This is just getting worse and worse. Now it's happening in Texas. (And in MO, if you read to the end of the article). And the vaunted "thousands of attorneys" from the Obama campaign and the DNC are still nowhere to be found.

With every incident so far reported of touch-screen vote-flipping during early voting in this year's general election --- from county to county in WV and in Nashville, TN) --- it's been the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machine that has failed, flipping votes from one candidate to another not chosen by the voter. In most every instances [see update below], it's been an attempted Democratic vote, flipped to a Republican, or another party.

These are the same machines that lost 18,000 votes in Democratic-leaning Sarasota County in the 2006 U.S. House Race for Katherine Harris' old seat. The Democrat, Christine Jennings, was declared the loser to Republican Vern Buchanan (whose own wife had trouble voting for him that day), by just 369 votes. Several academic studies, and even the GAO, have been unable to rule out either tampering or hardware/software error for the disappeared 18,000 votes.

As we wrote earlier this week, after there was finally one report of a vote flipping from Democratic to Republican in TN (a very rare instance, btw), these machines need to be taken out of service now, impounded and quarantined immediately, and every voter needs to be given a paper ballot where these machines are currently being used. Voters who have such problems need to inform other voters waiting in line which machine should not be used (and we offer other tips below, as well).

[Update: The rare vote-flip from Republican to Democratic now seems to have been a hoax carried out by local Republicans, according to a TN election integrity activist who did some digging and reporting. Details here...]

The latest reports today of ES&S vote-flipping come from Palo Pinto County, TX, where two voters --- one of them an alternate election judge and office manager of the Palo Pinto County Democratic Headquarters --- saw straight-ticket Democratic votes flipped to straight-ticket Republican votes. Two times for the first person, and three times for the alternate election judge!

The report is a doozy...

Said David Alan Grier at the end of Comedy Central's Chocolate News this week, after being shown a touch-screen voting machine which tries to talk him out of voting for Barack Obama, tells him that he's Muslim, and then registers the vote for John McCain anyway: "For all you Barack Obama supporters out there, if you see a machine like this, beat it like it stole something. Cause it almost did. Your vote."

Not that we'd ever advocate the way Grier resolves the problem. (Though we admit it was quite satisfying to watch. Like pornography for election integrity geeks. 2 mins...)

Finally! A lawsuit [PDF] has finally been filed today in federal District Court in Pennsylvania, against the Democratic Secretary of the Commonwealth, Pedro A. Cortes and the Commissioner of the state's Election Commission, Chet Harhut, over Cortes' recent directive that paper ballots only need be given out to voters in the event that every voting machine in a precinct breaks down.

That stunning decree was in opposition to PA's state law which allows election officials the discretion to give emergency paper ballots to voters if even a single machine breaks down in a precinct.

That neither Obama nor the DNC have said a word about this in the month or so since Cortes issued his directive has been maddening, and should be an outrage to voters of all parties in the Keystone State, sure to be another battleground state this November. The lawsuit was finally filed today by the state's NAACP in concert with the 866-MYVOTE1 Election Reform Network.

While the complaint should call for paper ballots to be made available to any voter who wishes one, or, at a minimum, to be given out if just one machine breaks down in a precinct, or even if the wait time in line is longer than 30 minutes, unfortunately, the suit calls very conservatively for emergency paper ballots to be given out if 50% or more of the voting machines in a precinct break down. But at least it's something, we guess, particularly in lieu of Obama and/or the DNC taking any action at all here, given they have the most to lose by the ridiculous action from state Democrats.

Pennsylvania uses unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) machines across most of the state, and saw machine failure after failure, as we documented in detail during their April primary this year. The failures resulted in untold numbers of disenfranchised voters, as noted in news reports, and logged by calls to the 866-MYVOTE1 hotline...

From WV's Sunday Gazette Mail today, yet another report of vote-flipping on ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machines...

Every county was told by the SOS to recalibrate all touch-screen machines. This is the ES&S iVotronic machine again and it appears the voter voted straight-party, in this case, as we have warned against, but that's not entirely clear from the article.

Today's report follows reports within the last week of votes flipping from Democratic to Republican (or other) candidates on ES&S iVotronics touch-screens in at least two different WV counties, and in Davidson County (Nashville), TN. Just yesterday, there was a report of votes flipping, on the same machines, from Republican to Democratic in Decatur County, TN.

