&S today has over 400 employees located in eight regional U.S. offices and agents on five continents."
The above is what ES&S's site said after 2004. Here is what ES&S says about itself in 2008:
http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html
"Headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, the company has been in the election business for more than three decades. Based on the primary voting tabulation system installed within the United States, our customers represent approximately 45 percent of the precincts and registered voters in the U.S. In addition to seven regional U.S. offices, ES&S has offices in the U.K. and Canada, and agents in several international locations."
About Diebold, the market share is very high. A state Secretary of State I speak to, and who is no fan of voting machine conspiracy theories, talks very comfortably of Diebold and ES&S having over 90% market share.
I would ask Election Data Services for a precise breakdown of which vendors' equipment counted the nation's votes in 2004.
Re the Republican ties, we know that one of ES&S's major investors was a campaign treasurer for a Republican US Senator's re-election campaign, and that the same Senator was CEO of ES&S in its previous incarnation, American Information
Systems:
http://www.aboutus.org/Essvote.com
We know that Diebold's former CEO Wally O'Dell was enough of a Republican to be a leading fundraiser for Bush in Ohio in 2004 (and most Ohio counties did not use Diebold in 2004).
This doesn't prove any past conspiracy - at all. But it should make us think about the future, and the need for verified elections.
http://www.votingindustry.com/ About_Us/newsitems/Salon_com%2 0Technology%20%20Hacking%20democracy.htm
Harris quickly found that ES&S was owned, in part, by a merchant banking holding company called the McCarthy Group and that the firm's chairman, Michael McCarthy, was Chuck Hagel's campaign treasurer. After searching news archives, Harris found that during Hagel's first campaign, in 1996, the Nebraska media reported that he had been president of ES&S -- which at the time was called American Information Systems -- between 1992 and 1995. But the articles suggested that Hagel was no longer affiliated with the voting equipment company. Harris saw election records that showed Hagel still holding between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock in McCarthy, which owned about 25 percent of ES&S.
The labeling of Conspiracy has been long used by Bernay / Freudian technique users to stop all discourse, trivializing and demonizing discussion that in many instances if accurate.
Conspiracy is all around us, everyday, in most human interactions. Our Very Declaration of Independence was written by people involved in Conspiracy.
Your review doesn't tell us anything about the movie good or bad. I can't even call it a review.
From my own searches, it seems ES & S, Diebold, and Sequoia do in fact control the vast majority of elections and they are all private companies. ES & S and Diebold founders are brothers. The fact that three PRIVATE companies have such a strong hold on our entire countries elections and we all know about the prevalence of white collar crime, should raise the alarm bells right off the bat. It is pretty easy to buy someone off to swing an election your way.
Regardless if the number is 70% or 80%, it is irrelevant to all the issues raised in the movie, the known election fraud, and the fact the movie covers both Republicans and Democrats who are trying to do the right thing retaliated against.
I saw the movie. My only criticism would be the beginning focused too much on the Bush/Gore election and rehashed too much of the same stuff. It was from midway in to the end that the real meat of the movie took stage. Bruce Funk and Clint Curtis testimonies were the most interesting.
I attended with a group of Republicans and they enjoyed it as much as I did.
Mr. Elliot, you really did a disservice to your readers here by not doing a real review of the movie, and if you didn't like it, a true critical analysis of why you didn't like it instead of a stupid link to a group you oppose when you easily could have done a reporters job and checked into each county and the machines they use yourself.
I'll go beyond that. The fact that CEO Wally O'Dell gives ANY amount to ANY political candidate should disqualify his company from counting our votes. They ought to be counted by the organs of government.
Poll workers are excused, if they display any partisanship while serving their mandated functions. A voter cannot wear a candidate's name on a button or t-shirt, or hold a campaign placard on the sidewalk outside the polling place. And yet, the maker of the machines that count our votes can be contributing to one party's candidate?
This guy's idea of research is to surf the web and find fault, but never to go find the answer for himself. If he's going to pan the number, he's got an obligation to the reader to find the real story. Otherwise, he should find some other aspect of the film to comment on.
Ride herd on these guys- or are you maybe having editing (editor) problems?
What is silly about both the review of the film (above), as well as the film itself, is that people are arguing (nitpicking is more like it) about something which is quite obvious to anyone who has kept up with politics in the past million years.
The very fact that exit poles during the Kerry-Bush election were WIDELY off the mark (as in LIKE-NEVER-BEFORE-IN-THE-HISTORY OF THE WORLD), especially in heavily Hispanic populated areas, (and this was even reported by big media, albeit brushed aside) should at least be a starting point . . . or a finishing one.
And of course, we've all heard of Florida and Ohio . . . and read and seen many documentaries dealing in detail with these two (of many) situations (assuming we haven't been living 1 million feet under the ground for the past 10 years.)
The problem with MoJo is the problem with the Democratic Establishment, both those who hold office and those who vote
for them ("the straight ticket-ers") - they will always be more concerned with appearances that with realities, and never really care about the latter.
That is why we had the genocides in East Timor and Guatemala, why we still have an insane drug war and not harm-reduction policies, and why the military-industrial complex has never been in fear of its survival.
It isn't that I find fault with those who enjoy their leisurely lives - only that they pretend to care when they really don't.
Still, it is better than having nothing but Republican fascists in office, that's for sure!
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."
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 Stone", 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
Um, Justin, did you try that yourself, or did you look up just that one assertion and call it a day?
If this is what passes for film reviews at MJ, perhaps you shouldn't bother.
dutchman
The vote is the foundation of democracy. To allow private corporations to count the vote with proprietary software is insane! Too bad Elliot doesn't understand that simple concept.
In the best Orwellian tradition the only safe assumption is that there is flying corruption going on - any proper system worth it's salt would have implemented standardised machines and remove the controversy. It's so easy to do that - in the way that gaming machines in Casinos have to conform to checks.
You can talk about allegations and associations all you like but this is the pivotal matter for me - the fact that there are no excuses for unchecked technology. A dimwit could see what was going on! And until they bring in such a rigourous system there will continue to be controversy.