An Introduction

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“The notion of stolen elections is something we assign to Third World countries but not to this beacon of freedom and democracy that we like to view ourselves as.”
~ Bernie Ellis, Election integrity activist

Our election process is a mess. Many of us consider voting to be a sacred act – core to our identity as a country – and something we all embrace as individuals. The notion is simple: you vote, and your vote gets counted. Yet, in every election, millions of votes go uncounted. Why and how does this happen?

UNCOUNTED is a journey through our dysfunctional election process – exploring the many different ways that our vote doesn’t get counted. Everything from the intimidation of minority voters - to voting machines that don’t work - to voters being denied the right to vote – to a national media that ignores and even makes excuses for what is wrong with the election system.

Much of UNCOUNTED searches for answers to a fundamental question about our most recent presidential election: was it stolen and if so, how was it stolen?

Like many Americans and others around the world, filmmaker David Earnhardt spent Election Night 2004 watching the results come in. The exit polls earlier in the day had indicated an easy Kerry victory with George W. Bush’s popularity ratings at an all-time low. But as the night went on, the official results started turning toward Bush – and by midnight, it appeared that Bush would win. After John Kerry conceded early the next day, the national media never questioned the results and turned a deaf ear to the many questions being raised by the public:

• Was there a concerted effort to suppress votes?
• Were the votes correctly counted?
• Did the rise of electronic voting and its documented lack of security allow for easy manipulation of the vote total?
• Why were the exit polls, which had been pinpoint accurate for 40 years, suddenly wrong in predicting a Kerry victory?
• Why were nearly 2 million people who tried to vote, told that they were not on the voter registration rolls?
• Perhaps most important – why was the national media, almost without exception, ignoring these serious and substantive issues in the
  months following George W. Bush’s election?

These questions fueled a two-year journey for filmmaker David Earnhardt that led to the 2006 mid-term election where many of the same illegal and unethical tactics remained unchecked by election officials and by the media. UNCOUNTED tackles these critical issues that threaten the very core of our democracy – our vote.