Ritchie speaks on voting

The Social Responsibility Masters program along with the Women's Center, Multicultural Student Services, Theatre Film Studies and Dance and Mass Communications Departments, packed the Atwood Theatre on Tuesday.

They showed David Earnhardt's documentary, "Uncounted: The new math of American elections" that highlights the election fraud that changed the outcome of the 2004 election and increased in the 2006 primary elections.

The viewing is just in time to educate some Minnesota voters as the 2008 election is just a short four weeks away.

In the darkness of the Atwood Theatre, the information and images that rolled across the screen opened the eyes of voters to the issues and discrepancies that have been raised in the recent elections as a result of the movement away from paper ballots and toward electronic voting machines.

At first glance, one may not understand the problems that many had with the machines considering the convenience of not having to use a pencil and paper to cast a vote.

Earnhardt's documentary presented that not all technology is advancement in accuracy or validity. Without a paper trail, the American citizens' votes can become ambiguous and the results are much more likely to be skewed, uncounted or misrepresented.

Putting the vote into a voting machine privatizes the voting process and it has been found that the Diebold Company, who makes and distributes the machines has strong ties to the Republican Party.

According to the documentary's Web site www.uncountedthemovie.com there has been exit poll discrepancies.

According to the site for example, "The 2004 exit poll, commissioned by six major news organizations, showed that John Kerry won the popular vote with about 51 percent of the vote.

The final tally of the voting machines showed George W. Bush with about 51% of the votes." There are also discrepancies in how votes were tallied with representations in undervoting, and vote flipping all of which are made extremely easy by the computerized system.

Uncounted also shed light on how the democratic system has been mocked as certain populations have faced trials and tribulations that have barred them from getting their vote fairly counted, if counted at all. Most would think that these kinds of events do not take place in our heavily democratic United States, but have the perception that corruption like this only takes place in third world countries with very obviously corrupt systems and leaders. This problem is very real in the inner cities and areas with populations with higher concentrations of African American and Hispanics who are more likely to vote democratic.

This Jim Crow voter suppression in the 21st century has been executed through stealing of the electronic voting systems, a greater percentage of undervotes, supplying only two machines and thus voters having to wait in line for up to 12 hours to cast their vote, and miraculous power failures on voting days. According to the movie, in one Ohio county there were only 638 people who voted, but George W. Bush received over 4,000 votes from that site.

After watching the documentary, most were understandably discouraged about the political process and democracy that our country possesses. To offer reassurance and bring faith back to those who sat in the theatre seats Minnesota Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie, offered his words of hope and encouragement for a fair and free election in 2008. After his own frustration and fears about democracy in the United States, he ran in the elections and secured his position as the state's chief elections officer. According to Ritchie, he presented that Minnesota has avoided "drinking the Kool-Aid of the electronic voting system" and has worked hard to keep the state from going to a paperless system. He also presented that Minnesota's voting system is one that has been emulated by other states who have run into great discrepancies and fraud. Our state is know to be the highest in percentage of eligible voter turn out in the nation leading by four percent over Wisconsin.

The electronic voting issue is critical for students and all voting citizens to be educated and taken seriously because the vote is crucial to our democratic process. If the voter does not know if his/her vote is counted or counted properly, that discounts democracy because the vote is the core of our democracy.

Uncounted is available for checkout at the Miller Center here on campus for all students who choose to get more information about the electronic voting process. During Mark Ritchie's presentation, he also recommended HBO's film Recount for a deeper understanding of the recent election controversies.

The Social Responsibility Master program Film and Speaker series continues through October 15th, 28,th and 29th each 2:00 covering different issues of Social Responsibility.