TO SCREEN AT THE HAMPTONS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ON SUNDAY, OCT 20 @ 2 PM

GLOBALVISION’S COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY PROBES MISSING BALLOTS, DISENFRANCHISEMENT, AND SUBVERTED RECOUNTS

The story of what happened in Florida during the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential race plays like a drama in many acts. Despite the wall-to-wall coverage, many Americans are still perplexed about what happened and why. Now, a new film from Globalvision, COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY, directed by Globalvision’s Danny Schechter and produced by Faye Anderson probes the deeper untold story of what happened and why.

It will screen at the annual Hamptons International Film Festival at Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York, on Sunday October 20^th and be followed by a panel discussion on voting rights and media coverage. Schechter will be there along with one of the film’s subjects, BBC reporter Greg Palast who lives in Peconic on the North Fork.

From election night, when the three networks erroneously called the state before the polls closed, to 36 days later when the Supreme Court made the highly controversial decision to halt the recount and call the election for George W. Bush, Americans were stunned by what they saw.

As the confusing stories piled up - of voter fraud, "dimpled, pregnant and hanging chads," African Americans whose names were purged from the rolls, Jewish Palm Beach retirees who were horrified to learn they had voted for Pat Buchanan - both candidates swiped at each other, each seeming less presidential as the days dragged on. But concern, outrage and continued investigation of the debacle became a casualty of September 11th. The New York Times wrote, "The Florida debate shifted from 'who won' to 'who cares.'"

Before the fiasco in Florida, most Americans assumed that the votes they cast would be counted in accordance with one of the fundamental principles of American democracy, yet 175,000 votes cast in that state, largely by the working poor and people of color, were uncounted. COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY asserts that a systematic pattern of behavior on the part of the state's various election boards, overseen by a compromised elections department, resulted in a myriad of lost votes.

Thousands of African American voters were purged from the voter rolls and, in some counties, African Americans were required to present three forms of I.D.; in other counties, none. In communities with large Spanish-speaking populations, translators and bilingual ballots were unexplainably absent. In communities with large Jewish populations, confusing ballots made what looked like a vote for Al Gore actually a vote for Pat Buchanan.

The film also shows how both sides responded to the situation - with schoolyard bullying and taunts of "sore loser," by sending busloads of protesters (actually the party faithful) to disrupt the recounts, by each candidate calling for recounts only in precincts they expected to win, and by fighting against recounts in precincts they thought they would lose. What emerges is a shocking but very clear picture of political interests cynically ignoring and overriding the will of voters. As 1960s Civil Rights Leader Rep. John Lewis says in the film, "People struggled, people died for the right to vote. And there are people saying we should forget about it, we shouldn't make too much of it. How can you sweep it under the rug like it didn't happen? It did happen."

For more information, call Danny Schechter at 212 246-0202 x3006. See itvs.org/countingondemocracy and globalvision.org. Schechter, a former summer resident in East Hampton worked with CNN and ABC News before co-founding Globalvision, an independent media company. Schechter won a National News Emmy for investigative reporting as well as the top investigative journalism prize at the Society for Professional Journalists. He is also executive editor of Mediachannel.org, a global media issues website and author of Mediaocracy, a book about the media coverage of the 2000 presidential election