Enough! We've called for these machines to be immediately impounded, and taken out of service --- just as the GOP called for when Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) received similar reports of touch-screen votes flipping during his unsuccessful 2006 re-election attempt --- and for paper ballots to be made available to all voters instead. To date, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have called for the impounding/removal of these failed voting machines. ES&S is the largest voting equipment supplier in the nation, with systems in dozens of states.

[Ed Note: Please see the "IMPORTANT UPDATE" to this story at the bottom of this article. - BF]

Yesterday we reported the problems experienced at the Davidson County (Nashville), TN polls by Election Integrity filmmakers David and Patricia Earnhardt. Patricia, like so many others before, in so many elections past, saw her vote flip before her eyes on the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen system from her intended candidate, Barrack Obama, to the Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney.

Last week, we noted voter reports from two different WV counties, Putnam and Jackson, both counties where the same ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machines (which are notorious for flipping and losing thousands of votes and costing at least one Democratic U.S. House nominee her rightful seat) similarly flipped votes away from Democratic candidates.

Earlier today, John Gideon reported on ES&S iVotronics in SC which fail to include a number of races on the final review screen. In at least one county in that state, during the Republican Primary earlier this year, the machines had failed to even turn on at all, leading voters to scramble to find scraps of paper to vote on. ES&S is the nation's largest supplier of voting machines.

Now, finally --- and thankfully --- we have a report of voters experiencing votes flipping from the Republican candidate John McCain, to the Democratic candidate Barack Obama in a second TN county. Does this mean someone can actually take some action to get these machines the hell out of service now?!...

If we didn't know better, we might think that someone over at The Colbert Report is reading The BRAD BLOG, as he nailed it from top to bottom last night, on the GOP's ACORN 'Voter Fraud' Hoax, the Help America Vote Act, and all that's related.

Now that it's officially made its way into the national joke lexicon, it seems to us this may signal the beginning of the end of the GOP's once-useful "voter fraud" scam. Not that common sense and becoming a national joke has ever succeeded in shaming, or stopping, them before. But still. Enjoy...(and thank you, Stephen!)...

Everything we've been warning about for years here at The BRAD BLOG --- and that both the Obama and McCain campaigns continue to ignore --- seems to have been neatly wrapped up in a report by John Zarella of CNN in a report on his personal experience during early voting in Florida...

His full report, with video, is at RAW STORY...

If you think that's bad, just wait for the Election Day meltdown. Why the Obama campaign and DNC are not raising holy hell --- and demanding paper ballots for every voter, in every precinct, in every state, along with back-up paper plans for the e-registration computers (as untested and unreliable as the e-voting machines, and made by the same failed private companies) --- I still cannot tell you. They have the most to lose, but still seem to be in a complete state of denial about these problems.

Steve Rosenfeld at AlterNet also has details on the sorely lacking Democratic strategy for dealing with voting machine problems.

At best, it can be said that Obama and the DNC are (again) bringing a dull butter knife to a gun fight. Minus the knife.

I've written both here and at the UK's Guardian to point out that not a single case of ACORN "voter fraud" has been shown anywhere despite the Republican's phony outrageous and MSM's knee-jerk reporting of it.

That changed on Friday (for about a minute) when the GOP and their always-reliable and incurious media echo chamber began trumpeting "undeniable proof that a significant number of fraudulent votes were cast in Democrat primary races for the New Mexico legislature as a result of ACORN's voter registration fraud."

Knock us over with a feather, but those charges have now fallen apart as well...

Now comes the vote-flipping on touch-screen machines in Davidson County (Nashville), TN, where early voting has also begun. This time, the problems occurred for David and Patricia Earnhardt, the director and executive producer of the award-winning election integrity documentary, Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections which details the history of problems with electronic voting across the nation and some of the whistleblowers and EI advocates who've helped to bring the matter to light. [Disclosure: The BRAD BLOG is prominently featured in the film.]

The Earnhardts' story of what happened to them last Friday when, among other things, Patricia's attempt to vote for Obama on the ES&S touch-screen wouldn't register at all, and at one point, with a poll-worker trying to help, had actually registered a vote for Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney --- five rows away from Obama on the screen --- follows below.

The first reports of vote-flipping on touch-screen machines (we expect many more, as we saw in both '04 and especially in '06) came in from two counties last week in West Virginia, which also uses ES&S touch screens across the entire state.

The machines in both TN and WV need to be taken out of use and impounded immediately. So far, it's been Democrats, again, who are being affected by these problems, while votes are flipping from Democratic candidates to others. While the DNC and the Obama campaign ought to be raising holy hell, so far they are not...

