Guest Blogged by John Gideon

Tonight Lou reported on the complete failure of the Maryland primary. Thousands of voters were forced to vote on 'provisional' ballots instead of the state's vaunted Diebold Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines. At least those voters have a paper trail of their votes, but will they actually be counted? What a failure and it should all be laid at the feet of state Director of Elections Linda Lamone and Governor Ehrlich who both share responsibility for this failure.

The text-transcript of tonight's segment on Lou Dobbs Tonight follows in full...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

Sarasota Alliance for Fair Elections (SAFE) has just announced that a Sarasota County Judge has found in their favor and against the county voting officials and the Florida Secretary of State.

SAFE had been proposing a ballot initiative that would require voter verified paper ballots and independent random audits of election results in Sarasota County. The County Commissioner chose to go to court instead of allowing the legal petition to move forward.

The press release from SAFE says:

This is a big announcement from a hard-working group of activists who still have an uphill battle to force their county to use a voter verified, auditable voting system.

Guest blogged by Joy Williams

According to CNN, Ann Richards, the former Governor of Texas, has passed on due to esophogeal cancer. She was a straight talker, a truth teller, and an intelligent and fiery woman. She will be missed.

As a former Texan, I found in Ann Richards a salt-of-the-earth kind of person who had an incredible amount of compassion, and is one of those gems that you find amongst those tumbling tumbleweeds. You could trust her. You could rely on her. You knew she cared.

Her spirit and energy were phenomenal. She would have made a tremendous President.

In 1988, she gave the Democratic National Convention Keynote Address. Though it's a different George Bush, much of what she said then applies remarkably well now. The Bushes have NEVER changed their agenda. Please read her address.

We love you, Ann!

-- Brad Friedman, EXCLUSIVE
-- (Salon.com has posted a shortened version of the following report right here:
"Hack the vote? No problem")

A vote for George Washington could easily be converted to a vote for Benedict Arnold on an electronic voting machine and neither the voter, nor the election officials administering the election would ever know what happened. It wouldn't require a "conspiracy theory" or a "conspiracy" at all. It could be done by a single person with just a few moments of access to the voting systems.

Those new findings are detailed, and illustrated on video-tape, in a new first-of-its-kind study released today by computer scientists and security experts at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.

(The version of the video demo at the Princeton website is being hit hard, and thus, slow to download and view currently. We've got a quick flash version available here for your convenience, courtesy of David Edwards.)

The scientific study has revealed, for the first time, that a computer virus can be easily implanted on an electronic voting machine which could, in turn, result in votes flipped for opposing candidates. The virus, as well, could be written to then spread itself from one machine to the next resulting in a stolen election. The malfeasance would likely never be discovered, the scientists have said.

Though the concept of stolen votes via electronic voting systems has been widely regarded as theoretically possible by experts up until now, a top-secret four-month long hands-on study of an actual touch-screen voting system, by the scientists at Princeton, has confirmed the worst nightmares of elections officials and American voters…not to mention a voting machine company known as Diebold.

The BRAD BLOG has had exclusive access to the scientists and information being tested as the team's various hack attempts have been designed and carried out over the course of the study.

Working directly with a Diebold AccuVote TS touch-screen voting system, the computer scientists have been able to implant a nearly-undetectable virus onto a touch-screen voting system, managing to successfully alter a voter's ballot --- after it's already been confirmed and cast --- in order to flip the vote so that it is recorded for a candidate other than the one the voter had intended.

According to the study's team leader, Edward W. Felten, a professor at Princeton's Department of Computer Science, the report confirms – and records in a video-taped demonstration – that such a malicious virus could be easily inserted onto a Diebold touch-screen voting system by a single individual "with just one or two minutes of unsupervised access to either the voting machine or the memory card" used with the system to store ballot definitions and vote tabulations.

The virus, as programmed by the Princeton team, could then spread from one voting system to the next depending on the way the machine in use is configured, or the way in which votes are tabulated in any particular jurisdication.

