As many of you have already read, the premiere of David Earnhardt's "UNCOUNTED: The New Math of American Elections" ( www.uncountedthemovie.com ) on Monday night in Nashville was a sold-out, smashing success. The theater was packed with a visible cross-section of Nashvillians, some of whom had followed the 2004 election theft story closely but many of whom were only partially informed about the multiple layers of election fraud evidence in that election and the elections that have followed. It was a grand and glorious evening.
There were many meaningful and fulfilling moments on Monday night in the very hot (literally and figuratively) old majestic Belcourt theater in Nashville. But three really stand out for me. Two of them occurred during the film and one occurred during the panel discussion that followed.
Throughout the showing of the film, there were many places where audible gasps of disgusted enlightenment could be heard in the audience. For example, the results from the 2004 Presidential election at the Gahanna 1-B precinct in Ohio, where 639 voters produced over 4,000 votes for Bush on the DREs there, generated much laughter. But there were two moments in the film when the audience burst into applause.
The first was during the story of Steve Heller, the temp worker for Diebold's law firm in California, who broke the story of Diebold having supplied DRE software for California elections that they knew was uncertified. Steve said (on camera) that when he realized what he was hearing (as he transcribed notes from one of the firm's attornies who had met with Diebold that day), he immediately started copying all Diebold-related documents he could get his hands on at the law firm. Hearing that, the Nashville audience burst into sustained applause. (Although Steve's actions resulted in Diebold being fined millions in California and likely started the process through which Diebold has been once again de-certified in California, Steve himself was convicted of three felonies and fined $10,000 for his courageous whistle-blower actions.)
The second applause came at the end of the film's segment on Clint Curtis, another whistle-blower who has testified that he was hired (by current Florida Congress-vermin Tom Feeney (R-Diebold)) to write vote-flipping software. At the end of the Clint Curtis segment, when the film reveals that Clint changed his party registration from Republican to Democrat and ran against Feeney in 2006 (using the campaign slogan, "Take the (Lie Detector) Test, Tom"), the audience once again hooted and hollered. (We're good at that down South.)
The final moment that will stay with me forever came during the panel discussion and question-and-answer period that followed the film. One of the last people to stand up to the microphone was a young (and very nervous) Iraqi war veteran (hair still cut military-short) who said that, until that evening, he had not been aware of all the illegal, immoral and anti-American acts that had been perpetrated to subvert the consent of the governed in the 2004 elections. At that moment, he said that he was angry as hell. He ended his statement by saying that when he joined the military, he had taken an oath to defend this country against all its enemies "both foreign AND domestic". He said to all of us, in that dark and steamy theater, that people who tamper with and steal American elections are the worst kind of domestic enemy threatening our country today and he spoke for many soldiers who were prepared to honor their oath to help defend us against that enemy. That young man received rousing and sustained applause for his comments and for his continued commitment to his country.
Quite a night in Nashville. For those of you who haven't read a review of the evening yet, here is a link to the story by Christine Ann Piesyk, the only journalist to attend the premiere.
http://www.clarksvilleonline.com/2007/11/13/fifty-states-face-voting-machine-lawsuits-uncounted-documents-dre-issues/This story has now drawn more than 5,000 hits to Clarksvilleonline since Tuesday morning, and the story has been reprinted in its entirety on the following web-sites:
Blogowogo
Daily Kos
Democratic Underground (on two separate threads, both of which reached the "Greatest" page)
Digg.com
GuerrilawomenTN
Network Mirror
Technorati
Markcrispinmiller.blogspot
Resnet (out of the U. California, San Diego)
Chuonthis
Politicsanew (the political voices of women)
Boonika
the Math Department web-site at Duke University
Virtualreview
Slashdot
RSS Radar (Open Source/Linux expert users' web-site)
Ballots.blogspot
Community.tuliptools
Tech.originalsignal
Hardware.info
In closing, we sincerely appreciate David Earnhardt crediting our National Election Reform Conference (Nashville, April, 2005) as the impetus for his three year journey to document the election theft epidemic in this country. While doing an internet search last night on the breadth of coverage for Monday night's premiere, I ran across an old DU link to a thread I posted late at night after our conference ended. If you have time, re-visit this thread and learn what a small band of committed Orange State activists were able to accomplish in 32 days, on an (eagle's) wing and a (country-loving) prayer.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x355167It turns out that, indeed, we were the ones we had been waiting for.
We still are. Peace out.
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