Film Review: Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections

If at times facts presented in this film seem overly suggestive or downright implausible, trust your instincts.

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Long lines. Misallocated voting machines. Voters inexplicably purged from the rolls. Sound familiar? Through interviews with activists and policymakers, filmmaker David Earnhardt surveys these and other symptoms of America’s ailing electoral system in the documentary Uncounted. While the film ends with sound advice—volunteer to be a poll worker; lobby against paperless machines, and support a national holiday on election day—the bulk of Uncounted relies less on facts to back its claims than on a canned, conspiratorial score.

If at times facts presented in Uncounted are often seem to you overly suggestive and or downright implausible, trust your instincts.

At one point the following text appears on the screen (accompanied by ominous cello notes): “Two voting machine companies—ES&S and Diebold—electronically counted 80 percent of the votes in the 2004 presidential election. Both companies have extensive ties to the Republican party.” Source: Baltimore Chronicle 12/09/04.”

Click over to the Chronicle, an online newspaper, and you’ll find that it did indeed run an article containing that 80 percent figure—as a directly quoted citation of the American Free Press. Click over to the Free Press, and you’ll find a fringe-right conspiracist website. Click around their site some more, and what do you find? That one of their primary focus coverage areas is the nefarious influence of international Jewry. And that’s just one of their favorite conspiracy theories.

Unsurprisingly, when I ran the 80 percent “factoid” by Kim Brace, a respected voting expert with the consulting firm Election Data Services, he called it “totally wrong.”

Perhaps, as with voting itself, indictment of the voting system is an exercise better suited to print than to a screen. That way, viewers can more easily check the facts for themselves.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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