Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Ohio’s Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, has dictated that all counties must replace their Direct Recording Electronic voting machines with optical-scan machines. This was all done before the state announced a $1.9B shortfall in revenue. The media are now reporting that Brunner has two choices if she doesn’t back down: force the replacement and don’t help counties to pay for new machines or remove from office all officials who defy her wishes.

The Illinois Ballot Integrity Project has announced that they have begun a clearinghouse for election problems at the polls. Illinois voters are encouraged to go to their blog and report the problem. This sharing of information is vital to our discovering problems and getting those problems solved. ...

(Hat-tip Mike Finnigan of C&L)

ADDENDUM...
By way of happy coincidence, we had mocked up the above item on Friday night for prep to run later, and then showed up to speak Saturday morning at the independent media conference here in Santa Cruz where a guy who looked very similar to the video above was making a few announcements from the podium. Turns out it was the same guy, Bryan Sacks of Philadelphia, and he was one of the organizers of the conference. Small world. Got to chat with him for a while later in the day, and happily so. He's a good guy. Plus, he thoroughly apologizes for not giving The BRAD BLOG its proper hat-tip in the above video, claiming that he did in the original script, but it ended up on the cutting room floor. We shall endeavor to forgive him and look forward to him otherwise keeping up the good work!

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

In response to the Colorado Governor and legislative leaders' push for every county to use paper ballots at the polls in November, and to be counted by optical-scan, county election officials are warning of long lines and late results. We’ve heard this from election officials in California and Ohio, also. My opinion? So what. I want my vote counted and I want as much assurance that it has been correctly counted as possible. I don’t need immediate gratification, i.e., a winner or loser within 30 minutes of the polls closing. The media crawl all over themselves to be the first to call the election for one candidate or another. Well, if they have to wait a few more hours then so be it. I want my damn vote counted the way I cast it. Tomorrow is fine. And about the long-lines; have they heard of cardboard boxes? Voters don’t necessarily need to use a specially built voting booth. If they have a choice between using a cardboard box as a booth or standing in a long line in the rain or snow, which do you think they will chose?

Our sincere congratulations to the elections staff and poll workers of Horry County, South Carolina, for what is being reported as a trouble-free election today.

As usual, links to those stories, and the rest of today's voting news, all follow below...

[UPDATE: The UK Sunday Times piece referred to below as "coming tonight" has now been published right here: "Tip-off thwarted nuclear spy ring probe." Some key passages and a bit more commentary has been been posted as an update, appended to the bottom of the article below.]

I'm in an alternative media conference up here in Santa Cruz, CA, for the bulk of the day and evening, so may or may not be here when the story gets filed. So offering an advance heads-up that UK's Sunday Times is set to offer another exclusive tonight on Sibel Edmonds' claims of the illicit sale of U.S. nuke secrets to the foreign black market, as protected by high-ranking U.S. officials, and the connections in the story to Valerie Plame Wilson's "Brewster Jennings" CIA cover company.

Should hit around 7pm PT ET. (If any of the BRAD BLOG eds are around, please feel free to update this item with a link to the new article when it runs.)

For those of you just jumping into this story, our most recent articles of note on the explosive series of Times/Edmonds stories are here...

1/6/08: SIBEL EDMONDS SPEAKS TO UK SUNDAY TIMES: SAYS U.S. OFFICIALS INVOLVED IN RELEASE OF NUKE SECRETS TO TURKEY, PAKISTAN, IRAN, OTHERS, POSSIBLY EVEN AL-QAEDA

1/8/08: Worldwide Coverage (Everywhere but in the U.S. ) of the Sibel Edmonds Bombshell

1/19/08: UK Sunday Times Scoops US Media Again, Confirms FBI Cover-Up of Documents in Sibel Edmonds Nuke Secrets Case

1/20/08: DANIEL ELLSBERG EXCLUSIVE: Covering Up the Coverage - The American Media's Complicit Failure to Investigate and Report on the Sibel Edmonds Case

The collection of all of BRAD BLOG's Edmonds stories are here...

UPDATE: The new Sunday Times piece is now posted. Here it is: "Tip-off thwarted nuclear spy ring probe"

It's another blockbuster. So big, the U.S. media have assigned several extra reporters to begin ignoring it immediately.

