“A Time To Break Silence” celebrated its 10th anniversary on Sunday with a virtual event centered around election transparency, voting rights and voter suppression.
The annual event series was founded at the Castleton Festival in 2012 by activist Orson Maazel, who hosted the anniversary celebration, and opera singer Davóne Tines. It focuses on raising awareness on social justice and environmental issues through collaborations between artists and activists, according to the A Time To Break Silence website.
Presentations were given by John Brakey, director and co-founder of AUDIT Elections USA, Jason Flatley, head of design and product development at America Counts and Ray Lutz, executive director of Citizens’ Oversight. Each presentation centered around a different area of election security and transparency, and empowering voters to access and audit election information to help prevent inaccuracies.
“If we do independent audits, we can achieve improved election transparency, defend against bad faith accusations of election fraud, and most extremely, potentially uncover evidence of error or fraud if it exists,” said Flatley in his presentation on how vote reporting works in the United States. He talked about Actual Vote, a free app that allows citizens to report and verify election data.
In between presentations, recordings were played of the words of thought leaders such as Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King Jr. Donations and ticket sales from the event will go towards the three organizations the presenters represented.
