For what it's worth, just a quick note in response to some of the folks who either disagreed with or were otherwise disgruntled by my observation over the weekend explaining why I believe that "Not Voting IS a Vote", following the 36% voter turnout during the midterm elections.

Though I said I thought it was a "dumb vote", I also noted that "it was a landslide". The central part of my argument, in response to politicians and pundits who blame the American people (rather than themselves) for the fact that 64% of the registered electorate didn't turn out, was this:

Some seem a bit irritated with me for pointing that out. But on Monday night, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was on The Colbert Report (full interview posted below), making a pretty impressive play for a Presidential run in 2016.

During the conversation, Colbert asked him for a response to the "Red Tide" results of the 2014 elections and whether it signaled bad news for Democrats as a rejection of "liberal philosophy". Here was Sanders' concise answer:

Hmm. Sounds familiar.

(Don't hate the playa; hate the game.)

Colbert's complete 11/17/2014 interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders follows below...

Election officials in St. Louis County, Missouri were repeatedly warned by local Election Integrity advocates that a plan to supply enough paper ballots for only 15% of the electorate at polling places on Election Day there would not be enough, according to emails obtained by The BRAD BLOG.

The emails, sent well before Election Day, expressed concern and doubt about "enough paper ballots at every polling place on November 4th to cover all of the voters who would like to have one," as one of advocates wrote to the Democratic Director of Elections in St. Louis County.

The warnings were ignored, the missives suggest, and, as reported by local media, the result was a widespread shortage of paper ballots on Election Day 2014 at sites throughout the county, including in the embattled city of Ferguson, MO. Throughout the county, the shortage of ballots resulted in long lines and voters who were turned away or forced to vote on 100% unverifiable touch-screen systems which the county has long encouraged voters to use. Some precincts were required to stay open at least an hour after the normal closing time in order to accommodate those who were in line to vote before the close of polls at 7pm local time.

St. Louis Public Radio reported the day after the election that "unexpected demand for paper ballots caused a shortage at about 95 polling places throughout the county Tuesday. That's more than 20 percent of the county's 444 balloting sites."

"The paper shortage," they explained, "was the biggest unexpected problem on Election Day."

But, in truth, it wasn't unexpected at all, at least according to emails we reviewed to and from the county's chief election official, suggesting that the Board of Elections simply ignored the clear warnings they had received from local Election Integrity experts...

Bill Maher offered a very reasonable response to the ridiculously lazy argument that there's "no difference" between the two major parties or in who wins elections or that "voting doesn't matter." Part of his argument, however, includes a bit of tantrum thrown against those who don't vote at all...

I'd like to counter that latter part of his argument (his tantrum against those who didn't vote) with this point:

I've been looking into a few deeper dive stories of late --- for next week, at this point. So, until then, since the Colbert Report is soon disappearing (which makes me incredibly sad), please enjoy this segment from earlier this week.

It's not particularly political, really (other than beating up on one particular jackass at Fox "News" who really deserves it), but the last part of this thing just struck me as so goddamn funny at a time when I'm guessing you and I both could use some "goddamn funny"...

On this week's KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast I was joined by investigate journalist and author Greg Palast to discuss his disturbing report on the GOP's secret "Interstate Crosscheck" database and the hundreds of thousands of voters it may have knocked off the rolls this year.

PLUS: A flashback to my interview with then 25-year old paralyzed Iraq War veteran turned anti-war activist Tomas Young at "Camp Casey" in Crawford, TX in August of 2005. It was Young's first national interview proceeding his story being told on CBS 60 Minutes in 2006 and in Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro's documentary Body of War in 2007. During the interview, Young (who had driven 13 hours from Kansas City on his honeymoon, despite unceasing pain) describes the tragic story of how he was wounded during a rescue mission in an unarmored truck in Sadr City; how and when he turned against Bush's war; we joke about BBQ in Missouri and more; and then hatch a (successful) plot to bring his story to national attention.

After years of demanding accountability for the Bush/Cheney Administration war criminals, Young died earlier this week just before Veterans' Day and just weeks shy of his 35th birthday.

Download MP3 or listen online below...

On thousands of "missing" votes in Wisconsin, on Nate Silver and polls vs. "results", on "True the Vote" clowns, and on much more...all on Thom Hartmann's Big Picture last night...

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I am incredibly saddened to learn, on Veterans' Day of all days, of the death of Tomas Young, a 34-year old Iraq War veteran turned unapologetic peace activist, paralyzed from the chest down, whose heart-breaking story I played a small role in helping to bring to the national stage back during the extraordinary summer of 2005...

This is a very smart post, particularly from someone calling themselves "potatohead" at DailyKos: "About Touch Screen Voting".

I'd quote something from it, but then you'd be less likely to click over and read the whole thing.

