The good news: New Mexico now votes on paper ballots, since their touch-screen debacle in the 2004 Presidential Election left Gov. Bill Richardson with little legal choice but to move to paper.

The bad news: The huge turnout in yesterday's Democratic Primary led to long lines, voters who found they were no longer on the registration rolls for some still-unexplained reason, 17,000 votes had to be cast on provisional ballots which remain uncounted today, and now it's being reported --- incredibly --- that at least three ballot boxes were kept overnight last night, uncounted, at the home of a Democratic County Party Chairwoman.

What makes it all worse, as if all that is not troubling enough, is that the current razor-thin margin between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the caucus stands at just 217 votes out of 136 thousand ballots cast.

The governor's apologizing, the party is prevaricating, the candidates' representatives are negotiating, and, as usual, it's the voters who are left hanging, wondering if their voices will actually be heard...

The Los Angeles Times, which has been among the worst major newspapers in the country --- for years --- in reporting (or, actually not reporting) on issues of Election Integrity tells us today, in regards to yesterday's voting in California, that there were "Few election glitches, except for independents."

Um, does the braintrust at the LA Times realize that out of 15.3 million registered voters in the state, some 20% of them, more than 3 million, are "independents"? (3,043,164 to be exact, with more than 700,000 in LA alone, if the latest numbers from the CA SoS are to be trusted). Plus more than 300,000 voters registered as "American Independent" who may or may not have wished to be included as members of that party? Or shall we just deliver the "Understatement of the Year Award" right now to the folks at the LA Times?

That's more than just a "few glitches," no?

And if the following disturbing video from a Los Angeles Ron Paul supporter who switched from Democratic to Republican specifically to vote for Paul is any indication, it's not just "independents" who experienced "few election glitches" yesterday...

We're crawling through tons of election-related problem reports (thanks to VotersUnite's early report, and those of you emailers and commenters) this morning from all over the state, and all over the country. Trying to make sense of as many of them as possible. Confirm them, seek out more details, etc. It's really a matter of triage at this point.

Many of you, in other threads, have been sharing experiences and concerns from the polling place yesterday, or have come across troubling reports from the news media, etc.

Feel free to repost and/or add new comments here in this thread, as we continuing to sift through the rubble, so that we might be able to continuing collecting some of the reports, and allowing for others here to dig into them as well. There seems to be more than enough work to go around today. Again. And unfortunately...

Alright, we've got a bona fide mess here in Los Angeles County. We covered this a bit earlier tonight, but have been speaking with various precinct captains and trying to figure out exactly what's going on. As mentioned it's a confusing mess, and could indeed be shaping up as "California's Butterfly Ballot" as far as we can tell.

There are two main problems:

1. Many voters who thought they were registering as non-partisan independents have been surprised to learn they registered instead as members of the "American Independent" party, and thus, were not allowed to vote in the open Democratic primary.
2. More insidiously, those independent non-partisan voters who did successfully manage to get registered as "Decline to State" (or DTS, or Non-Partisan), were allowed to vote in the Democratic Presidential Primary if they requested to do so when voting. However, without filling in a certain bubble on the ballot, specifying they wanted it to be counted in the Dem Primary, their vote for President, according to LA County's Registrar of Voters, will not be counted.

After being up since dawn, we hope to get some rest tonight shortly, and will then get a clearer picture on all of this, and the myriad other problems reported elsewhere in California and around the nation tomorrow (and beyond).

For now then, our friend Jake Soboroff at Why Tuesday has a video interview, posted below, with LA City attorney, Rocky Delgadillo who is also expressing concerns about what is becoming known as the "Double Bubble Trouble" issue. As well, Delgadillo gives a full statement to CBS2 News, calling for review of the issue, which could well disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters, by CA SoS Debra Bowen and LA County's acting Registrar of Voters Dean Logan.

