Subject: JANUARY 30TH Coalition Newsletter - 3/15
This is the J30 Coalition Newsletter – currently this is mainly for communicating with the 70-90 people in the J30 group (who signed up on 1/30/2005).
We aim to have this newsletter go out to other electoral reform, voting rights, and activist groups soon, even if the newsletter is not yet designed for that purpose. That’s our next step! So, please send this to other activist communities to raise awareness for our actions in Ohio. We do not have a mission to formally expand and raise funds, yet, but we need all the support we can get. Please help expand our reach by sharing our message with others.
Since you last heard from us, we have been moving ahead with high priority tasks that are begging to be done. The J30 Coalition has four committees – Research,
Litigation, Legislation, and Media – and these are the core of the coalition. We have proposed and are generating Coordinating Council, a leadership team that will coordinate across the committees and work with the entire J30 Coalition and outside groups as necessary to support the core work of the committees. We are working with the 4-committee leaders on the people, process for this Council. We believe this will evolve our organization to a sufficient level of structure. We don’t plan further structure beyond our clear need.
From the beginning, we asserted a different type of leadership, from the base of democracy activists making up the coalition. We are not a hierarchical club of followers!
If we haven’t heard from you, please consider joining the Yahoo group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/J30/
and listening in on things.
We also have weekly conference calls with the Coordinating Council and Committee chairs – these have been Sunday at 8:30, and we are looking for a better rotating or regular time that work for the committees. These calls are open to all who wish to participate – they are focused working meetings, and productive.
Check the Yahoo Group Calendar for updates, or contact a Committee Chair of your interest.
WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING
TEACH-INS:
Our California friends hosted and participated in a well-attended teach-in Oakland a couple weeks ago - they had 350 people attend! These were the same
Californians you met on 1/30 –among them, Dan Ashby reports some of the following speakers and events (too many to list all here now) dealing with Voter
Suppression, Exit Polls, Voting Machines, Litigation, etc.: Lynn Landes, journalist, "How America Used to Vote", Bob Fitrakis, and “The Taking of Ohio Prior to Nov. 2", Emily Levy, Juice for Justice, "Precinct Analysis in Ohio", Warren Stewart, National Ballot Integrity Project, "Recounting New Mexico", Wayne
Madsen, journalist, "The Privatization of the Vote."
The entire five hours of presentations were videotaped and recorded. Plans are to issue a complete 5-hour DVD, and a shorter highlights version, for distribution.
OHIO TEACH-INS ARE PLANNED!
Now it’s our turn! J30 and CASE are both in planning stages for Ohio teach-ins. get involved!
CASE is planning the first teach-in, in early May in Columbus. We are actively engaged with others proposing a hands-on teach-in, focusing on workshops and awareness, for Cleveland the first weekend in June. Many J30 folks have expressed interest in having teach-ins all over Ohio. Marj Creech writes:
I see the purpose of teach-ins to be to educate, motivate, and activate the target groups, which can be roughly divided into two: 1) "newbies," those who have heard there were problems in the 2004 election, but don't know the extent, and to give them a place to "plug in," and 2) the "already on-board" people, to teach them advanced skills, e.g., legislative action, auditing elections, research skills, organizing communities, etc, etc, and getting them organized into active work groups. Please email Marj at
(or the Yahoo group) to be on the organizing committee for teach-ins. whether you are on the committee or not, we will be asking for your input as to content and advertising and other help with teach-ins.
We have also been invited to participate in the Tennessee conference in April:
"Gathering to Save Our Democracy" -- National Conference on 2004 Election & Need for Election Reform - Nashville, TN - April 8-10, 2005
See http://fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com/2005/03/gathering-to-save-our-democracy.html
LEGAL AND OTHER ACTIONS
Evan Davis reports that we are also in communication with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under the Law's Voting Rights project. And, we are coordinating our litigation efforts to coincide with lawsuits being prepared by a national legal team that includes the National Voting Rights Institute's John Bonifaz.
Some on the Research Committee and several others are working with Ray Beckerman on a comprehensive outline of election incidents that are tied directly to evidence and incident reports. We are using the empirical data of EIRs (Election Incident Reports) and incident databases to compile a non-redundant outline to be linked and hosted on the Beckerman website:
This is being called the Ohio Project:
Rady Ananda and the Research Committee are also working on compiling research products on Ohio Boards of Election and Voting Equipment vendors. Vicki Lovegren, of Ohio Vigilance and Case Western, is working on a database that will let us search and report on any criteria stored about evidence and incidents. With numerous (other) parties preparing litigation, we expect this important work to support the needs for legal research into Ohio voting irregularities.
That’s all the news that fits – if you have any questions or things to add to newsletters, reply to or contact Evan or me. We will be starting up a blog site pretty soon as well, which will basically be like an online newsletter. This will serve as our website – more later!