By Brad, from Denver...

Damn bloggers. Following you around everywhere you go, with their nosy little cellphone cameras, writing down every little thing you do or say. Someone should make a law or something...bastards...

P.S. Thanks to the Coloradoans for Voting Integrity (who need a website!) and ProgressNow.org for inviting me to their Denver Roots Camp and for all the great grassroots work they are doing in their fights for truth, justice and the American way! Supermen (and women) all! Looking forward to coming back soon!

By Brad Friedman from Denver, CO...

A late-night report from the Firedoglake blog last night indicated that a Republican-backed initiative to split California's 55 electoral votes by Congressional district has been "withdrawn." In fact, it has not, as The BRAD BLOG has confirmed this morning, with both the California Secretary of State's office and the initial proponent of the original initiative. Democrats have regarded the ballot initiative as a dirty trick by Republicans desperate to hold on to the White House in the 2008 general election.

The current version of the initiative, which has raised millions of dollars, is said to have garnered some 400,000 signatures in support and continues to move forward as planned.

There had been two nearly identical initiatives in circulation attempting to gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in next June's election in California. The original measure, known as "07-0016," as filed by Anthony F. Andrade Jr., has indeed been withdrawn, according to the California Sec. of State website. But the version of the measure most likely to make its way onto the ballot next year, "07-0032,, barrels full steam ahead for the time being.

The BRAD BLOG has confirmed that point with two officials at the CA Sec. of State's office. We have also confirmed it with Andrade himself, a colorful fellow with whom we spoke earlier today, who now supports the other, still-active, initiative.

Andrade, who says that he's a BRAD BLOG reader himself, submitted the original initiative in May of this year. It was approved for signature circulation on July 3, before the nearly identical initiative, submitted by Thomas W. Hiltachk, a former associate of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, was filed on July 10.

Hiltachk's initiative continues to gain momentum and money from Republican backers, while Andrade's original proposal was finally withdrawn from circulation, officially, on November 27.

Andrade, who says he's "a libertarian at heart," told us that Hiltachk saw his original initiative and decided to file a version of his own.

"This asshole goes and reads my initiative, and says 'Ah, I'm gonna file a duplicate,'" he told The BRAD BLOG this morning. "This asshole says he has $2 million," and then it turned out he didn't have a dime. "Perhaps the polite word is 'flake,'" Andrade clarified later during the call.

The Hiltachk proposal was indeed pronounced dead by the LA Times several weeks ago after it was found to have been backed by Rudy Giuliani supporters. The measure has since found new sponsors, also reportedly tied to both Giuliani, as well as California's 49th district U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa. There have also been subsequent allegations of fraud in the gathering of petitions for the measure.

Andrade believes the original backers of the proposal were looking at it as a way to raise money for themselves.

At first labeling the measure a "people's initiative" (after we described it as a "Republican initiative"), Andrade admitted that, while he considers himself more of a libertarian and a Ron Paul supporter, he's most interested in stopping Hillary Clinton from gaining the White House...

Washington Post reports on outgoing Republican Senator Chuck Hagel's comments last night during an address at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. It seems he doesn't care much for the Bush Administration...

We have been remiss in honoring the good Senator with The BRAD BLOG's coveted and too-rarely bestowed "Intellectually Honest Conservative Award". So before he leaves the Senate entirely, we're happy to announce our awarding of this prize today to Hagel.

(NOTE: We're well aware of Hagel's troubling one-time ownership of voting machine company ES&S, before becoming the first Republican Senator to be elected in Nebraska in a dog's age... on ES&S voting machines. It is in spite that ignominy that we offer this most coveted award.)

Blogged by Brad en route to Denver...

While we put a lot of miles on our car, at our own expense, we're not nearly clever enough to figure out how to get to places like Hawaii or Cape Cod, much less trick the government into picking up the tab like the DoJ's John "Minorities Die First" Tanner.

But we will be visiting lovely Denver for a day or two in December, as we've been invited to speak this weekend at Progress Now's Root Camp on our way back towards Los Angeles.

If you're in the 'hood, please stop by for some Election Integrity strategizing in the Mile High City and to say hello! In addition to discussing EI and blogging at the free conference, we'll also be moderating a Q&A to follow a screening of David Earnhardt's new documentary UNCOUNTED: The New Math of American Elections. Would love to see ya there!

UPDATE 12/2/07: Had a great time in Denver, even with all of those nosy bloggers hanging around!

