(Context from Jon Ponder. Hat-tip BRAD BLOG toon sherpa Pokey Anderson)

Blogged quickly by Brad from Palo Alto, CA...

We can't think of a clever enough turn of phrase this morning to adequately cover the full irony here... Via Computerworld...

Not enough irony yet? Add this...

Yes, that would be the same Ed Felten, computer science professor of Princeton, who last week was sent a threatening email from a Sequoia executive, warning of legal trouble should he dare examine the Sequoia AVC Advantage touch-screen voting machines which failed in New Jersey's Primary Election in February.

In the wake of this latest PR nightmare for the company, as John Gideon pointed out last night, they've decided to mount a Campaign of Lies instead of simply allowing their "tamperproof" e-voting systems to be examined by a third party. Brilliant strategy, guys. As usual.

The same failed Sequoia touch-screen systems, which have never been tested by any independent third-party, are currently set for use in Pennsylvania's Primary next month. We continue to encourage readers to click here to encourage NJ's AG to immediately commission a complete technical review of NJ's voting machines to determine what went wrong.

By John Gideon VotersUnite.Org

In a press release dated March 18 Sequoia Voting Systems attempted to quench the fire storm that resulted from failures of their voting machines in New Jersey and their subsequent threats of legal action against New Jersey counties and Princeton University scientists if they independently review the problematic voting machines. Unfortunately the press release is full of inaccuracies and obfuscation.

Here are the worst of them...

Blogged by Brad from the road...

Remember in the summer of '06 when citizen Election Integrity advocates from the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project (IBIP) discovered that Chicago's voter registration system was hackable, and allowed for access to voters' private information, such as Social Security number etc?

Looks like a similar thing has now been discovered in Pennsylvania, where their online voter registration system has now been taken offline after it was found that anyone was able to access other voters' registration information.

We can't even do online registration securely, and yet Democrats have been talking about actually voting by Internet?! There is, apparently, no bad voting idea (touch-screen voting machines, "paper-trails," vote-by-mail, now Internet voting) that Democrats aren't all too willing to leap at before bothering to look.

Of course, where Democrats fail with often the best of intentions, Republicans often aim to "fail" in the first place with such systems. We're still not sure exactly which of those is worse. Either way, there seems to be plenty of failure to go around these days. Luckily, there's nothing important coming up for voters in Pennsylvania anytime soon.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

These new numbers from Gallup are from March 14 to 18, and so may reflect negative reactions among Democrats to the controversial sermons of Barack Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but not positive reactions to Obama's speech on race and racism on March 18:

McCain still comes out ahead of both Democrats in the national head-to-head:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Interview by Martha Raddatz of ABC News with Dick Cheney:

Update: You must see the smirk to believe it. Video available here.

Blogged by Brad Friedman from San Francisco...

If you had any doubt, this seals it.

A more shameful display of "journalism" we don't believe we've ever seen. As our friend Susie Madrack of Suburban Guerrilla just wrote in an email, about the new low for corporate mainstream media, appallingly displayed at the link above...

What she said. And then some.

Meanwhile, today marks the 5th Anniversary of the War on Iraq. How many lie dead? And for what?

Heckuva job, Mr. Ross. You, and "the ABC NEWS INVESTIGATIVE UNIT" --- as our friend the Freeway Blogger might say --- are all wearing the blue dress now.

UPDATE 3/20/08: Glenn Greenwald, as usual, has more cogent thoughts on this, as AP joins Ross and "the ABC Investigative Unit" in covering this "story". Greenwald writes aptly: "It just isn't possible for this country to have a more depraved and wretched press corps."

He goes on to write of previous Ross failures as a "reporter", as does our own Alan Breslauer in this video. And as long as we're piling on, I'll point out that while ABC was more than happy to find the journalistic value in this "story", the same unit took a pass on an exclusive interview with Sibel Edmonds for reasons that we'll let them justify. Elsewhere, the ABC News division had previously spiked a number of important stories on Election Integrity.

Wonder why this country is in the mess that we're in? Look no further than our Corporate Mainstream Media. The links and stories above tell you all you need to know. It all begins and ends with them. Period. They have abused both the public trust and their First Amendment obligations to this country.

Guest Blogged by Dennis Domrzalski of f-brilliant...

The Albuquerque Journal today proved once again why it can't be trusted to inform the public.

Today the paper finally published a story about the allegations of vote buying at the mid-February Bernalillo County Republican Party's pre-nominating conventions. And what a lame, disgraceful story it was. Read this stupid lede:

Naaah! Really? A registration fee might be the root of a behind-the-scenes political flap?

How about allegations of criminal vote buying are ripping the party apart? That would be more accurate. How about this story has been raging in the national blogosphere for weeks and has contributed to a massive swell of anti-Rep. Heather Wilson venom? How about former KKOB Radio afternoon drive time news anchor Laura MacCallum broke the stories in late February and resigned in early March when her idiot news editor killed them because bloggers hadn't picked them up? How about the f-brilliant blog which broke the MacCallum resignation story and put the vote-buying allegations on the Internet on March 3, more than two weeks ago?

Or The BRAD BLOG, which joined f-brilliant and advanced the story on March 5 with its own exclusive interviews with a number of the players, including KKOB's news director Pat Allen, who backpedaled on his explanations for spiking MacCallum's stories once the reasons he'd emailed to MacCallum became public?

You'll never read about those things in the Journal because they're the truth and that paper is incapable of telling it...

Please help the good folks of "Why Tuesday?" win the $10,000 top prize in the MySpace IMPACT awards. Click here to vote if you're a MySpace member. It takes two secs.