The website of the Ohio Secretary of State is being set to "static mode" following a recent series of "security breach" attempts, as well as suspicious packages and a number of death threats sent to the office, according to a press release issued late this afternoon. (Posted in full at end of this article.)

The threats against Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner's office come in the wake of a rash of recent burglaries and vandalism at ACORN offices in Massachusetts and Seattle, as well as death threats delivered to a number of their workers following much-hyped media reports of "voter fraud" by the community organization. The attacks against the group escalated following the Republican Presidential nominee John McCain's comments about ACORN "voter fraud" at a recent rally, and his extraordinary allegation that ACORN was "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy" at last week's Presidential debate.

Notably, there has been no actual evidence of any such "voter fraud" by ACORN, simply allegations by many on the right.

The recent threats against Brunner and her office follow on criticism from state Republicans, who have launched a number of legal suits against her during the final weeks leading up to this November's election...

And speaking of GOP voter registration hucksters, it looks like Nathan Sproul of Sproul & Associates, the group accused of destroying Democratic registrations in several states during previous elections, has been hired by the McCain-Palin campaign and the RNC again this year. Knock us over with a feather...

Well, that was fun. My first time on Fox. And I don't feel dirty at all! Hopefully, it'll not be my last. Hey, I was even honored to offer them a big scoop on air, in the form my very own "Fox News Alert", after which, I'm told, they ran the headline during top of the hour news and on the crawl. So we did some good, if only for that. You're welcome, Fox!

Host Julie Banderas asked me, kindly, near the end of the segment (video below), if I'd felt they'd been "fair and balanced" with me during the segment. I believe they were, which was much appreciated. Though I wish I had answered "Yes, you were, thanks. In this segment. And I hope you'll have me back to discuss the GOP's ACORN 'voter fraud' hoax, about which you guys have been anything but fair and balanced over the last week or two, and, in fact, dangerously unfair and unbalanced."

But, hey, ya can only fit so much into seven minutes. And I think I was able to get some good info in. You'll let me know. Here's the segment...

For those who've asked, yes, when I was booked I was told we'd most likely be discussing "voter fraud" issues, not housing crisis issues...

From Saturday's Washington Post, on the "November Surprise" we've been trying to shout about for months now.

The lede: "Thousands of voters across the country must reestablish their eligibility in the next three weeks in order for their votes to count on Nov. 4, a result of new state registration systems that are incorrectly rejecting them."...

Rightwinger Laura Ingraham ably filled in for Bill O'Reilly in the "No Spin Zone" this week, by seeing her argument dismantled by constitutional attorney, prosecutor, and former (Republican-appointed) special counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, John Flannery on Fox "News."

Ingraham just couldn't believe there would be "all these reports" on the news about "massive voter fraud going on" all over the country, led by ACORN, if they weren't all true! (As we showed both here and at UK's Guardian, it's not true. It's a GOP hoax. More at our special coverage page here.)

Despite being in way over her head, having fallen for the hoax, Ingraham, naturally, played the loyal dead-ender and stuck to her empty guns. (Gosh, we hope there are no typos on Ingraham's own driver's license or voter registration, or she might find herself purged from the voting rolls entirely this November, as they're doing in Florida and so many other state, not mentioned on Fox "News," or even by the Democrats.)

The video follows below, along with further evisceration of Ingraham's "If this were happening to the benefit of the Republicans, the Democrats would be screaming fraud" argument...

See below for a rather breathtaking "Round-up of Problems Facing Voters Nationwide", such as registration backlogs, illegal voting roll purges, deceptive practices and dirty tricks, etc., now plaguing American voters across the country with just 17 days left before our country's biggest election ever.

All of that, while Fox "News" (whose asked me to come on live tomorrow, Sunday, at 2:40pm PT, btw, along with my old friend John Fund "for balance") continues to misreport, alarm and deceive their viewers in regard to the GOP's phony ACORN "voter fraud" fraud. Unfortunately, it's not just Fox who is irresponsibly and dangerously misreporting that scam --- though they seem to have made a small cottage industry out of it of late --- CNN and MSNBC have been filed loads of equally inaccurate and misleading reports on it as well.

But take a look at the "Round-up" below, sent this afternoon via email by the 866ourvote.org Election Protection coalition of non-partisan election watchdogs. And keep in mind that their summary below doesn't even mention the myriad electronic voting issues we've been reporting here of late --- touch-screen votes flipping, paper ballot electronic tabulators that can't count correctly or that add thousands of "phantom votes" or that drop thousands of real ones etc. --- cropping up, yet again, across the country...