Let Me Vote! Count My Vote!

Start: Monday, September 17, 2018• 6:00 PM

How Voter Suppression and Election Fraud Are Undermining Our Elections and What You Can Do About It

Featuring voting rights leaders from around the country who recognize the dangers Florida is facing in the midterm elections

At this FREE community event, you will:

Find out how communities of color are being denied full voting rights and what’s being done about it
Hear from the filmmaker who discovered the destruction of ballots in Broward County’s 2016 election and the candidate who challenged the Congressional election
Watch a live demonstration of how elections can be rigged because of a security vulnerability built into our election systems
How an election transparency group is using a feature in our voting systems to make it possible for communities to verify or challenge election results
What you can do between now and the November election to help make sure the election results reflect the will of the people the will of the people

Hosted by:

John Brakey
Co-Founder of AUDIT USA

Featuring these confirmed speakers:

(Scroll down for speaker bios)

Mimi Kennedy, Moderator
Actress (MOM on CBS)/author/activist and board member of Progressive Democrats of America

Tim Canova
Congressional Candidate in FL-23 and election integrity advocate

Andrea Miller
Executive Director, People Demanding Action

Bennie Smith
Software developer and political consultant who discovered the election system vulnerability now known as the capacity for Fraction Magic

Emily Levy
Director of Communications, Americans United for Democracy, Integrity, and Transparency in Elections (AUDIT USA)

Chris Sautter
Attorney and nationally renowned expert on election recounts (AUDIT USA)

Lulu Friesdat
Emmy-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker whose investigation into the 2016 Congressional primary race between Debbie Wasserman Schulz and Tim Canova revealed the illegal destruction of ballots by Broward County election officials.

This is a nonpartisan educational event that does not advocate for any candidate or political party.

Speaker Bios:

John Brakey, Host

John co-founded of AUDIT AZ in 2004, the group now known as AUDIT USA. Brakey is longtime election transparency activist from Arizona who has specialized in electronic voting machine security and hacking issues for nearly two decades. He has filed or been in numerous lawsuits that have challenged reported election results and shown breakdowns in verifying the vote. Brakey is often referred to as the “spark plug” who is highly intuitive and skilled at spotting patterns in large volumes of data.

Brakey's investigations have changed Arizona election law. He was part of Bev Harris’ team (www.BlackBoxVoting.org) that exposed Fraction Magic, the capacity of counting software from Diebold/Premier/Dominion, ES&S, and HartIntercivic to obey rigged programs that divide single votes into fractions and re-allocate them to achieve a pre-determined outcome. AUDIT is acronym for American United for Democracy, Integrity & Transparency in elections. More at www.AUDITelectionsUSA.org

Mimi Kennedy, Moderator
Mimi is an actress (MOM on CBS)/author/activist and Board member of Progressive Democrats of America. As a founding member of California Election Protection Network, she helped elect Debra Bowen as California Secretary of State (2006), who restored the state to paper ballots. On LA County’s Citizen Voter Outreach Committee she helped stop then-Registrar Connie McCormack from buying Diebold touchscreens to comply with HAVA, and then from buying an ES&S tabulator that relied on memory cards. (Paper ballots are scanned on a central tabulator, and the ballots hand-counted for audits.)

A member of the Voting Systems Advisory Panel that developed principles for LA’s new system (2020) she won a pitched battle for a human-readable, easy-to-hand-count paper ballot, tabulated independently from the touchscreen marker that produces it.

As PDA Advisory Chair, she briefed Congress in 2006 on the dangers of computerized election counts, including of paper ballots. Only rigorous hand-audits can catch error – or crime. She will briefly describe this year’s failed federal election legislation and her campaign to reverse California’s disastrous 2018 exemption of late-arriving mail ballots and provisional ballots from the state’s mandatory hand-audit (see article). Her article on national election “track conditions” can be found here.

Tim Canova

A scholar and political activist, Tim was drawn into Florida politics in 2015 through his work to stop the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Frustrated that his congresswoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, voted to fast track the TPP, Tim soon challenged Wasserman Schultz for her House seat in a closed Democratic primary. Wasserman Schultz was then the chair of the Democratic National Committee. In the closing weeks, Tim’s campaign came from nowhere to apparently within a few thousand votes of winning. But after the election, a number of leading election integrity analysts raised questions about the accuracy of the final vote count. To put concerns to rest, Tim sought to verify the vote by inspecting the ballots under Florida’s public records law. But the Broward County Supervisor of Elections then destroyed all the paper ballots, in violation of federal and state criminal statutes.

