Just Focus on the Issues

Quick: How many branches of government rule America? By some lights, the country is properly governed by four: the executive, the judiciary, Congress and the people themselves.

But increasingly, the people have been reduced to a phantom limb, especially in the course of executing their most important power, voting. "Stealing America: Vote by Vote," which is less a film than an organizing pamphlet on celluloid, argues that with the advent of electronic voting machines, the American public has been steadily disenfranchised, especially in districts populated by poor, African American voters.

It's not a new argument: The HBO documentary "Hacking Democracy" made the same points with many of the same characters, including the heroic Florida election official Ion Sancho, who led the hand count of the Florida ballots in the 2000 presidential election, until the Supreme Court stopped it. And too often "Stealing America," which was directed by Dorothy Fadiman and narrated by Peter Coyote, plays like an enhanced PowerPoint presentation, with lots of talking heads, computer graphics and warmed-over clips from "The Daily Show." What's more, its obsessive focus on the 2004 presidential election, while raising legitimate questions, gives the film a bitter partisan edge that makes it too easily dismissed.

And it shouldn't be. What "Stealing America" lacks in formal elegance it makes up for in important information that deserves far more compelling delivery, as does its call for a return to paper ballots. It might take a lot of dead trees to save that fourth branch.

-- Ann Hornaday

Stealing America: Vote by Vote Unrated, 90 minutes Contains nothing objectionable. At Landmark's E Street Cinema.