Guest Blogged by Mary Mancini of the Uncounted Blog

Everyone has different tastes, and hey, if you aren’t moved after watching Uncounted that’s your prerogative. But an uniformed and half-assed review that tries to nail the 80-minute movie on one ten-second factoid - like the one delivered to Mother Jones readers by former MJ Senior Online Fellow and current TPM Media News Editor, Justin Elliott - is inexcusable.

In the review, Elliot references the following that briefly appears on screen: “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.” He then runs the 80% number by Kimberly Brace, “a respected voting expert with the consulting firm Election Data Services” who calls it “totally wrong.” And that’s it. Proof by assertion. No follow up. End of review.

You can, of course, read the rest for yourself at MotherJones.com, where you can also read the comments of some very smart MoJo readers who recognize not only Elliott’s shoddy work but also the importance of the bigger issue - that our democracy is at stake because of bad electoral practices.

You’ll also find Uncounted's filmmaker, David Earnhardt's response, which I am also printing in its entirety...

Guest Blogged by Mary Mancini of the Uncounted Blog

For some reason our wild and crazy wig-wearing Founding Fathers didn't see the need to build the right to vote into the Constitution. Instead, they decided to leave it up to the individual States to determine who, where, when, and how we vote. Oh sure, some voting rights have been amended into the Constitution in the form of anti-discrimination prohibitions (15th, 19th, and 26th), but the fundamental and very human right of the franchise is nowhere to be found. Zero. Zip. Nil. Nada.

Turns out that while election integrity activists have been busy fighting against systemic disenfranchisement, Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., has been introducing House Joint Resolution 28 (H.J. Res. 28) --- legislation calling for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting everyone the affirmative right to vote --- in every Congress since 2001, noting that "It's time to scrap the states' rights-based system we have now, and place the right to vote alongside the constitutionally-protected right to free speech."

Today, Rep. Jackson furthered his cause by releasing a statement to the press citing a new report by the Advancement Project (which "details a dizzying array of Election Day meltdowns), as well as the documentary Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections (which offers "evidence of how voting machines themselves can create problems"). Both the report and the film, he says...