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Review: 'Stealing America: Vote by Vote'

BY JOHN ANDERSON | Special to Newsday

August 1, 2008

(3 STARS) (unrated)

PLOT General alarm about the stealing of the 2004 presidential election and how it could happen again.

CAST Pete McCloskey, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Wolf Blitzer

LENGTH 1:30

PLAYING AT The Quad, 13th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, Manhattan

BOTTOM LINE Critically important movie that makes solid case that the White House was heisted.

This well-crafted documentary about the purported theft of the 2004 presidential election could well be the feel-good movie of the summer - after all, it absolves the general public for everything that happened. The fault, according to Dorothy Fadiman's autopsy of vote fraud, lay with Ohio Republicans; Diebold; media that failed to go after the story, and Democrats who seemed to want it buried. It's amusing that Fadiman digs far less into the 2000 election, apparently assuming its criminality is now a given. It's also a hoot what she found as she looked into how the glaringly obvious discrepancies in the 2004 Ohio vote were covered in the media - her chief exemplars turn out to be "Comedy Central's" Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. A journalistic companion piece to HBO's

"Recount," "Stealing America: Vote by Vote" is well-timed and certainly puts a stake through the heart of Diebold and any advocate of electronic voting, especially in a political atmosphere so charged with ruthless partisanship.