Larry BerganUncounted: See It Wednesday
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Early this year, the Democracy For America organization held showings of an important new movie: “Uncounted.” This well researched documentary by Emmy award-winning director, David Earnhardt, is an examination of election fraud, focusing on the electronic voting machines deployed nationwide after congress passed the HAVA act; a terribly failed attempt to correct the chance of another disaster like the 2000 election mess that came to be known as Bush vs Gore. The Supreme Court of the United States stunned the nation by interfering in the Florida State Supreme Court ruling which would have allowed people’s votes to be counted by hand instead of by secretly programmed punch card voting machines. These are the same type of machines used in Utah at the time. The same scenario would have played out much differently here, because state law would have prevented any recount, even in a close election. The machines would have had the last word, and they still do. The Utah media bosses are unconcerned. We know every intimate detail of the Lori Hacking murder, but we don’t know if anybody could be hacking our votes.
Utahn’s will have a chance to see this movie this week at the Post Theater on Wednesday, September 3rd, at 7:00 pm.This link at democracyforutah.com provides a google map, picture of the theater and other information about the event.
Unlike the other nationwide showings of the film, Utahn’s will be introduced to the movie by one of the main people featured in the film. Bruce Funk, a native from Utah, and one of two election officials in the nation who couldn’t turn the other way when his responsibility to the people he took an oath to serve overtook his desire to take the easy way out and ignore the danger these new machines represented to the people in his county and even the nation.
While an earlier film shown on HBO called “Hacking Democracy“, (link to entire film), covered the anomalies of the 2000 election and ends with the live hacking of voting machines under the supervision of another brave and concerned election official named Ion Sancho in Florida, this film covers the anomalies discovered after the 2004 election in Ohio and elsewhere. The same man who successfully hacked the machines in Florida, (Harri Hursti of blackboxvoting.org, an organization founded by Beverly Harris), was filmed hacking into Utah’s first shipment of the Diebold machines which would be deployed here and nationwide for the 2006 election.
This Utah hack by Mr. Hursti, which could not have taken place without Bruce Funk’s courageous cooperation, finally vindicated computer scientists and voting rights activists everywhere, and forced some of America’s largest newspapers and magazines to cover the clear and present danger posed by electronic voting machines. A month later, other major publications, who were afraid to get their feet wet reporting on the discoveries in Utah, by Black Box Voting, fell in line when the Brennan Center for Justice published a study.
The New York Times was quick out of the gate with some astounding quotations in this May 12th 2006 article, “New Fears of Security Risks in Electronic Voting Systems”:
Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University:
“It’s the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system,”
Douglas W. Jones, a professor of computer science at the University of Iowa:
“This is the barn door being wide open, while people were arguing over the lock on the front door,”
Aviel Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University:
“I almost had a heart attack. The implications of this are pretty astounding.”
A Wall Street Journal article, with the heading “Reversing Course on Electronic Voting” includes quotes from a Diebold Inc. representative, but doesn’t mention Blackboxvoting, or Harri Hursti. What’s notable about this column, is that it’s released on the EXACT same date as the New York Times article. Hmmm…
Newsweek, in an article published after the Brennen report called “Will Your Vote Count in 2006?”, mentions Hursti and Blackboxvoting and includes another quote from Aviel Rubin:
“If Diebold had set out to build a system as insecure as they possibly could, this would be it.”
USA Today mentions the importance of the Utah findings in a small paragraph after the Brennen report also, in this piece named “Analysis finds e-voting machines vulnerable”:
Election officials in California and Pennsylvania recently issued urgent warnings to local polling supervisors about potential software problems in touch-screen voting machines after a test in Utah uncovered vulnerabilities in machines made by Diebold Election Systems.
It’s been almost eight years since The US Supreme Court overrode states rights and slipped Bush into office. Although some places in the US have been forced to take steps to insure transparency by unyielding voting activists, Utah’s congressmen and the Lt. Governor’s office seem to be working to make our elections the most secretive in the nation.
What should we do?
