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Will your vote count in November?

A lot of folks in Ohio are still smarting from the 2004 presidential election, when the nation's eyes turned to the pivotal state's tight race between John Kerry and President Bush, eventually tipping toward the incumbent, sealing his re-election.

Some point to Ohio as the place where the Bush team stole the election, citing polling-place snarls in Democratic strongholds and suspicions about voting machines which didn't generate paper trails.

Charla Barker, a graduate of the University of New Mexico, tells that story in the film "How Ohio Pulled It Off," which will be screened at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at the Guild Cinema in Nob Hill.

Barker co-directed the film with fellow Ohio University grad students Matthew Kraus and Mariana Quiroga. The film clearly attacks the issue from the left, suggesting things weren't kosher in 2004 — and that Ohio might not be the end of the story.

"It started out in Florida," journalist Greg Palast intones during the film, recalling the hanging chads that elected Bush in the first place. "Ohio, 2004. It's going west — New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado."

Barker had moved from New Mexico to Ohio by 2004, and she remembers the fallout from the election. Exit polls had shown Kerry with a solid margin, and when the numbers were counted, the Democrat's lead quickly melted in the wee hours as Bush did surprisingly well in liberal precincts.

"The next day, all my friends started calling me, asking me, 'What happened?' " she recalled. "Everybody was shocked by the outcome."

Barker said she and her colleagues went into the project open-minded, digging through documents and following hearings led by John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat.

"We were, like, 'Whoa. Maybe people voted like they think they did but there were all these problems with the machines . . . everything.' It changed the whole direction of the project."

Barker says Palast, the British journalist, might be prophetic in his warnings of more irregularities in 2008.

"He's predicted the West and Southwest would see a problem, with Native American and Hispanic voters," she said. "Those are the two groups he thought would be targeted."

She said "How Ohio Pulled It Off" is a call to grass-roots voters to be aware of the election process.

"It's more of a warning, rather than solutions," she said.

"You have to pay attention and you have to be vigilant, and you have to hold people accountable for what's happening."

Barker, 33, earned her master's in filmmaking in June from Ohio University. She moved to Hollywood in October. "If you're going to be a filmmaker, this is the place to be," she said.

Barker grew up in western Pennsylvania. She had visited Colorado and wanted to study Native American art. She settled on the University of New Mexico, originally in the fine arts department. She segued to studio arts — paintings, sculptures — and then video and film.

In the late '90s, she worked with filmmaker Paige Martinez on "El Senador," a biography of New Mexico politician Dennis Chavez. She later shot video as a news staffer at KOB-Channel 4.

The work on "El Senador," which she described as mostly a two-person project, gave her a crash course in filmmaking.

"The 'Senador' project laid the foundation for everything I'm doing now," Barker said. "That project was an education in itself. It was basically me and the director."

When the Ohio folks needed to license footage from CNN, Barker stepped in to take care of it, because she had done that for the New Mexico film. She also edited "Ohio" with Quiroga.

Barker left New Mexico in 2003 to expand her horizons.

"I felt like I'd gotten as far as I could get, as far as filmmaking in New Mexico," she said. "It was right before the big boom."

She landed at Ohio University.

"It's a really good program, but it's the one no one's ever heard of," she said with a laugh.

She said it was easy to work with Kraus and Quiroga as a team of directors.

"A lot of faculty in our program didn't think it would work," Barker said. "They thought it would be a three-headed monster."

"How Ohio Pulled It Off" is still making the rounds of film festivals, and the makers are looking for a distributor.

Barker is a veteran of Basement Films, Albuquerque's underground cinema group, and she showed the film to Keif Henley, co-owner of the Guild, back in the fall when she was passing through Albuquerque on her way to Los Angeles. He asked if he could show it as part of the Guild's weekend matinee documentary series.

Barker hopes the lively political races will stir interest in her film.

"There's a wave of interest in the elections now," she said, "so we're hoping to catch that energy and propel the film that way and get it out there."