The article picks up on the Times' coverage from last week, which corroborated one element of an "anonymous letter" referring to an FBI case number said to be at the center of allegations by "gagged" former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds. In response to a FOIA request, the FBI had denied the existence of documents related to such a case number, though the Times corroborated the existence of an official document referring to that case.

The BRAD BLOG obtained the anonymous letter several weeks ago, prior to the Times' expose, but has yet to publish it in full.

Part of the letter alleges that Marc Grossman, the former #3 State Department official under Powell and Armitage, tipped off Turkish agents that Valerie Plame Wilson's "Brewster Jennings" was actually a CIA counter-proliferation operation tracking the sale of nuclear secrets to the foreign black market.

The Times series of articles, including the latest, does not give Grossman's name, but refers to him, and quotes him as a "State Department official." Here are the money grafs, and there are several of them, from the Times article, along with a few more details in follow-up...

Blogged by Brad from Santa Cruz, CA...

This is how bad it's gotten:

Last week, as The BRAD BLOG reported, machines in 100% of the precincts in Horry County, SC couldn't even be made to start working until noon or so in the Republican Primary. Folks were voting on any scrap of paper they could find, reportedly even paper towels. So now, it's print your own.

South Carolina uses DRE (touch-screen) voting systems made by ES&S. It will be literally and physically impossible to verify that a single vote has been recorded accurately on any of them. 100% faith-based voting. So, short of machines breaking down leading to the outrage of people not being unable to vote at all, or a huge undervote rate in some area (as we saw when 18,000 votes "disappeared" on the exact same machines in the 369 vote margin Jennings/Buchanan race in Sarasota's FL-13 Congressional election in '06 on the exact same machines) we'll likely have little to say about the results of today's Democratic Primary in the Palmetto State one way or another. Our guess will be as good (or bad) as theirs. Best of luck to ya, South Carolina.

By way of depressing reminder: This Election Year is just 26 days old.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Just announced by Voter Action is that they have filed a preliminary injunction to stop Lackawanna, Northampton, and Wayne Cos Pennsylvania from purchasing and using unverifiable, paperless DREs. They are citing state law which requires that all voting systems produce a “permanent paper record.”

The South Carolina Democratic primary is tomorrow. The state promises there will be no repeat of last Saturday’s train wreck in the Republican primary. Let’s hope the promises are kept and the machines all work the way they are supposed to.

In New Hampshire Secretary of State Gardner has told the media that Kucinich was satisfied with the few ballots that had been recounted and had called a halt to the recount. Gardner seems to have a bit of a problem because he had already received a letter from Kucinich that was critical of the results from some polling places and asked that the state conduct a complete and accurate recount. ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org

The community of Gloucester Mass. has a huge environmental disaster on its hands due to a sewage pipe that is leaking into the bay. The community has $150M in unfunded mandates due to the sewage pipe and all of that on an $80M budget.

Now the community, as well as those across Massachusetts, has been told that they must replace all of their ES&S Optech Eagle III-P precinct based optical scan voting machines. ES&S has told these people that the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) has mandated that those machines can no longer be used. According to the Gloucester Times Daily ES&S has told its customers in MA that "the firm's software 'will not meet federal standards and can't be modified to meet those standards.'"

In fact, the software may not meet the present federal standards that it would be tested against, if it needed to be tested today. However, the software and the machines have worked fine in the past and can probably continue to work for as long as Massachusetts communities want to use them.

This morning I called the Editor of the Gloucester Daily Times. He was interested to learn that the EAC had made no such mandate and that this seemed to be a sales ploy by the vendor. His interest was not unexpected after he ran an editorial in his paper this morning in which he said:

Then I called the city clerk's office and spoke with the gentleman in charge of voting machines. He said that communities across the state like the III-P's and want to keep them. They cannot afford to buy new machines and they don't understand why they are being forced into that position. He told me that with the III-P's the only failure they ever had was a "read head" that was easy to replace. Newer technology has many more moving parts.

It's amazing that ES&S is clearly misstating the facts and accusing the federal Election Assistance Commission of making mandates that will cost these Massachusetts communities hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Blogged by Brad, from on the road...

Behold the "chain of custody" for the ballots in New Hampshire's ongoing Election Contest hand counts. The man seen in the still frame below, on the right, is NH Sec. of State Bill Gardner...

