Mimi Kennedy, PDA National Advisory Board Chair, Election Integrity Activist

Forewarned is forearmed. Here comes November. Check your registration, work for your candidates and sit down with one of the four great election protection movies out on DVD. They’re all documentaries with the same plot – but that plot is scarier than anything Hollywood’s horror/suspense fiction screenwriters have produced in this distraction-heavy, angst-ridden, politically-censored Bush era.

And we’re the ones in peril. Watch with half-covered eyes, if you must. Scream, “Don’t go in that basement!” Then get up and change the real-life ending. A landslide under citizen scrutiny in ’08 – that’s what we’re going for. But it can’t be done without knowing how, so educate and entertain yourself simultaneously with one of these. The movies’ websites are for ordering DVDs, seeing trailers, and obtaining information on public screenings near you.

“Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections” – directed by David Earnhardt (80 mins.)

This is the vivid, more paced version of the two comprehensive films (the other is described below: “Stealing America”.) It is a red-hot poker to puncture willed ignorance and lazy denial. It features election protection greats whose names you know and some you don’t: Brad Friedman, Bev Harris, Bob Fitrakis; statistician Jon Simon,; Florida whistleblower (and PDA-endorsed congressional primary candidate) Clint Curtis; Utah election hero Bruce Funk – and others. Earnhardt takes you from Ohio’s long lines and unequal distribution of faulty, vote-flipping machines to statistical anomalies in e-vote results that suggest that not only did Kerry win in ’04, but the Democrats’ slim ‘06 majority was really a landslide denied. He ends by facing ‘08’s vulnerabilities squarely. You’ll be moved to sign up as a pollworker – it’s the next step in your education and it gives you a kind of quasi-legal standing as a citizen overseer of your local procedures’ accuracy, transparency and security. Educated pollworkers – even in depressingly-untransparent e-voting jurisdictions – can do wonders to deter acts of suppression and manipulation that are used to tamper with casting and counting votes

www.uncountedthemovie.com

“Stealing America : Vote by Vote” — directed by Academy-award winning documentarian Dorothy Fadiman (90 mins.)

THE definitive, comprehensive, encyclopedia film on election fraud! Fadiman delivers in one sitting what I took four years to learn. As the title suggests, her approach is step-by-step. The incremental accumulation of proof that the situation is dire might crush naïve viewers. But we’re activists – the reality-based community – so with strong coffee and strong stomachs we absorbs facts to counter wishful, well-meaning opinions that stolen U.S. elections are a paranoid nightmare or, worse, some kind of divine punishment for our greed that we must endure until God decides we’ve had enough. No – we must be the change, or lose the ability to change via the ballot box. A good chaser is an immediate internet search for how your local votes are cast and counted – if you don’t know – on what equipment and from what vendor. With those answers, pursue any of the actions suggested at the end of the film.

www.stealingamericathemovie.org

“Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story” –directed by Patty Sharaf for Earthworks Films. (64 mins.)

Alfred Hitchcock would have chosen this, if the fact that it’s true didn’t scare him too much. Clint Curtis was a GOP-voting Florida software engineer, who worked at a firm doing NASA contracts, when he was approached to write software that could flip elections undetectably – in order to pre-emptively diagnose (he was told) a sneaky Democratic attempt to steal Florida! The rest is history, but only because Clint courageously blew the whistle and reporter Brad Friedman courageously amplified it. Clint passed a polygraph test and testified before Congress; the man who asked for the vicious program refused the lie detector and ran for Congress – Rep. Tom Feeney. Two deaths occur – Clint’s dog (murdered) and a former fellow worker who supposedly commited suicide at a motel. Neither case is solved conclusively. The picture of Florida state politics is not pretty. Clint ran in two Democratic primaries, the second time PDA-endorsed, for the chance to oppose Feeney , but the DCCC ran another candidate, each time, who refused to mention the crime that dare not speak its name: Election Fraud. Yet that crime dooms Democrats and the capacity to commit it increased exponentially under HAVA. The Democrats act as if conservatism and denial is the way to win in Florida. This movie shows the courage that Floridians are showing – and we must support it so the whole nation can win.

www.votinglies.com

“Free For All! One Dude’s Quest to Save Democracy –directed by and starring John Ennis (95 mins.)

The election fraud comedy! Shakespeare made comedy out of tragedy. Ennis does it by becoming our on-camera Everyman in the style of Michael Moore. He gives us a happy ending in the establishment of Video The Vote! (An aside: I can personally testify to the power of VTV, which taped me in the ’08 primary – not in the movie – when I was an L.A. Poll Inspector fruitlessly seeking answers, on the registrar hotline, to a problem that eventually spoiled 12,000 voters’ ballots.! The footage belied the registrar’s post-election assertions that “everyone knew” about the problem and how to solve it. The registrar is now under much better scrutiny and training has been improved. Ennis begins the movie with a queasy 2000 election night, then 2004, which he realizes is a re-run of 2000 only Ohio is the new Florida! Horrified, he sets out with videocam and finds faces and events seen in the other films, with the welcome addition of Mark Crispin Miller and more attention paid to Greg Palast and his issue of voter caging. The wake-up-slackers approach is funny without sacrificing content. Those under a certain age (and you know who you are) can dive into Election Protection with Ennis and emerge with all the expertise offered by the other films.

http://freeforall.bravenewtheaters.com