(NOTE: This story was set to break on Sunday, with a release of the study on Monday morning. I had written an exclusive story for The Nation to be released Sunday night along with exclusive coverage that was being scheduled with ABC World News Tonight. The scientists of the study, unfortunately, jumped the gun in releasing it this morning without warning me. Currently scrambling to get a version of my previously prepared report up on Salon.com to be followed by a more complete report here at BRAD BLOG shortly.)

UPDATE:
-- My full exclusive report is now posted here.
-- Salon is now running a shortened version of that full report. (Requires subscription, or viewing of a short ad.)

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

by David Horsey, from the September 3rd Seattle Post-Intelligencer, via Bartcop, via my science advisor (who loves Bartcop!!)

Please consider this an OPEN THREAD!

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Election integrity advocates in Arizona got a double-whammy Tuesday --- just in time for their primaries!

First we have some bad news from Erica Meltzer of the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson:
Backup verifying of votes unlikely: Hand-recount procedures not cleared for touch screens

What??? Late Thursday? To get the recount procedures approved for use when?

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Jonathan Allen: Most RSC members enjoy pork

and more...

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Have you seen this yet?

Weird is RIGHT!

You can read all about it here.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Regular BRAD BLOG readers will know that Thomas Noe has been in big trouble for a long time. As reported previously on these pages, the former head of the Lucas County, OH GOP and a "Pioneer" level (responsible for more than $100,000 in contributions) fundraiser for Bush/Cheney '04, pled guilty to three charges including funnelling more than $45,000 in illegal contributions to the Bush/Cheney re-election effort in Ohio. Noe's wife, Bernadette, was the head of the Lucas County board of elections and was forced to step down after "irregularities" were found in their management of the 2004 election. Some of those points are discussed in Bobby Kennedy's Rolling Stone article on the gaming of the 2004 election.

Today we got the first meaningful indication of how much time Tom Noe is going to spend in prison. The Toledo Blade has very good coverage, and more than I can quote here. So hurrry on over and get yourself some of this: Noe gets 27 months in federal prison for illegal Bush contributions

It's an incredible tale in the American-dream mold: rags-to-riches-to-prison!
And Mike Wilkinson has done a fine job on the story so I really want you to read it all.

But I can't resist this bit:

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Thanks (I think) to Radar Magazine, if you went to this page: Capitol Domes: Creepy comb-overs. Macabre toupees. Misadventures in gel. (And that's just the women.), and you scolled down to where it says "Trend Four: CHILDLIKE HAIR", you would find:

They have a picture. Click that link!

Guest blogged by Joy Williams

Bush's speech yesterday and Cheney's interview this last week on Meet the Press, were the first salvos in their attempt at business as hideously usual during this election cycle. It's still fear, terror, and divisiveness, and Bush's speech last night had nothing new, except that he said there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11 but then spent the rest of the speech trying to convince us there was a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. His speech was an example of the politicization of 9/11 that is to come. Oh, the spin, the spin.

What is coming next is an ugly and cynical attempt to scare voters into voting to maintain the do-nothing Republicans in Congress.

Democrats need to be prepared with a counter-Rovian strategy. According to the Dallas Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Republicans are spending 90% of their campaign funds on negative ads, where they will attempt to dig up as much dirt as possible on their Democratic competition. And Rove has a strategy to politicize 9/11. Rove's Fall Election Strategy is revealed at Andrew Sullivan's blog...

Blogged by John Gideon

This morning voters in much of Maryland awoke with plans to go to the polls early and then head off to a normal day. Unfortunately when they got to their polling places they only found locked doors.

As reported by the Baltimore Sun many poll workers did not show up for work this morning and when they did they many had no idea how to operate new voting technology called "e-poll books" which are a necessary part of the voting process in Maryland and many other Diebold states. The workers were not trained to use that technology because Diebold did not provide the technology to the state until it was too late to properly train the pollworkers.

According to the Sun...

