This is not the first documentary Ive seen on the subject of our Electoral system, all of which sprouted out of the total fuck up that was/is the election of 2000. We can blame several people and groups for that one, not the least of which is the main stream media who basically called the election before they had all the numbers, thus creating a landslide effect for Bush.
I could easily go off on a political and ethical tangent that has lots to do with the documentary, but would mostly be my opinion and not about the film. So I will do my best to steer away from things not covered by the movie. Am I surprised that the election in 2004 appeared even then to be stolen? No. When you have an electric voting machine that has no paper trail and no way to verify the votes that have been cast then of course someone is going to take advantage of that. Most of the documentary focuses on that, but before I jump into that I will do my best to outline the other plain scary actions that went down during the '04 election.
-Not enough voting machines in poorer areas, or areas with African and Hispanic people.
-Broken Machines.
-People being turned away.
-Lines at times exceeding 12 hours.
-Voter intimidation
The list just keeps going, and then add on top of that that when some of those people voted for Kerry the machine voted for Bush in their name. All of which is a very simple thing to do when writing software. The two companies who make the voting machines contribute money to the Republican Party.
According to exit polls and primaries Kerry was set to win by a 3% margin with him at 51% and Bush at 48%, a pretty good margin. When election results were coming out the numbers flipped, and Bush won by 51%. Doesn't necessarily sound big but that's 3,000,000 people who suddenly changed their votes or lied to the exit pollers. The odds that the exit pollers were wrong is 1:10,000. It seems pretty obvious what happened. They talk about the county that had 600 sum odd voters, and the votes from there tallied to over 4,000 all favoring Bush. There were examples of this in 11 battle ground states all favoring Bush.....accident?
The thing is, at this point why does it even matter, he did his damage with those extra four years he got, and Yay for Obama, but the thing is is that they didn't really fix the problem by 2006, or even by 2008. I remember I voted on a touch screen computer just like they show in the film for the '08 election. I got a paper receipt showing who I voted for, but I got to keep that, thus not doing much to help the computer problem.
The film was very well done, it was understated, they let the people talk and didn't add in any editor or narration commentary. They didn't try to go over board with effects, or little animations but just let the subject speak for itself. It wasn't terribly long, only 81 minutes, so for that I think it could have been longer, its a pretty hefty issue. If we don't have real elections anymore then we don't have freedom, a very cut and dry concept. Overall it gets a 7/10. They could have made it longer, but was still a tough little pill to swallow.
Director: David Earnhardt
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