The author has almost everything exactly right, discussing concepts that BRAD BLOG readers should understand very very well by now, but using different words than I usually do, so it may help everything soak in a bit more.

He (presuming a "he" here) even extends his explanation of the inherent, unfixable problem that make touch-screen voting systems 100% unverifiable (and, therefore, antithetical to American democracy) to explain why both "open source" computer voting systems and Internet Voting can't work either, for the same reasons.

Only quibble: He needs to put the word "hand-" before the words "marked ballots" and we'd be 100% golden. Thank you, "potatohead".

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[This article now cross-published by Salon...]

Despite a larger population and a contested race for an open gubernatorial seat, turnout in the state of Texas was reportedly down this year, as compared to the last mid-term election in 2010, by more than a quarter of a million votes.

That data point --- a decrease of some 271,000 total voters this year --- is one of several, at least anecdotal early indicators that suggest the Texas GOP's strategy of suppressing the vote this year with polling place Photo ID restrictions seems to have worked.

Since 2003, Texas law had already required every voter to present an ID when voting at the polls in the Lone Star State. But the newer draconian restrictions that have been so controversial were finally in place for a federal general election for the first time this year, after state Republicans have been attempting to enact them since at least 2007.

We've spent quite a bit of time over the past year(s) reporting on the GOP attempt to implement these new polling place Photo ID voting restrictions, with all evidence suggesting that they are meant only to suppress the votes of minorities, students, the poor and other disproportionately Democratic-leaning constituencies.

In virtually every instance that the new, exceedingly restrictive law has come before federal authorities, it has been found plainly discriminatory. The law was struck down in 2012 as a discriminatory violation of the Voting Rights Act by both the U.S. Department of Justice as well as a three-judge federal panel on the D.C. District Court. It was struck down once again this year by a U.S. District Court in Texas after a full trial and a 147-page ruling [PDF] which found the law to be "purposefully discriminatory", an "unconstitutional poll tax", and likely to disenfranchise some 600,000 legally registered Texas voters as well as more than a million eligible voters.

Nonetheless, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed it to stay in place during this year's election, as the Republicans who run the state of Texas appeal the lower court's unambiguous ruling.

In the meantime, early data coming in from Texas suggests the law appears to have had its intended effect...

Though some 5,350 voters are known to have voted in the city of Stoughton in Dane County, Wisconsin on Tuesday, just 16 of those voters were interested in voting in a local ballot referendum calling for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to help overturn the infamous Citizens United decision --- at least according to the results reported by paper ballot optical-scan computer tabulators there.

"A malfunction with the voting machines in Stoughton Tuesday led to an incomplete outcome of the city's referendum on whether to amend the U.S. Constitution, Stoughton clerk Lana Kropf said," according to a terse and somewhat cryptic report in the Wisconsin State Journal on Thursday.

The city's ES&S DS200 paper ballot optical-scanners (a computer tabulation system plagued with problems in many states over the years) reported zero votes for the initiative in five of the city's six voting wards, and just 16 votes (7 Yes, 9 No) in the other.

"Never in my years working in clerks' offices have I seen something like this," Kropf told the Journal.

The initiative in question was added to the ballot after citizens gathered enough signatures last July to have it included on the November ballot. According to the wording of the measure, it seeks "to reclaim democracy from the expansion of corporate personhood rights and the corrupting influence of unregulated political contributions and spending." It is similar to referenda passed overwhelmingly in other WI communities.

"Last Tuesday, nearly 5,350 good citizens of Stoughton went to the polls," writes Karen McKim of the progressive Wisconsin Grassroots Network. "If you believe the city's voting machines, exactly 16 of them had an opinion they cared to express on the matter. The rest thought 'Whatevs' and left the referendum blank."

She adds: "Fortunately, no one believes the city's voting machines"...

"Americans can feel the vital organs of their democracy shutting down."

A disturbingly on-point turn of phrase from Bill Curry's smart advice for Democrats at Salon.

It's been happening for years now. On the day after elections like last Tuesday's, media figures begin navel gazing to figure out how pre-election polls, created by dozens of independent pollsters using dozens of different methodologies, could all find the same thing but turn out to be so wrong once the election results are in.

The presumption is that the results are always right, and if they don't match the pre-election polling, its the polling that must be wrong, as opposed to the election results.

On Wednesday morning, after Tuesday's mid-term election surprise in which Republicans reportedly won handily in race after race despite pre-election polls almost unanimously predicting much closer races or outright Democratic victories, FiveThirtyEight statistics guru Nate Silver declared "The Polls Were Skewed Toward Democrats".

His analysis of aggregated averages from dozens of different pollsters and polls this year found that the performance of Democrats was overestimated by approximately 4 percentage points in Senate races and 3.4 points in gubernatorial contests. Silver's assessment relies on a "simple average of all polls released in the final three weeks of the campaign," as compared to the (unofficial and almost entirely unverified) election results reported on Tuesday night. He doesn't suggest there was anything nefarious in the polling bias towards Dems this year, simply that the pollsters got it wrong for a number of speculative reasons.

