Nope, and Eric Boehlert explains why. After years of having abdicated their Constitutionally-guaranteed role as watchdog for the public, the corporate media's too-little, too-late, temporary stint at actually reporting is now regarded as little more than a joke. And one that not even McCain/Palin feel they need to take seriously. What they've sowed, so shall we reap.

We’ve been telling you that voter registration issues are going to be important this year. Even voters who have been registered for years and who have voted in recent elections may find out, when they go to the polls in Nov., that they are not eligible to cast ballots. In our “Featured” article Kim Zetter of Wired News has done a great job in gathering information on voter registration data bases and presenting that information. It’s a scary story. Everyone needs to check to ensure they are still registered to vote and that the registration is correct. Do it now while there is still time to make corrections...

Over at HuffPo, Nancy Scola files a nice piece asking whether or not "New Media's obsessiveness" can save democracy, given that "Elections in the U.S. involve countless moving parts and...so many different players [that] Improving the way we vote demands sustained, focused attention --- not exactly the strong suit of the American Press."

It's a job for bloggers, she suggests, since the corporate media have, at least so far, not proven up to the task. She may be right, even though the thought simply exhausts me more than I am already.

She goes on to mention a few of us (yes, she names me specifically) who have been fighting this battle for quite some time. "From the sidelines, their campaign often seemed quixotic," she writes, "But [as electronic voting machines are now being scrapped for junk, recycled and/or sold on eBay] we're watching history bend their way."

Nice. Though not as nice as the following turn of phrase, so well writ that I had to share it:

Game, set, match. Well done, Nancy.

With that, one friendly critique for her if I could be so bold: Paperless electronic voting is not the problem --- as she suggests in the piece --- as if adding "paper trails" to touch-screens makes a damned bit of difference (this article and its accompanying video from the Computer Security Group at UC Santa Barbara should make that crystal clear, no matter what some computer scientists like Princeton's Ed Felten and Verified Voting's David Dill keep saying out loud.) The problem is that democracy in this country demands nothing short of the transparency offered by a hand-marked paper ballot --- one that is actually counted, and counted accurately --- for every vote cast in America. Period.

And that point should be served from a silver platter, and carried directly to every election official and election official in the country, in the beak of a bald eagle.

I'll once again be hosting KPFK/Pacifica's "Special Election Year Coverage" hour from 2p-3p PT (5p-6p ET) today (Wednesday).

I hope to be focusing on plans (or lack thereof) by both Democrats and Republicans to help protect your vote, though neither the Obama/DNC nor the McCain/RNC has so far been particularly forthcoming in offering a rep to discuss those plans. So if they don't show up, I guess I'll have to discuss their plans myself. To bad for them, I guess.

Guests scheduled for today...

• JON GREENBAUM - Director of the National Lawyers Committee's Voting Rights Project, on their new, non-partisan, 866OurVote.org election protection effort announced today.
• MARK CRISPIN MILLER - NYU Media Professor, author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform and Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. See his BRAD BLOG guest blog on why he believes Palin was chosen as Veep by the GOP, filed yesterday.

In addition to that, I will be giving away some DVDs of the freshly released documentary Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story and tickets to next Tuesday night's Los Angeles screening of the documentary Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections at the Fairfax in Hollywood to callers (see the websites of each for more details.)

KPFK is heard at 90.7FM in Los Angeles and 98.7FM in Santa Barbara and streams live on the net at KPFK.org. Please tune in, stream in, and call-in at 818-985-5735, if you like.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: It was another lively, and hopefully very informative show today, with a bunch o' great calls and more. Unfortunately, our best laid plans for Mark Crispin Miller were for naught, as we lost him on the Long Island Railroad somewhere, but Jon Greenbaum was great, with a lotta good info, and some interesting information concerning the National Lawyers Committee's support for a bill that supported the continued use of touch-screen voting machines. I'm hopeful they will consider changing their position in the future, even as they're doing a great job of serving the voters with their 866-OUR-VOTE election protection effort this season!

MP3 Download (appx 55 mins), or listen online...

BTW...I hope those within spittin' distance of L.A. will come to the screening of Uncounted in Los Angeles --- as mentioned during the show, next Tuesday (9/23) at Fairfax Cinemas, 7907 Beverly Blvd. --- where you'll be able to spit on me, filmmaker David Earnhardt, "Diebold Document Whistleblower" Steve Heller, and host Jerry Quickly of KPFK in the Q&A that follows. If you can't come, you can get the DVD at the website, OR help support our work here and get a special version of the DVD, signed by Earnhardt, in exchange for a contribution of $50 or more to The BRAD BLOG.

We hope to offer a similar premium soon, for the just-released --- and scary as hell --- Murder, Spies & Voting Lies!

