Filmmaker questions the
‘democracy’ of the 2000 election
by Mischa Byruck

Call it Democracy, an official selection of the 2005 Chicago International Documentary Film Festival, dives into the turbulent themes raised during the 2000 election debacle, examining disenfranchisement and the Electoral College through an analytical frame.

Its director, Matthew Kohn, has an iconoclastic but not especially polemical history. He graduated from Brandeis with a degree in politics, feminism and film theory, and since then has made a series of alternative music videos, silent films, shorts and biographies of obscure artists.

The film questions the current system for administering American democracy, making it likely to be dismissed by many as yet another leftist diatribe on a par with Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 or UnPrecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election. Yet Kohn is not out to discredit Bush’s victory in 2000, but rather to point out that the system that allowed him to win under dubious circumstances has not yet been adequately reformed. Indeed, as if to prove his neutrality, he points out at the beginning of the film that if Kerry had won in 2004, he would have become the second man in four years to win the presidency while losing the popular vote.

“No one thinks this system works,” says Kohn, “but I wanted to show the way the system works to stop the system from working.”

Disgusted with the politicization of what he sees as an objectively important issue, Kohn imbues his analysis of the American electoral system with “not only a nonpartisan, but an anti-partisan message.”

“Ever since Fahrenheit 9/11,” he says, “people have been deluged with partisan advertising. It’s very difficult for a film like mine to break through that kind of dissonance.”

It was a few weeks after election night, Kohn says, when the large media outlets stopped their independent investigations of possible electoral fraud in Florida, opting instead to focus only on the press conferences called by the candidates. They de-amplified the aspects of the story that remained controversial, while simultaneously creating “hysteria by saying that (the whole thing) had to be over quickly.” This assumption, also made by the Supreme Court, is succinctly debunked in the film.

“Three days after the Supreme Court stopped the recount,” says Kohn, “there was no more coverage of the facts of the election. It was covered as an emotional issue that America had to get over.”

“Election reform,” he says, “wasn’t covered at all.”

Kohn was, he says, “both frightened and disturbed by the way the country, guided by the mass media, opted not to analyze, but to move on.”

“They think Americans like and need closure,” he says of the mainstream media, “whereas I think Americans like and need exposition and contrarianism.” So he decided to turn the volume back up, dedicating himself to four years of research and exposure that, he says, the mainstream media ought to have been doing anyway.

The film begins as a candid series of man-on-the-street interviews, displaying the range of emotions and reactions to Bush’s first election. Kohn then takes us through a brief overview of contested US elections, delves into the history of the elusive electoral college, and finally moves on to an in-depth study of the events surrounding the highly controversial 2000 decision.

Unlike other journalists and filmmakers who have tackled this subject, Kohn does not dwell on indicting individuals, though he does make clear who benefits from the current system. Instead, he focuses on the inherent corruption of an unaccountable electoral process while skewering a mass media for which an issue as important as the exercise of democracy is hardly discussed, particularly if both parties decide it is not in their political interests to do so.

“The reason why politicians refused to speak even about the successes of their electoral reform legislation (The 2002 Help America Vote Act) is that neither party believed it was beneficial to have that argument in public,” says Kohn. Given that the Republicans stressed stricter ID verification while the Democrats advocated laxer requirements, to do so “would have made the Republicans look mean and the Democrats look weak.”

In seeing such petty distractions for what they are, Kohn largely manages to rise above the political fray, making his case for electoral reform difficult to dismiss. The same holds true for his indictment of the mainstream media, which centers on its spastic and myopic coverage of electoral malfunctions in 2000 and its pacifying, minimal coverage of electoral reform.

Kohn does an excellent job marshalling well-phrased soundbites from the people who have done much of the thinking on these issues over the years. Investigative journalist Greg Palast, congressman John Conyers and professor Alan Dershowitz all weigh in. He also finds various other law professors who offer contrasting views to Dershowitz, journalists who emphasize other facets of the case than does Palast, and statesmen and women, from both parties who offer their own perspectives.

Yet the most fascinating moments in the film are historical ones, as when Kohn explores the little-known history of U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana in office from 1962 to 1980. The framer of the 25th and 26th Amendments (which dealt with presidential and vice presidential succession, and lowered the voting age to 18), Bayh was instrumental in bringing an amendment abolishing the Electoral College to the Senate floor, where it was ultimately defeated with the help of anti-civil rights senators from the South who accused it of infringing on states’ rights.

What Kohn most wants to instill in his audience is shock that — even given the astounding electoral history analyzed in the film — the farcical mismanagement and fraud of 2000 wasn’t all that unusual. Yet, at times, he seems torn by his desire, on the one hand, to merely examine the hypocrisies of the system, and on the other, to foster “an anti-partisan, across-the-board movement to ensure voting rights.”

More than mere analysis and less than pure polemic, the film asks a question: Are Americans ready to unite to fight for a system in which, as Kohn says, “Everyone is sure that every vote is counted in every election?”

Call it Democracy premiered in fifty colleges nationwide prior to the 2004 presidential elections. It came to Kansas City as part of the Midwest Center for American Values’ Reel Democracy Film Festival at the Screenland Theater last May. For more information and short biographies of the approximately forty people interviewed for the film, go to www.callitdemocracy.com. To find out more about electoral reform, visit the Constitution Project, at http://www.constitutionproject.org/eri/ or electionreform.org at http://www.electionreform.org/ERMain/, or Fair Vote at www.fairvote.org.

Mischa Byruck is a freelance writer based in Kansas City. He can be contacted at msb174@yahoo.com.