The above video clips were recorded and compiled by election watchdogs Bev Harris (of BlackBoxVoting.org) and Susan Pynchon (of Florida Fair Elections Coalition), both of whom were on the ground in Concord during the initial stages of the requested Democratic and Republican hand counts following the Primary Election in the Granite State. Harris offers more commentary on the video above right here.

Previously, Harris posted a stunning photo essay detailing the embarrassingly poor condition of the ballot boxes themselves --- unsealed, open for anyone to reach their hand in --- as they were picked up from towns around the state and delivered to the counting area at Concord's State Archives building.

The counting continues today for Republican Albert Howard, though New Hampshire SoS Bill Gardner, seen in the above video, has requested a halt in the counting for two days next week. That, after apparently misrepresenting Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich's serious concerns about "significant variances" discovered during counting of just one New Hampshire county so far. Disparities have been discovered as high as 10% for some candidates in some precincts.

By Brad Friedman, from on the road (again)...

A representative of Republican Albert Howard's New Hampshire hand count called this morning to say that, without giving any specific details, the NH SoS office informed them today that "We're gonna have to stop the recount for a couple of days" next week. No reason, other than "legislative business" was given.

A few minutes ago, Howard, who had patiently waited for nearly two weeks while NH SoS Bill Gardner began the counting for the Democratic request, claiming they couldn't count the two different primaries at one time (though it seems they couldn't even count one primary at the same time!), sent us the following note, objecting to the delay in counting. The letter was hand delivered to Gardner moments ago...

Howard had requested the hand count after noting that results reported by C-SPAN on Election Night allegedly showed him as having many more votes than were finally reported in the official results after the polls closed. He gave a check for $57,600, raised by supporters, to the SoS on January 16th. His hand count finally began yesterday, after Kucinich's stopped when the funds submitted so far had apparently been spent.

Yesterday, we pointed to Gardner's apparent lie to the media, claiming that Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich was "satisfied at the integrity of the recount" despite a letter from Kucinich to Gardner the day before (posted exclusively by The BRAD BLOG here), clearly revealing Kucinich to be anything but "satisfied," and, in fact, having requested "a complete and accurate recount of all ballots" to be carried out at state expense, given the "significant variances" discovered so far during the counting of just one NH county.

We had left a message with the SoS office seeking comment and/or clarification for Gardner's statement to the media. He has yet to return our call.

UPDATE 1/26/08, 1:35am PT: We've been on the road, and in a media conference all day, so haven't been able to follow up ourselves, but an emailer writes to tell us, "the NH SOS told Albert Howard that there would be NO recess in the counting of ballots next week".

Bev Harris reports in comments (along with additional thoughts on the dynamics of SoS Gardner and Dept. SoS David Scanlan) that she has received a similar report from someone else on the ground in NH, that the count will proceed without hold up. Though the reasons for the initially attempted halt remain a mystery for now.

What's clear is that standing up, and pushing back loudly and publicly by Howard has made a difference. If Democrats did the same, we'd probably not be in this fine mess in the first place...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Late yesterday a report was released by the Florida Fair Elections Center regarding the Nov. 2006 election in which voting machines did not register over 18,000 votes in the congressional district 13 race. The report, “Sarasota's Vanished Votes - An Investigation into the Cause of Uncounted Votes in the 2006 Congressional District 13 Race in Sarasota County, Florida January 2008,” is a well researched and presented report that chronicles the problems that very probably led to the wrong person serving the voters of Florida Congressional District 13. The report is damning to the vendor, ES&S, and to local and state election officials. ES&S’s statement about the report is that the writers of the report are “biased.” Of course the report had just been released and they had no way to have read a word.

This morning when I began working on this space I wrote something about New York and how the State Election Board could (would) not make a decision on what voting technology would be used for accessibility. A decision that allowed DREs would have nearly guaranteed that some counties in the state would be using DREs in the future. Apparently Board Member Doug Kellner was able to convince the other two members that New York State Law must be followed and that none of the DREs would meet the legal requirements. So, today the board met again and unanimously voted to allow only optical-scan or ballot-marking-devices for accessibility. No DREs were approved. This is a huge win for the voters in New York....

The BRAD BLOG is four years old today! Though it feels like 40 for some reason.

