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BuzzFlash: In my view, we have a voting and an electoral system that discourages people from participating in our democracy instead of encouraging it. Would you agree with that?

Matt Kohn: Not completely, I wouldn't say that the system discourages people. I think that people understand the system and know of their ability to change it. Whether that happens or not is something else entirely.

BuzzFlash: Why did you decide to do a documentary about the problems with the American voting and electoral process?

Matt Kohn: I was angry about what happened in the 2000 presidential election. But I was also curious to know what other people felt about voting in America.

I remember when I was in fourth grade, and the Electoral College was explained to us. And I think I was probably the kid in the class who asked, "What if there's a tie?" And the teacher said, "There can't be a tie." What I was fascinated more and more with was, well, we just had a tie. And the more you look under the rug of electoral systems, the more you realize there's lots of little ties happening all over the country, not just because of the two-party system, but because the machines don't work. You mix that up with the small percentage of Americans who actually participate, and you get a recipe for the system breaking down to the extent that people become cynical.

BuzzFlash: What are the most important things that people need to know about our voting system and what's wrong with it?

Matt Kohn: People need to know that there are two forces which are diametrically opposed to each other creating the system we have. One is that barely 50% of Americans participate in the Presidential election process every four years. What they don't realize, and what the election in 2000 brought out, is that not all election systems are the same. That's what people don't understand.

There's also a political difference between the two parties about how to solve the problems of how to count the votes and also how to stop people who shouldn't be voting from voting. The Republicans generally believe that states should have absolute control over the process. Now more people are beginning to believe that there should be a national standard, which is generally supported by Democrats.

If you ask people, "Should there be a direct popular vote for President?" 72% say there should be a direct election for the President of the United States. To me, that means the biggest problem with the electoral system we have now is in its initial conception of an Electoral College. That gets in the way of votes actually being counted for the candidate of their choice in the state in which they reside.

BuzzFlash: The 2000 Presidential election, with all of the irregularities and voter disenfranchisement that occurred in Florida, demonstrated just how broken the American electoral system really is. And in your film, several poll workers, voting analysts, journalists and various heads of elections, stated that what happened in Florida was and is not uncommon. There are very significant and systemic problems in our voting system.

Matt Kohn: Georgia had a higher rate of thrown-out votes than Florida did in 2000. And there are a few other states that also had worse problems than Florida. And the reason why no one knew about those oddities until way after the elections was generally because the elections weren't that close.

What a close election reveals is the margin of error -- how many votes get thrown out. And some states don't even keep records of this. Before 2000, there were very few people -- maybe a handful of scholars, academics, and activists -- that were concerned with this issue. And for the most part, election officials always knew about it and they just didn't really feel like it was necessary for them to take any action. Even now, they're divided on it.

BuzzFlash: One of the truly appalling aspects of the Supreme Court's decision of the 2000 election awarding the Presidency to George W. Bush was that the Court stated that Florida had no uniform standards in their voting process to ensure a fair recount. They went on to say that their decision wouldn't apply to any other decision or court challenge, because -- as the conservatives on the Supreme Court know -- only in a few states in America are there uniform standards for voting. Standards vary from state to state. Americans vote on different types of equipment and technology with varying degrees of accuracy and spoilage rates. The average time to wait in line to vote and the number of poll workers vary wildly.

Matt Kohn: My film is making an effort to encourage the viewer to be concerned about this. But before 2000, no one was concerned. This was not considered a civil rights issue and it certainly wasn't an issue that the vendors or the election administrators were even concerned about. Election administrators were actually using spoilage rates of votes as a reason to buy one type of product or voting machine over another. Nobody was using the spoilage rates as a wake-up call to fix the system. It wasn't that it was a hidden thing. It's just that so many bad things happened all at once in Florida during the 2000 election that it brought voting problems to the forefront.

BuzzFlash: In Florida, in the 2000 election, Katherine Harris, Secretary of State, was also the chair of George W. Bush's campaign in Florida. And yet in her role as Secretary of State, she's the state officer to certify elections. When you look at this just from a common-sense perspective, you have to ask yourself: how can this be allowed?

Matt Kohn: I believe that election administrators have to be anti-partisan and that we have to work to develop laws which prohibit any kind of political activity. There are some that believe that the way to provide honest elections is to make sure that there are at least two sides that are opposing each other equally. But most people believe that the Democrats and the Republicans no longer oppose each other equally. And I think it's fair to say that if you talked to a Republican thirty years ago or forty years ago about the way elections were run, they might feel a lot of the same feelings that Democrats feel now. So that's why we need to have administrators who aren't really part of either party.

BuzzFlash: How do you respond to critics and the right wing who say that progressives and Democrats need to get over it and accept the fact that George W. Bush is the President.

Matt Kohn: I think that George Bush didn't win in 2000. I think we present that information in a clear way in my film. But I also think that George Bush won the election in 2004. And if people are concerned about what happened in Ohio, they also need to be concerned about what happens in every state in every election. What we have to think about is why does the system allow egregious errors and potentially even worse things to happen? And what do we need to change in the system overall? And that's not a Democrat thing or a Republican thing.