Not unusual? What an unbelievable statement to make when talking about elections. It's his job as the president of the Board of Elections to ensure that every poll worker is trained and that no equipment is new to them. What should be unusual is that Mr. Jones keep his job.

And this is not the whole story. Added to a lack of trained poll workers to open the polls and operate the equipment we also learn that when the supplies were sent out to the polls in Montgomery County someone forgot to include the smart cards. These are the cards that have the ballot definition and the machines will not work without them.

The Sun says:

The Washington Post is reporting that voters in Montgomery County are being given provisional ballots by poll workers until the smart cards are received. Unfortunately many polling sites ran out of provisional ballots which kept voters from voting until workers could scramble to get copies made. Even more unfortunate is the fact that these provisional ballots require inspection before they can be counted. The county should have required 'emergency ballots' to be used. These ballots would just be handled as if they were received in the mail as absentee ballots.

As this is being written candidates and political parties are beginning to ask that the polls be kept open longer this evening to make up for the late start this morning. We are also getting reports that local radio and TV station switchboards are being filled with complaints from voters who have had problems this morning. The Baltimore Sun has three people taking handling a constant flood of calls from voters with complaints.

Added to all of this is information that Diebold and the state are using technicians ("rovers") who were just hired from a technical services company, PDS Technical Services, that advertised for help on Monster.com and the only technical qualification for these people who were to provide technical oversight is that they have "some high school course work".

This post will be updated throughout the day as more information comes out.

UPDATE More information from the "Train Wreck":
Poll workers arrived at work this morning to face new "E Poll Books" which they had never seen before and on which they had gotten only a minimum of training. This technology ties in with the state's new voter registration data base. Due to these two issues some voters are arriving for the first time at the polls only to be told that they had 'already voted'.

Also being reported are "Candidate selections missing from review screens, machine crashes requiring multiple re-boots, lots of precincts running out of the paper ballot back-ups, and battery problems.

UPDATED LATE THIS AFTERNOON Fox News reports that a judge has found that polls can stay open for an extra hour this evening. This will now keep the polls open until 9PM tonight. However, the county says that only paper ballots can be used during that time.

This leads to a concern about the handling of the paper ballots that many, many voters have been forced to use. Historically provisional ballots have not always been counted and handling of those ballots takes a bit more work in that each voter who cast a provisional ballot must be checked to ensure they are truly eligible to vote. Now officials are concerned that these thousands of ballots cast today due to failures in the election administration process and with technology will be handled differently than normal ballots and may not be counted at all.

According to Fox:

It will be a surprise if there are not more than one lawsuits after this debacle is done.

Also an issue is that when polling places ran out of ballots they made copies of the ballots. However, because the ballot was bigger than a normal sheet of copy paper the printed ballots were pages long. Are these new ballots legal and will they be counted? Only time will tell.

Guest blogged by Chris Floyd. Originally posted at Empire Burlesque, September 10, 2006.

Let us pause on this day of solemn remembrance and take stock of what our noble Leader has done in the world with the vast storehouse of "political capital" he received from the "new Pearl Harbor" that his noble captains Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby (and brother Jeb) once openly called for – in September 2000 – in a document published by their noble organization of selfless zealots for global altruism, The Project for a New American Century. Now, on this solemn occasion, as the noble Leader himself takes to the airwaves to remind us of his nobility in those dark days after the attack that his noble captains had so presciently yearned for, let us assay just one small gleaning of the great and noble crop of freedom the Leader has harvested with the seeds from what he has often called the "opportunity" provided by the murder of almost 3,000 American citizens and nationals from many other countries.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Here's Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel, from his blog, with my emphasis:

As reported extensively at The BRAD BLOG during the past two years, Clint Curtis has leveled several specific accusations at Tom Feeney. The chief allegation is that Feeney requested Curtis to design a software vote-rigging prototype (a computer program which appeared to be a simple vote-counter but which was in fact something else). Curtis has taken --- and passed --- a polygraph test in support of his allegations. Feeney has not indicated any willingness to go near a polygraph.

For more on the Clint Curtis / Tom Feeney story, start here.