And, in addition to everything else, the dirty trick push-polling seems to have begun in earnest. From AP today...

As usual, "anything to win" for these guys.

SAVE R VOTE is a group of election watchdogs in Riverside Co California. Yesterday the group gave the county Board of Supervisors a report that they wrote after pouring over more than 10,000 documents for the past three months. Their report included evidence of elections staff correcting documents to balance ballot inventory; electronic voting machines being delivered up to 11 days before the election, some times to bathrooms [Election law permits officials to deliver voting machines a week before Election Day]; and missing electronic voting cartridges. Of course the county registrar could only do all she could do to minimize the issue. Congratulations to SAVE R VOTE. They got the county supervisors to listen. They have ordered an audit of the Registrar’s office to determine why there were hundreds of violations found. ...

-- Brad Friedman

I've been quite critical of the Obama/DNC plan (or lack thereof) for "election protection" this year, noting that it looks, smells and sounds a lot like a slightly beefed-up version of the Kerry/DNC "we'll have thousands of lawyers in place on Election Day should anything go wrong."

On Election Day, of course, if DNC lawyers are still trying to keep up with what's going on, it's already game over. While for years Osama Bin Laden and Muslim extremists had supposedly declared war on the U.S., as the legend goes, America paid little attention until it was too late. So it is with the raging Republican War on Democracy, where proactive steps are necessary (beginning long ago, but we'll take what we can get at this point) to join the war and push back against the GOP's assault on the most democratic of all values, the right to freely cast one's vote, to have that vote counted, and to have it counted accurately.

Back in 2006, after speaking to a group of DNC election attorneys in Chicago, I wrote about the "Dysfunction at the DNC" and the persistent cluelessness they had displayed at the time concerning a number of very real threats to our electoral system. While Obama has certainly displayed a tendency to understand at least some of the issues at stake --- far more so than his '04 counterpart --- the party, from every sign I'm able to get, remains out of touch with the serious threats they face: from the massive front-end disenfranchisement efforts, about which they are at least somewhat aware, to the back-end disenfranchisement efforts via manipulation and/or often-undiscoverable "tabulation error" of completely un-transparent electronic voting systems used in virtually every county, in every state in the union.

So we may be grasping for any optimistic straw we can find here, but at least today we have one such sign of proactivity from the Obama/DNC that we can tell you about...

A Guest Editorial by author and NYU media professor, Mark Crispin Miller...

"Strategists say that Mr. McCain can now count on a more motivated social conservative base to help him in areas like southern Ohio, where the 2004 race was settled."
--The New York Times, Sept. 7, 2008, A1

"In investigating the 2004 election in Ohio--examining pollbooks, talking to pollworkers and election officials, as well as reading local newspaper accounts --we could find no data of a late surge to the polls by born-again Christians. What we did find is certified voting totals in areas favoring Bush that didn't match the number of voters who officially signed-in on the poll sign-in sheets."
--Email from Bob Fitrakis of The Columbus Free Press, Sept. 7, 2008

To understand how Team McCain intends to get away with stealing this election, we must recall how Team Bush got away with it four years ago. (Those aren't two different teams.)

The plan for stealing this contest has everything to do with the ostensibly surprising choice of Sarah Palin as McCain's VP.

Here's why...

Last Friday a group of volunteers for a non-partisan veteran’s organization went to a Veterans Administration facility in San Francisco to meet with veterans and to provide them with an opportunity to register to vote. Just a couple weeks ago the Department of Veterans Affairs relented under pressure from state and national election officials, veteran’s advocacy groups, and legislators and agreed to allow non-partisan voter registration drives in their facilities. Contrary to assurances from the DVA the volunteers were stopped and told that for them to meet with residents they would have to go through a back-ground check to ensure they were, in fact, non-partisan and each visitor would have to submit to tuberculosis screening, a process that requires two medical appointments. A federal judge has already found that the DVA cannot impose special limitations on visitors simply based on their message. The DVA, at least in San Francisco, has decided to ignore the court and impose those special limitations. ...

Wow. Poor Tucker Bounds. First CNN's right-leaning Campbell Brown (she's married to Bush Admin loyalist/lackey Dan Senor, despite the fact that CNN rarely, if ever, discloses that serious conflict of interest) committed a rare act of actual journalism by asking Bounds what foreign affairs experience Sarah Palin had. The McCain/Palin shill had nothing, and embarrassed himself under Brown's repeated, and responsible, prodding. So the McCain camp subsequently cancelled an interview with CNN's Larry King, claiming "that exchange was over the line" because Brown bothered to ask actual questions, and follow-ups, of their campaign.