Logan arrives here fresh from from his reign over the disastrous 2004 gubernatorial election mess in Washington state. He replaces the recently-resigned LA County Registrar and Diebold cover girl, Conny "Cut and Run" McCormack, who seemingly left this ridiculous scheme in place as a parting gift to LA County voters.

We'll post Soboroff's video of the interview, as well as Delgadillo's statement below. First, Soboroff describes the confusing situation very well...

Have been talking to various folks at various mainstream media outlets all day, hoping to help improve their coverage beyond the usual "glitches, hiccups, snags and snafus" reporting, so they might better understand that those are not "glitches", but failures.

My report on Los Angeles County issues for now, promised earlier, will therefore be somewhat truncated for the moment. I'll try to offer more details late night and/or tomorrow when, as the Century Foundation's Election Integrity expert Tova Andrea Wang smartly points out in her article titled "Super Tuesday. And Wednesday, and Thursday": "[M]any of the biggest problems will not be revealed until well after the polls close tonight."

For now, allow me to point out that, or caution, that serious legal issues could come in to play if results of the Democratic primary in the state are close in any way...

As happened on the day of the New Hampshire primary on January 8th, disinformation on the net about problems at the polling place were rampant. But wrong. The disinfo, as The BRAD BLOG was able to debunk that day, seems to have originally emanated from the DRUDGE REPORT.

It looks like Mr. Drudge is busy getting the story wrong again today, reporting that "The board of elections failed to deliver voting equipment to polling places ALL OVER LOS ANGELES"...

After running the above story for a number of hours at his site --- and sending corporate mainstream media folks and Internet blogsites alike into a tizzy, as well as helping to ring our phones off the hook --- DRUDGE has finally updated the item with the real story, and it's far less scary...

Tom Herman of Vocalo.org (a project of Chicago's National Public Radio) had some good questions about how votes are counted in Illinois, and elsewhere, over the weekend. I tried to give him some good answers. I believe it was a very good, sober discussion on these questions, and one that might come in handy tomorrow and beyond.

Appx. 14 mins, download MP3 or listen online right here...

Former CIA analyst and international security and counter-terrorism expert Philip Giraldi has filed some of the American media's best reports (even though we realize that's not necessarily saying much) on the Sibel Edmonds case.

If you missed it a week or two ago, Giraldi filed a detailed report on the latest of Edmonds' allegations on the sale of U.S. nuclear secrets, on the foreign black market, to friend and foe alike, as aided and abetted by very high-ranking U.S. officials. His article, published at American Conservative Magazine and titled "Found in Translation," is a must read for both folks new to the issue and those who may have missed a beat or two along the way. The case also, if you haven't noticed, ties in to the Valerie Plame Wilson/Brewster Jennings CIA Leak Case, and includes allegations that her cover company was outed to foreign agents by the #3 in the State Department, Marc Grossman, years before Robert Novak wrote his infamous column blowing the cover of the previously covert Plame Wilson.

Giraldi has now posted a slightly more general read this morning at Huffington Post, in an article titled "Sibel Edmonds Must Be Heard." The piece offers both an easily readable summary of the case so far and another scathing (and well-deserved) condemnation of the American corporate mainstream media for all but ignoring the story.

He even notes, correctly, the failure of "so-called gadflies like Olbermann and Moyers" to cover this story, as we detailed ourselves several moons ago...

The courageous anonymous diarists at Daily Kos, the world's largest so-called "progressive" blog site, continue their pre-emptive suicide.

Today's dangerous mislead comes courtesy of anonymous poster "smintheus", who warns readers, in advance of Super Tuesday, that no matter what happens, there is nothing to worry your pretty little head about...

(Toon by Paul Jamiol. Hat-tip to TheZoo's "nwmuse" who offers, along with the above, a bunch of good details on the Sibel Edmonds case. Our own extensive Edmonds coverage can be read by you, and ignored by the MSM, right here.)

Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) continues misleading America about his two different election reforms bills. On Saturday night's CBS Evening News (video here), he says, in regard to the upcoming Super Tuesday Election: "There will be states around the country where the election results will be in question, and there will be no way to resolve the question."

What he fails to mention is that, should either of his own two federal Election Reform bills be passed into law as currently written, there will still be states around the country where the election results will be in question, and there will still be no way to resolve the question, because he still refuses to include a ban on touch-screen voting machines in either of his two bills.

Incredibly, even his newly introduced "Emergency" bill (which we wrote about back here) would give money for paper ballots only to jurisdictions that don't already use unverifiable touch-screen (DRE) voting systems with so-called "paper trails"...

Before I became a real newsman, by the name of Brad Friedman, I played a fake newsman by the name of "Brad Friedman." The results were startlingly similar.

Before we get to this week's Super Duper Tsunami Bloody Tuesday, I thought it might be nice to have a smile before the storm and look back at Super Tuesday 2000. Back when things were still funny.

That year, on March 11th, I headed out to my polling place, with a video camera, as "Brad Friedman," one of the characters I played for a bunch of years on stage in a live comedy show that I co-produced here in Los Angeles called CRIME SCENE. (You can poke around and find some fun stuff to use against me in the old archives here.)

As you'll see in the following (hopefully) amusing video report, some of the candidate names were similar that year. And, as you'll see, then, as now, the line between fake reporting and real reporting was perilously thin. Enjoy...

Brandon Friedman (no relation) writes:

Here's what happened...

Despite the tease at the end of those uncomfortable three minutes, that Williams would be back for more after the break, he was not there when the show returned from commercial.

More details on the above three minutes on Fox and Friends, and the fate of "former Marine and Naval officer," Montel Williams, here...

Last week, Reps. John Conyers (D-MI) and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), both of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to the former Ohio Secretary of State and Co-Chair of the state's Bush/Cheney '04 campaign committee, J. Kenneth Blackwell, inviting him to appear next week at a subcommittee oversight hearing on voter suppression issues.

To the surprise of almost nobody, Blackwell has refused the invitation to testify, claiming his "schedule [would] not permit" him to attend the hearings.

The snub, according to both the following report from Jon Craig at the Cincinnati Enquirer and additional indications given to The BRAD BLOG by a Judiciary staffer other than the one quoted by Craig, may lead to an escalation of the longtime standoff between Conyers and Blackwell. A congressional subpoena requiring an appearance by the controversial former SoS, who presided over one of the worst-run Presidential Elections in American history, may well be in the offing.

As Craig reports today at the Enquirer's political blog...

Though our own Judiciary source spoke to the same point, if not quite as directly, the comments above from Godfrey offer an additional indication that we may be headed to a showdown.

Such a subpoena would require a majority vote of the committee, which likely wouldn't come in time for the hearings currently scheduled for next Friday, according to Craig's report.

New Hampshire's Republican Presidential Primary candidate Albert Howard has delivered a letter to Secretary of State Bill Gardner, demanding that "all ballots that have been returning from the towns and cities, including, but not necessarily limited to, the unused/uncast ballots and the 'spoiled' ballots," be counted as part of the ongoing Election Contest in the Granite State. Howard filed for the contest, where ballots are being counted again today in Concord, following concerns about reported results from the Diebold optical-scan machines used during the state's January 8th Primary.

The BRAD BLOG has also learned that problems with Diebold machines were reported in 21 different towns during the primary, according to Howard, who says he has finally received some answers to public records requests filed with the state weeks ago, asking for details of problems with the machines that occurred on Election Day.

We just spoke with Howard, who explained that counting conditions in Concord continue to be "a mess," prompting his latest demands, which echoed earlier ones that remain unmet by SoS Gardner.

The Republican Howard also told us that he'd been contacted recently by the Democratic chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, who called him personally to discuss concerns about what was going on in the wake of questions surrounding the New Hampshire Primary Election results...