After the 2016 election, Tim launched Progress For All, a grassroots community action group that has advanced a progressive agenda in Florida and throughout the United States. Tim is once again running against Debbie Wasserman Schultz in Florida’s 23rd Congressional District, but this time as an independent in November’s general election. Election integrity is at the heart of his campaign. More info: https://progressforall.org/

Andrea Miller

Andrea Miller is the Executive Director of People Demanding Action, a multi-issue advocacy group. Andrea is both an organizer as well as a digital advocacy expert. She has appeared on the Thom Hartmann show, hosts the Progressive Round Table and is Executive Producer or PDAction Radio. As an IT professional she is also responsible for PDAction's digital strategy and customizes advocacy tools for small to medium size organizations through the Progressive Support Project.

She is the former Co-Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America, was the Democratic Nominee in 2008 for House of Representatives in the Virginia 4th District. Running on a Medicare for All and clean energy platform, Andrea was endorsed by PDA, California Nurses and The Sierra Club. Prior to running for office, Andrea was a part of Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign, first as Statewide Coordinator for Virginia and subsequently as Regional Coordinator. From 2006 until leading the VA Kucinich campaign Andrea was MoveOn.org’s Regional Coordinator for Central, Southwest and Hampton Roads areas of Virginia and West Virginia. More at: http://peopledemandingaction.org

Bennie Smith
Bennie Smith is a Memphis-based financial analytics manager for an electrical engineering and industrial automation company where he converges technical expertise with forward thinking, creativity and statistics to construct innovative solutions and broaden the use of actionable analytics in finance.

His passion for political strategy inspired him to develop a micro-targeting application and method to predict voter turnout. He believes this is the ultimate solution to evening the playing field and lowering candidates’ costs of competing.

In August 2014 Smith was approached by several candidates who insisted that their elections had been stolen. Though he disagreed, he offered to examine how the system works. After discovering an uncomfortable number of irregularities, Smith began to research how votes that originate from the same source can change once they get into the GEMS vote tabulation program. His work was featured as the cover story in Bloomberg Business Week. “Fraction Magic,” the proof of concept he created in collaboration with blackboxvoting.org, was also covered by Bloomberg in their cyber security segment.

Smith’s research uncovered an extraordinarily high-risk tampering mechanism and ultimately provided a new infrastructure for analyzing questionable election results.

Emily Levy
Emily has been a leader in the election integrity movement since 2004, when she coordinated the first phase of the precinct-level statistical forensic investigation into the presidential election in Ohio. She has worked on election integrity projects in her home state of California as well as in Arizona, New York, Wisconsin, Nevada, and New Mexico. Her writings on election integrity have been published by The Hill, Op-Ed News, and The BRAD BLOG. She is now working with AUDIT USA to bring public oversight and transparency to US elections. More at www.AUDITelectionsUSA.org

Chris Sautter
Chris Sautter is a nationally recognized political media strategist, award-winning documentary filmmaker, election attorney, and professor. Sautter has advised progressive candidates from coast-to-coast, including writing and producing Barack Obama’s first campaign commercials. He is co-author of The Recount Primer (1994), a guide to post-election disputes, and has worked as attorney/consultant on nearly every major election recount over the past 35 years.

He served as voter protection attorney for the 2016 Bernie Sanders for President campaign. Most recently, he was the legal strategist in the case against the Alabama Secretary of State seeking to preserve digital ballot images during the 2017 U.S. Senate special election.

Sautter teaches courses on election and constitutional law and the recount process at American University. His film The King of Steeltown: Hardball Politics in the Heartland (2001) about old-style machine politics won “Best Political Documentary” at the New York International Independent Film Festival. Another documentary, So Glad I Made It (2004) about an obscure singer songwriter won multiple film festival awards and was named one of the Top “Rock Docs” by GRAMMY Magazine.

Lulu Friesdat
Lulu Friesdat is an Emmy award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker. Her work focuses on election reform and political transformation. Her investigative reports exposing how easy it is to hack U.S. voting equipment around the country have received millions of views. Her exploration of the discrepancies in the congressional primary race between Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova resulted in a court victory declaring that a top Florida election official had engaged in illegal conduct.

Her revelations about the problems in the Racine County Wisconsin vote count during the 2016 presidential recount led to the decertification of the voting machines in use there. Recent articles offer details on Georgia's perpetually failing voting equipment, and provide background on a historic ballot initiative to restore voting rights to ex-felons in Florida.

Her television news assignments include producing profiles of presidential candidates for MSNBC as well as editing with Nightline, Good Morning America, and the NBC documentary unit. Holler Back: [not] Voting in an American Town, her first documentary exploring why more young people don't participate in politics, received a Best Documentary award from the Sunscreen Film Festival. Lulu also shot and edited the film. She has worked extensively with all of the major news networks (ABC, CBS & NBC) and her election security investigations have been featured on Politico, MSN.com, the Christian Science Monitor, Now This, The Young Turks, Truthout.org, Alternet, and Salon. More at http://www.hollerbackfilm.com/Follow her on Twitter @LuluFriesdat.

Event by

John Brakey

Tucson, Arizona

Registration is Closed