Citing the fact that nearly all of the polls suggested Democrats would do much better than they ultimately did, when compared to the reported election results, Silver asserts it wasn't that the polls were more wrong that usual, per se, but that almost all of them were wrong in a way that appears to have overestimated Democratic performance on Election Day.

"This year's polls were not especially inaccurate," he explains. "Between gubernatorial and Senate races, the average poll missed the final result by an average of about 5 percentage points --- well in line with the recent average. The problem is that almost all of the misses were in the same direction."

Silver is much smarter than I when it comes to numbers; I'm happy to presume he has the basic math right. But he seems to have a blind spot in his presumption that the pre-election polls were wrong and the election results were right. That, despite the lack of verification of virtually any of the results from Tuesday night, despite myriad and widespread if almost completely ignored problems and failures at polls across the country that day, and despite systematic voter suppression and dirty tricks that almost certainly resulted in election results (verified or otherwise) that were skewed toward Republicans...

[This article now cross-published by Salon...]

For some reason, this tweet of mine, from about 4am on Election Night, has become very popular...

Man, those Democrats really suck at all that massive voter fraud they do.

— Brad Friedman (@TheBradBlog) November 5, 2014

Perhaps we can chalk up its popularity to the joke it makes of right wing groups like "True the Vote" which has, since its dubious inception, received and spent a fortune over the years tripping over its own wingnut feet to publish fake "voter fraud!" data, find itself tossed out of courts, harass legal voters attempting to cast legal votes, and otherwise make repeated jackasses of themselves by attempting to perpetuate the well-worn, but fact-shy Republican hoax that there is a massive Democratic voter fraud epidemic at our polls.

TTV was made even more famous lately when they were cited, by name, by 7th Circuit Court of Appeals judge Richard Posner, a very well-respected Reagan-appointed conservative jurist, in his recent opinion on Wisconsin's Photo ID voting law. In Posner's devastating, must-read dissent decrying such discriminatory laws, the most well-cited legal scholar of the 20th century, according to the Yale Law School's Journal of Legal Studies, described the group's "evidence" of voter impersonation fraud as "downright goofy, if not paranoid," citing "the nonexistent buses that according to the 'True the Vote' movement transport foreigners and reservation Indians to polling places" to illegally cast a ballot.

The solution to the pretend problem that TTV lies to its followers about, is, of course, polling place Photo ID restrictions that, as Judge Lynn Adelman of the U.S. District Court in Wisconsin wrote in striking down that state's discriminatory, unconstitutional law after a full trial earlier this year, serve only to "prevent more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes."

So the group's newest embarrassing failure to uncover virtually any "voter fraud" at the polling places it monitored in dozens of states during Tuesday's mid-term general elections --- with an army of righteous and disinformed civilian wingnuts armed with a brand-new smart phone app --- comes as little surprise. It is, however, kind of amusing...

Well, that was interesting.

On this week's "day after" KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast I was joined by old friend Matthew Segal, co-founder of OurTime.org, to discuss whether the failure of young voters to turn out was really to blame for the results of Tuesday's red tide mid-term elections, or whether it was something else entirely. (Yes, we're looking at you, Democrats.)

Segal, by the way, became activated to help young voters while trying to vote as a student at Ohio's Kenyon College in 2004. He was one of 1,300 students who waited 10 hours or so on line, some until 4am on Wednesday morning, to try and cast a vote in the Presidential Election on one of two available voting machines at the polling place that year.

Speaking of voting machines, and voter suppression, and voter disenfranchisement, and election fraud, and unverified results, we also take a broad, early look at all of the other issues and failures --- beyond the horse race --- that may have played a part in Tuesday's surprising outcome, even as we're still trying to make sense of data and curious reports that are still coming in.

We hear from a bunch of callers on all of the above, and Desi Doyen joins us as well to discuss some of the implications of the GOP U.S. Senate takeover on the environment and climate change...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

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It was a very long night here last night (just scroll down the marquee at right to get an idea), and now I'm scrambling to try and make enough sense of things to coherently put together today's BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio. Wish me luck.

So, for the moment, I just want to re-re-re-remind that, historically, many problems from Election Day and, more specifically, in the tabulation of results, don't come to light until the days (or even longer) after Election Day. I'm already getting buried with various tips about various problems that folks had voting yesterday and, perhaps more disturbingly, issues and failures at the polls themselves. Trying to look through as much as I can, confirm what I can, debunk what I can and/or and make sense of it for you as best as possible.

For now then, I'll just drop this fun paragraph from a poster at Slashdot, as it points to a few issues we've covered over the past 24 hours, as well as a few that we have not...