Review of ‘Uncounted’

I stayed up late on Tuesday to watch the late screening of Uncounted at the Crest Theater in Sacramento.

The whole experience was great. The movie was lucid and clearly demonstrated that our voting system has serious election integrity issues and that these issues are exacerbated by the use of electronic voting machines. I liked it so much that I bought a copy of the movie so that I can re-watch it later, look through the extended interviews, and show it to friends.

After the screening there was a panel discussion and Q&A session with David Earnhardt (the director), Peter B. Collins (local progressive radio host), and Brad Friedman (investigative journalist focused on election integrity).

I chatted with Brad a bit during the first screening. Brad and I don’t agree about everything, but I think that he is doing a great job keeping interest focused on election integrity issues and pushing for systems with considerably better election integrity properties than the current status quo where many places use electronic voting machines that do not produce voter verified ballots of record, without a mandatory statistically valid audit of the paper ballots, or with poor chain-of-custody procedures.

I also chatted with a number of other people in Sacramento who are interested in election integrity issues. Many of these people are active in the group Sacramento For Democracy; I may attend some of their functions to get more of a feel for them.

So what can we do?

Some tips on how to Take Action:

• Work as a Poll Worker on Election Day.
• Contact your Congressional representatives
• Write a letter to the editor.
• Volunteer to be a Poll Observer on Election Day.
• Join a group to fight for honest and fair elections.
• Share this film with others.
• Be Informed about what’s going on with our election system.

(Interestingly, I’ve only done 4 of these 7 and only do 2 on a regular basis; It looks like I need to step up my participation some more)

More information:

• Uncounted: The movie – Official site for this movie
• Brad Blog A much better site for election integrity news then mine (I try to focus more on theories and ideas then news)
• Review by newsreview.com

(Quibble: The director has an aside where he pushes for Election Day to be a national holiday; He does not discuss the pros and cons of this approach. See Why Tuesday? for to hear about other alternatives like weekend voting.)