And now, it seems that even Fox "News" is holding a McCain foot to the fire for some currently inexplicable reason. Fox's Megyn Kelly went after Bounds in regard to the McCain camp's continuing lies, and new ad claiming Obama plans to raise taxes on the middle class, despite countless independent think-tanks that have studied the Obama tax plan and have reported the McCain claim to be simply untrue.

"I want to hold you accountable for what McCain is doing," Kelly said for some reason today. ThinkProgress has details, here's their video...

The remarkable video of Brown's grilling of Bounds on CNN during the Republican Convention follows below, in case you missed it previously, or in case you'd like a nourishing second helping of freshly grilled Tucker...

Blogged By John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org

Despite last week's agreement by the Dept. of Veteran Affairs to follow federal law --- after months of pressure from vet groups, members of Congress, and the public --- and relent to allow voter registration drives on the department's federal facilities, The BRAD BLOG has learned that the department is continuing to block non-partisan groups access to our wounded warriors in order to sign up voters. With most voter registration deadlines for the general election just one month away, the continuing stonewall, in this case by the San Francisco VA, continues to outrage.

The non-partisan Veterans for Peace organization has now been forced to file an emergency motion with the court in order to gain access. They contacted us this morning with the following statement...

"Having registered only 414 veterans nationwide, the VA needs all the help it can get," notes the press release from VFP, which continues in full below...

Following up on the arrest last week of Pima County (Tuscon), Arizona, election integrity advocate John Brakey... You'll recall, he was arrested after noticing that some 7 out of 10 bags of ballots being counted during a post-election audit last week were missing their proper security seals.

As an election observer representing both the Libertarian and Democratic parties during the hand-count audit of a Sept. 2nd state Primary, Brakey began to ask questions about the bags --- which had supposedly been chosen at random the day before --- prompting Pima's Brad "Election Director Gone Wild" Nelson to call the sheriff on him.

Despite the missing seals (which even Nelson admitted to himself, as seen in the Channel 9-KGUN video report we posted with our original coverage of the incident), the Pima County Board of Supervisors went ahead and certified the election canvass anyway, "over the objections of activists who wanted the county to wait until an additional hand audit could be conducted over the weekend," according to the Arizona Daily Star.

"The supervisors said they were very concerned about persistent problems in the Division of Elections, but they could not legally postpone the canvass," the paper reported over the weekend. That, despite a news conference that Brakey and the other activists held late in the week to call for a new audit, using properly sealed ballots, "and focusing on contested supervisor races, of which there were three."

They have also called for the removal of the beleaguered, hot-headed and perhaps even criminal Nelson, after years of problems and obstructions from the Pima Election Director. According to the Daily Star, at least one of the Supervisors agrees it's time for Nelson to to be removed...

Guest Blogged by Steve Heller of VelvetRevolution's Election Protection Strike Force...

On Friday, Judge Tomi Green of the Hind County, Mississippi, circuit court issued an order [7 page pdf] pertaining to the case of Trudy Berger, et al. vs Governor Haley Barbour and Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann. For background on this case, see our coverage from Thursday, but in brief, Barbour and Hosemann recently issued a sample ballot for the upcoming general election, as required by state law. They buried the special election for Senator Trent Lott's (R) old seat --- between former Mississippi governor Ronnie Musgrove (D) and Roger Wicker (R) --- at the very bottom of the ballot, even though state law requires that races for federal office must be at the top of the ballot.

Despite the clear state law, Barbour and Hosemann claimed that, because this was a special election, it should go at the bottom of the ballot. We believe it was an attempt on their part to "hide" the race, because while Wicker is slightly ahead in the polls currently, he is thought to be vulnerable and Musgrove, a popular former governor, may well unseat Wicker (who was temporarily appointed by Barbour to fill Lott's seat following his resignation at the beginning of the year.)

In Judge Green's ruling, she ordered the Governor and Secretary of State to follow the law. She ordered that the Musgrove/Wicker race must be near the top of the ballot with the other federal races. She found that because the Musgrove/Wicker race is a special election, it should be indicated as such not by placing it at the bottom of the ballot, but that it "must be accomplished by simply bold typing 'SPECIAL ELECTION' as a 'header' above the title of the office sought."

Barbour has announced he will appeal the decision...

Voter registrations and voter registration data bases have been a huge problem during the primary elections. There is no reason to believe that they will not be a huge problem in November. One of the only ways to ensure a voter is registered is for that voter to check their registration. We recommend every voter check now and then check again just before the voter’s state registration closes before November. We urge voters who find themselves purged from the registration roles to write a letter of complaint to their local Board of Supervisors, especially their own representative, with a CC to their SoS, the local newspaper Editor, and their congressional members. If those responsible for representing the citizenry start receiving such letters they might act to eliminate the cause. You can find out the date that your state is closing registration and who to check to ensure your registration is still good HERE: ...