Will your vote be counted?
America’s winner-takes-all system of counting votes per state makes for some unsettling stories of bungled polls and missing votes in important swing states (yes Florida, we’re looking at you.) Manhattanites needn’t sweat too much over their own votes in the upcoming presidential elections: Obama fans will simply add their numbers to the blue-state hordes; McCain devotees will nobly spit in the bucket.
Yet uncounted votes make for an insidious problem: according to an exposé in this month’s Rolling Stone by Greg Palast, an investigative journalist, and Robert Kennedy Jr, a lawyer, over 3m votes cast in the 2004 presidential election were never counted. The culprit, they suggest, was a piece of legislation called the Help America Vote Act, signed into law by George Bush in 2002. They also discovered that a black voter’s ballot is 900% more likely to get “lost” than a white person’s. But who’s counting.
About a week before election day Vote&Live!, political provocateurs in New York’s DJ music community, invited their Facebook fan base to a packed Monday-night screening of two alarming films about America’s missing votes: “Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections” and “Steal Back Your Vote”.
“Uncounted” grimly documents the now-familiar story of misread ballots, dodgy voting machines, long lines at polling stations and missing names of registered voters from the past two presidential elections. “Steal Back Your Vote”, made by Palast and Kennedy, is accompanied by a bristling tub-thumping comic book, featuring strips by Ted Rall, Lloyd Dangle and Lukas Ketner and edited by Zachary Roberts. Rachel Abrams caught up with Roberts after the Vote&Live! screening.
MIL: This exposé draws on eight years of number-crunching lessons learned from 2000 and 2004. So why a comic strip? …
