VideoTheVote.org

Bring your cellphones, digital and video cameras to the polling booths and document anything you think is delaying, preventing or disenfranchising your vote this Nov. 4th.

videothevote.org

"Video the Vote is a national initiative to protect voting rights by monitoring the electoral process. We organize citizen journalists—ordinary folks like you and me—to document election problems as they occur. And then we distribute their footage to the mainstream media and online to make sure the full story of Election Day gets told. Watch our 2006 highlights and join us as we Video the Vote this November."

Journalism: Dan Rather - The Trouble With Touch Screens

Dan Rather, formerly of CBS, now has an investigative news show on the new High Definition TV network HDnet.

This is a cable HD network but I think this particular segment still falls into media crashers territory because of the importance of the subject matter. The traditional media has had ample opportunity to look into the scandalous conditions of our computer based election system and the people who run it but they have offered nothing but appeasement to the status quo. This kind of reporting cuts right into the subject and it's about time. Today there are even bigger problems than the computers but at least some people are trying to shed more light on this subject.

I am particularly disturbed by the revelations in this piece from several former Sequoia Voting Systems employees that many of the 2000 Florida ballots may have, in fact, been deliberately printed on inferior paper and with odd specifications at times, to create errors and shake people's confidence in the punch card system. This uncertainty then opens up the market for the new high tech and much more expensive electronic voting machines. . . . that Sequoia also happens to make. Imagine that. You put private corporations in charge of voting equipment and they game the market so they can sell the government and the people on upgrading to more expensive product. The only problem is that this is our democracy they are gaming.

Please consider Signing The Petition that is going around to open an investigation.

Saturday Feature - Hacking Democracy

Bev Harris at Black Box Voting teamed up with Simone Ardizzone, Russel Michaels and Robert Carillo Cohen to create what was first called Voteregate. Votergate was a huge web success and it was later picked up by HBO, renamed Hacking Democracy and turned into a full length Documentary . It is very revealing about this whole new age of voting on computers and trusting that they count the vote correctly even though people these days are still afraid to buy stuff on the internet because of how hackable computers are.

Documentary: Votergate

Votergate was a short 40 minute independent production that was distributed on the internet via their original website (which is now gone) and a bunch of help from mirror sites. They went on to shoot more footage and put together what later became the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy which can also be found HERE. This has been a very important independent, grass roots, media effort to cover things the mainstream basically blacked out completely when it really mattered. This couldn't have happened without major internet support and it shows the kind of work we can and should continue to do.

Journalism: Greg Palast - Talking about elections

Greg Palast is one of those investigative reporters that really seems to get into the scary stuff. He is an American but he works for the BBC because none of the American media will run his stories, even when they have sharing agreements with the BBC and they could do it for free. Greg is the first person that I heard use the term "Electronic Berlin Wall" to describe the American Media's control over the information that gets to the people. I couldn't agree more. He recently placed his latest book Armed Madhouse into a creative commons copyright status which basically means public domain.


This is part 1 and 2 of a series on YouTube where he is at a speaking engagement with Robert Kennedy Jr. Greg does a lot of independent internet video outside the BBC. He also writes a lot of text articles. It's worth scanning around to see what Greg has to say about things.

Part 1



Part 2



See the rest here