An Activists’ Guide to Election Day: ‘Video your vote’

In an email update from the organization Black Box Voting, voting rights activist Bev Harris informed her supporters of a few things:

-Another organization committed to a similar cause, called Video The Vote. You can sign up there to film voting on Election Day in order to make sure everything goes smoothly. And if it doesn’t go smoothly, your footage can be an integral part of making sure the mistakes are corrected. If you don’t have a camera, you can volunteer to be a local coordinator, blogger, driver, or various other jobs. If you want to volunteer, though, you have to do it by tomorrow night.

-Black Box Voting has teamed up with PBS, Video the Vote, and a few other organizations to create a hub for help with elections and voting problems on Youtube. The Youtube channel created can be viewed here, and Black Box Voting channel’s can be viewed here.

-For their Youtube channel, Black Box Voting has produced a series of videos about how you can “protect the count” (i.e., make sure the voting and counting of the votes happens without errors) in different parts of the country. The videos are (this is taken directly from the email):

1. Protect the Count – most locations in America(4 min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3_xFb1sWKU
Takes 90 minutes on Election Night. You can even go out after polls have closed.
Please also view video # 3, because it shows what to look for to identify
tampered poll tapes and the kinds of small errors on tapes that can appear with
memory card tampering. Upload any video you take to http://www.videothevote.org
– Post link or comments for what you found in the state and jurisdiction at
http://www.blackboxvoting.org

2. Protect the Count – Absentee / Central Count (8 min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZp3rA1XXjw
(Applies to 13 states with CENTRALLY COUNTED ballots and/or HEAVY ABSENTEE
VOTING)
These are the most challenging Protect the Count locations.

3. Protect the Count – New England / New Hampshire(5 min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV4M12w6tY4
If you live anywhere in New England and can drive to any voting machine location
in New Hampshire to observe and video poll closing, please do so. If you live
anywhere in America that has polling place results tapes, please look at this
video to see what tampered tapes look like.
Contact Protect the Count – New Hampshire organizers at protectthevote@gmail.com
You can view the list for which New Hampshire locations use voting machines
here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/157/157.html

4. Protect the Count – New York (9 min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmSn4qLdgbU
New Yorkers are probably in the best shape for Election 2008, but not for long.
This shows the details of how the counting of the lever machines proceeds after
polls close, and gives you the details of the fight New Yorkers will have on
your hands in 2009.

What are you planning to do on Election Day to ensure that everything goes smoothly and we don’t have a stolen election on our hands? Let us know in the comments.