WT?'s founder Jake Soboroff is doing a great job of raising awareness of election issues around the country, and could much use our help to win the money in order to continue his work. Plus, he's promised to donate $1000 of his prize to The BRAD BLOG if we help put him over the top! (Oh, wait...no he didn't. But we're sure he'll see the light after benefiting from all of this free advertising! Right Soboroff?!)

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Amy Goodman's introduction to Democracy Now's coverage of "Winter Soldier":

JON MICHAEL TURNER: 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines.

-- Brad Friedman

Sequoia Voting Systems' legal threats against Princeton computer science professors and New Jersey election officials, as we reported in exclusive detail last night, have apparently had their intended effect.

The strong-arm email sent to professors Ed Felten and Andrew Appel was apparently accompanied by a two-page letter to Union County, New Jersey, Clerk Joanne Rajoppi, who originally discovered a tally failure in Sequoia's AVC Advantage touch-screen voting machines after the February 5th Super Tuesday election. The same error was subsequently discovered in at least five other counties.

Mercer County Clerk Paula Sollami-Covello tells the New Jersey Times that Sequoia's decision to block an independent analysis of its touch-screen voting machines makes no sense if the firm is confident that they work properly.

"I think it's unfortunate that they're not letting an independent investigation take place," Sollami-Covello tells the paper this morning. "They should have no problem with having a third party investigate the product if they are confident in their product."

Another Mercer County, NJ, official sent a letter to the state Attorney General criticizing Sequoia's bizarre explanation for failures discovered in the systems following state's recent Primary Election, characterizing what he describes as the company's "strange, confusing solution." He said the company's explanation for the problem, which succeeded in blaming voters and poll workers as usual, was based on a "bizarre scenario, with no cited evidence or testimony" to back it up.

While NJ's state clerks association had voted unanimously to recommend that the Attorney General commission an independent study of the machines --- the same ones which will be used across the state of Pennsylvania in next month's key Democratic Primary Election --- Union County's plan to move forward with their own study has been nixed due to the legal threats sent from Sequoia's VP of "Compliance/Quality/Certification" Edwin Smith, according to a number of New Jersey papers today.

Amazingly (or perhaps, not so much at this point), Union County's attorneys folded to the pressure from the company, which claimed that Election Officials in NJ --- who spent millions on the voting systems --- are not legally allowed to examine them independently because "the voting machine software is a Sequoia 'trade secret' and cannot be handed over to any third-party."

Fear of a lawsuit from Sequoia, which will also control the state's elections in an upcoming June primary, as well as the November general election, has led to county attorneys backing down from their plans for the time being, unless the state AG jumps in to take action.

In the threatening email from Smith to the Princeton professors sent last Friday, as posted here in full last night, the company executive threatened legal action if a "non-compliant analysis" of their voting systems was carried out. "We will also take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property," Smith warned.

The Star-Ledger reports the latest, almost mind-numbingly incredible, developments in your democracy, now fully and completely in the hands of privatized corporate America, this morning...

From Washington Post today...

But then again, it's not actually about experience or knowledge, as you know, it's about the image of having any...

And so it goes...

UPDATE: Think Progress has more, including audio of McCain making the same misstatement on right-wing Hugh Hewitt's radio show earlier. So it wasn't an accidental "gaffe". It was a fundamental misunderstanding --- by the man regarded by the mainstream corporate media as having the most foreign policy expertise among all of the major American Presidential candidates --- of a key issue at the very heart of one ongoing war in Iraq, and at the very heart of a possible second one in Iran.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

The Worst Vice President Ever goes to Baghdad and says:

Meanwhile:

-- Brad Friedman

Sequoia Voting Systems has sent a legal threat to Princeton University computer science professors Ed Felten and Andrew Appel warning them of legal action should they proceed with an analysis of New Jersey's touch-screen voting machines as unanimously recommended last week by an association representing election clerks across the state.

In a terse email sent last Friday, obtained today by The BRAD BLOG, Sequoia's Edwin Smith, Vice-President of Compliance/Quality/Certification, warns the university academics that the company has "retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any non-compliant analysis."

"We will also take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property," Smith threatens.

The email from Smith to Felten and Appel is posted in full at the end of this article. Felten has confirmed its authenticity late this afternoon.

The call by state election officials for the independent study of Sequoia's AVC Advantage touch-screen machines comes in the wake of a recent finding that the systems mistallied voter turnout totals across at least six different counties in New Jersey's February 5th Presidential Primary Election. During a post-election canvass, it was found that the number of voters for each party, as reported by the internal printouts on the electronic voting machines, failed to match totals on the internal memory cards inside the same systems in a number of instances across the state.

Sequoia's explanation for the problem, essentially blaming voters and poll workers for pushing a complicated series of buttons, was found lacking by the state election clerks.

The discovery of mistallies followed on previous embarrassment for Sequoia and New Jersey when several machines failed to boot up at all on the morning of the Super Tuesday Election, causing a 45-minute delay for NJ's Governor John Corzine before he was finally able to cast a vote at his polling place in Hoboken.

The very same Sequoia AVC Advantage systems which failed in New Jersey, will be used across Pennsylvania in that state's upcoming --- and rather important --- Primary Election next month.

Sequoia has good reason to be concerned about what may come of an analysis by professors Felten and/or Appel. Both of them have previously detailed major voting machine security flaws, and the ability to easily hack into such systems made by both Sequoia and Diebold Election Systems...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

So now what?