If you're in the mood to leave us a much-needed birthday gift, we'll happily and gratefully accept it right here.

If you're in the mood to really make this year "count", please consider creating an automatic monthly support subscription of any $ amount you wish. It'll take you about 60 seconds. See the blue form on the right side of this page to set it up quickly.

We'll send a gift (we've got a number of cool premiums we'll contact you about) to anyone who signs up for $10 or more per month.

NOTE: I'll be "celebrating" by driving back up to Northern California for the bulk of the day, to speak this weekend at an alternative media conference in Santa Cruz. So I'll be "off the grid" until later tonight. If you're near Santa Cruz, please come on by if you can! There will be a bunch of great folks there, including (ironically enough) a panel I'll be speaking on Friday night, along with Elizabeth Kucinich and Elizabeth de la Vega (author of The U.S. v. George W. Bush). While I've spoken to both Elizabeths on the phone previously, I'll look forward to meeting them in person. Especially now!

On Monday, New Hampshire's Union Leader editorialized as follows...

While The BRAD BLOG has reported, in some detail, on the incompetence of New Hampshire's Secretary of State, Bill Gardner, his failure to track Diebold memory cards, and many more issues revealed during the course of the Election Contests following the state's recent Primary Election, we've yet to question his integrity.

However, if this report from today's Nashua Telegraph accurately quotes Gardner, then its time to begin questioning him on that score, because now it would appear he is simply out and out lying to the media about the hand count results, and Dennis Kucinich's position on it, at this hour, as stated clearly in a letter sent yesterday to the SoS.

Tucked at the end of the Kevin Landrigan's Telegraph piece today on the latest "recount" news, are the following, virtually inexplicable, comments from Gardner...

Following on our report last Saturday of massive voting machine failures that kept voters from voting for hours in Horry County, SC, Kitty Pilgrim, on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight (video at left), reported yesterday on plans for SC to use the same machines again in this Saturday's Democratic primary.

At the same time, the Governor and Legislature in Colorado are finally beginning to get it, and simply override the incompetent SoS there, who can't seem to say "E-Voting machines that don't work should NOT be used in elections." So the Legislature appears ready to do it for him.

We're also happy to see the good John Bonifaz, of VoterAction.org, making an appearance to call for accountability (let's get our money back!) from the voting machine companies that have knowingly defrauded America.

And a NOTE TO KITTY PILGRIM: Your reporting keeps discussing "paperless voting machines" in reference to Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) machines that have no "paper trail." Adding "paper trails" to such machines is meaningless. They cannot be verified as reflecting the voter intent anymore than on a DRE without "paper trails."

If you stop and look carefully at your own reporting on SC last week, you'll note that the machines would not work at all until noon, as folks were scrambling to vote on scraps of paper, paper towels, etc. Had those DREs had "paper trails," they still would not have worked, and voters still would not have been able to vote on them.

References to "paperless voting machines" imply that machines with "paper trails" are somehow a solution. They are not. Only paper ballots are a solution. This is something that even Rep. Rush Holt's latest "Emergency Bill" doesn't seem to understand, incredibly enough. That bill (referenced in the CNN report above) would give money to jurisdictions to move to paper ballots, but only if they use "paperless" DREs. If they have DREs with "paper trails," however, they would not be eligible for that money under Holt's bill as written, incredibly enough.

Let's be careful what we wish for and/or report on, guys!

"A movement of ordinary citizens to save our democratic birthright is growing."

Once again, American treasure Robert Koehler, of Tribune Media Services, defies the corporate masters and gatekeepers, by delivering words that actually need to be read...

Our friend, sometimes seen in BRAD BLOG comments by the name of "Czaragorn," lost his beloved wife, born Anna Pernikarova, on January 22, MLK Day, after her 3 year fight with cancer. She was 53 years old.

"Czaragorn," an American ex-pat who now lives in the Czech Republic, quietly corrects my grammar, typos, punctuation, and wicked tendency to write "it's" instead of "its" and other such thankless tasks. He works late at night, from across the ocean, after we've moved on to other stories, and other things, like sleeping.

Many were the nights, he tells me, that Anna looked the other way, as "Czaragorn" toiled on our behalf. My prayers, best wishes, and condolences go out to him tonight. Thank you, Bob. RIP, Anna Pernikarova.