Being horrified by the blatantly mangled 2000 national election (stolen by Florida politicos and the U.S. Supreme Court) and having seen numerous documentaries like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Uncounted, I thought I'd been sufficiently educated about U.S. sham elections during the George W. Bush regime. So why pay heed to yet another that Netflix promoted to me—a lesser known 2005 documentary by Ian Inaba entitled American Blackout?

Headlining the film is former Georgia Congressional Representative Cynthia McKinney who currently is the Green Party's Presidential candidate. That name struck me—though I had forgotten her outspoken challenges to the Bush administration—because one of those online questionnaires had identified McKinney as the candidate who best matched my own political reviews at an 89% agreement level. Even though I've already cast my vote for Obama (with 75% agreement), I realized that McKinney certainly must be an intriguing non-mainstream candidate that I wanted to learn more about. Thus, I bumped American Blackout up in my queue, and I strongly recommend others check this film out as well.

While it touches base with the familiar 2000 Florida debacle of hanging chads and Katherine Harris, it digs deeper into devious pre-election efforts to deny thousands of blacks and Latinos voting privileges. It turns out that minorities living in battleground states were subjected to systematic Apartheid voting by the ruling Republican political machine in both the 2000 and 2004 elections. Although some news clips leaked briefly through the mainstream media, this story never got its due—especially considering how sacrosanct the right to vote is in a democracy.

Neither Al Gore nor John Kerry fought to expose these disgraceful elections, choosing to take the “high road” to preserve national "unity." That's the nature of mainstream politicians—turning a blind eye to issues that would threaten the fabric of the United States' standing in the world. Not so with Cynthis McKinney, so she unabashedly criticizes the Bush administration and conducts investigative sessions on its handling of 9/11 and later the long list of complaints from Ohio citizens when they were blocked from voting in the 2004 general election.

The phrase "Apartheid elections" is used more than once, and it certainly strikes a chord. Through interviews and archive footage, Inaba paints indelible images that can not be discounted—interminable lines of black voters patiently waiting in the rain for up to 12 hours to vote, voters systematically falsely purged as felons from registers, provisional ballots being tossed, etc. After outlining the struggle for voting rights with historical footage from the 60's march on Selma, one interviewee memorably remarks that he felt "sling shotted into slavery" when he was denied to vote.

With the 2008 general election nearly upon us, American Blackout deserves attention. If the U.S. has any vestiges left of democracy, it requires an educated public that will stand up to the kind of systematic injustices we've suffered in the past two general elections. And Inaba's film fervently pleads its case for justice to prevail.