The more politically conscious you are, whether you're on the right or the left, the more you understand the need to have the best election system possible, especially when you realize how close the numbers are consistently going to be in the next fifteen or twenty years. Unless there's a youth paradigm shift that no one predicts, there's going to be close elections every time.

Here's a really good example. I was hanging out in Congress waiting for a hearing on electronic voting machines. And the hearing got cancelled and I was talking to an assistant to a Republican representative in Congress who I did not know particularly well, but we'd enjoyed a few pleasant conversations. Anyway, I was talking to her and this guy comes up who I later found out was an advisor to several Republicans. And he was adamant that the Republicans get on top of the paper trail bandwagon because if Bush won the election by a small margin, the Democrats would be able to say he stole the election because there were no paper trails. And I know that this person has consistently worked hard with some of the more outspoken advocates demanding paper trials for computer voting machines. And of course he didn't know I wasn't a Republican. And that was very interesting. And I think that gave me a great deal of hope.

BuzzFlash: There is a push to increase the use of computer voting machines beyond those used in 2004 and in 2002, and again these machines and programs are privately held by companies and corporations. Would you agree that we're essentially selling and privatizing our election system?

Matt Kohn: That's already been done. I think that we have to realize that elections have been commercialized for a hundred years. If you go back, lever voting machines have no paper trail -- there have been ways to use the machines to manipulate elections. Some voting machines were run by gears and you could always shave off a gear or two and lose votes if you didn't want a certain person or party to win.

The high-tech version which people are more aware of now is computer voting machines. And this is increasingly frightening because you can't expect average or even highly-trained election workers really to provide tech support to computer voting machines. And in fact the need for tech support for a voting machine is a problem. The real concern is that computer programming, whether it's an open-source code or not needs a paper trail for every kind of machine whether it's a commercially based machine or not.

BuzzFlash: Our country is still so bitterly divided, and it seems possible if not probable that in future presidential elections the candidate who wins the popular vote will not necessarily win the election due to the Electoral College. Your documentary focused on former Indiana Senator Birch Bayh who led the charge in the seventies and the eighties to repeal the Electoral College. Since nothing happened after the 2000 election, I myself am quite pessimistic that we will ever get rid of the Electoral College.

Matt Kohn: My film is pretty clear that the reason I think we should get rid of the Electoral College is I'm sure that we're going to have more Presidents elected who did not win the popular vote. The reason I believe we should lose the Electoral College is that the Electoral College, in and of itself, suppresses voter turnout in Presidential elections in states that aren't battleground states. That's the number-one reason.

In Colorado, where we filmed in 2004 elections, there was an amazing voter turnout. And that happened because Coloradans believed that their vote counted. And they were right. It wasn't as close as anyone thought, but people turned out to vote. In states like New York and California and Texas, states which had presumed outcomes in the Presidential election, the voter turnout was exactly the same as it was in 2000. And that's not saying much in favor of why we should keep an Electoral College when we want to have every American participating equally in the vote for President.

BuzzFlash: Most Americans believe that we have the best or the most advanced democracy in the world. Yet we have perhaps by some standards one of the most pathetic electoral systems for a nation of our wealth and strength and power. I remember reading a whole list of categories which U.N. election observers use to rate the legitimacy of an election. And there were certain categories that the United States ranked behind several developing countries. It seems easy for Americans to judge other countries and elections as corrupt or illegitimate but not our own.

Matt Kohn: First of all, I disagree with that. I think Americans only judge other countries out of ignorance. They don't know whether those countries are running their elections fairly. There can be a general assumption that if there's a dictatorship that's been in power for twenty years that's running the elections that there is a problem. You know, FDR was elected four times and no one was brave enough to call him a fascist.

BuzzFlash: What would you say Americans can or should do about our voting and electoral system? It's the hardest question to answer, but people who watch documentaries like yours want to know where to begin?

Matt Kohn: I think the first step is to abolish the Electoral College and have a guaranteed right to vote, whether there's an Electoral College or not. There is no right to vote for President. It's the states that have that right. When I interviewed Jesse Jackson, Jr. at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he makes that point eloquently, and it's the most important point.

I also think Americans need to educate themselves, see films like mine about voting problems, and then move forward from that to educate themselves about their state election laws and voting rights and see where their politicians stand.

I think there should be a citizens' movement, one that's not just a movement of the two political parties, focused on voting rights. After the 2000 elections and the litigation that people saw, there's a number of new lawyers and litigation that's both for and against voting rights. Most Americans are unaware of it, but they haven't even felt the beginning of the repercussions on future elections. Obviously some of this litigation is necessary and positive, considering there are efforts to ensure that people who were disenfranchised in 2000 stay disenfranchised. The worse thing to do would be for us to do nothing.

BuzzFlash: Matt, thanks for speaking with us.

Matt Kohn: Thank you.

(c) 2005, BuzzFlash.com