Blogged by Brad Friedman from the Kansas/Colorado border...

Salt Lake City Weekly covers the state's recent electoral woes in the wake of moving to Diebold touch-screen voting machines. They even use a word we reference often here at The BRAD BLOG in regard to upcoming elections: "train wreck."

Utah, of course, was the home of one of the most notorious touch-screen voting system investigations in the country when Emery County Clerk Bruce Funk allowed renowned computer security expert Harri Hursti and e-voting watchdog group BlackBoxVoting.org to examine the new Diebold touch-screen systems forced on him for use by the state.

Their startling vulnerabilities revealed in the Diebold systems by the study were described at the time as a "major national security risk" and "the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system" by Election Integrity, Voting System and Computer Security experts.

For his diligence on behalf of his voters, Funk, the 23-year elected County Clerk, was subsequently locked out of his office and removed from his job with the support of the very state officials who had gone into business with Diebold to create the mess the state now faces.

Blogged by Brad from somewhere near the Kansas/Colorado border...

Not only is John Tanner confused about whose right to vote he's supposed to be protecting (everybody's, even elderly minorities') as head of the DoJ Civil Rights Division, Voting Section, he's also apparently under the impression that the U.S. Government is his personal sponsor for high-flying trips to vacation hotspots like Hawaii and elsewhere for himself and his deputy, Susana Lorenzo-Giguere.

Paul Kiel has a complete, detailed, and highly-recommended investigative report over at TPM Muck, as Tanner could even be facing felony charges, should several current DoJ Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) investigations into his activities pan out. Kiel's report begins this way...

The BRAD BLOG helped kick off a firestorm surrounding the DoJ's voting rights chief Tanner last September when we video-taped and reported on his astounding statement that "minorities don't become elderly, the way white people do. They die first."

Those comments, "highlights" of which are at right, helped lead to calls for his firing and Congressional hearings for the not-yet-fired-or-resigned Tanner.

Former prosecutor Melanie Sloan, of ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), says, in response to the litany of latest allegations, that if new AG Michael Mukasey was "serious about cleaning up the Department, he'd just get rid of Tanner."

We'll see if he does. Please leave your guesses in comments about the exact date on which Tanner will either be fired or suddenly discover that he needs to spend more time with his family. We'll announce the name of whoever is closest when (and if) it actually happens.

Diebold touch-screen voting disasters continue in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. When will the new SoS Jennifer Brunner simply pull this plug on this entire mess?

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer...

While the county was able to re-print paper trails on these machines to be counted in the recount, the practice completely defeats the point of such paper trails in the first place, since they are supposed to be verified by the voter (even though we know they usually aren't, and even when they are, voters fail to notice vote-flips).

If the paper trails are re-printed from the internal machine numbers, which can't possibly be verified by the voter, there is absolutely no point in even having such paper trails at all.

So again we ask, when is SoS Jennifer Brunner going to simply declare these machines uncertified all together. When will the rest of the election officials in the country declare same? It looks like it won't be before the 2008 elections begin. So...here we go again...

(Hat-tip Ed Still's VoteLaw. For much more continuing, detailed, on-the-ground, first-hand reports on these various latest disasters from the counting room in Cuyahoga, please see citizen Adele Eisner's top-notch blog coverage!)

IN RELATED NEWS: Congress and the courts review the Bush Administration's unprecedented extra-Constitutional use of the "states secrets privilege." The same one used to keep FBI translator/whistleblower Sibel Edmonds' allegations of criminal misconduct from seeing the light of day for 5 years now and counting.

(Hat-tip to BRAD BLOG toon sherpa, Pokey Anderson!)

And yet, Fox "News" continues to anoint her (and the rest of the MSM plays along, as usual). Go figure.

The numbers, just out, are here...

by Brad Friedman from St. Louis, MO...

Now that ES&S has finally submitted their previously withheld source code and documentation to California Sec. of State Debra Bowen, new members of her "Top-to-Bottom Review" team have been able to look at the ES&S Inkavote Plus system used across the entirety of Los Angeles County. And whaddaya know, the system is easily susceptible to fraud, hacking and manipulation.

The full report from the new testers --- not the original members of the TTBR team at University of California, but testers sub-contracted by the ubiquitous private e-vote consulting firm of Freeman, Craft, McGregor Group (FCMG) [Ed Note: See additional thoughts/concerns from John Gideon on FCMG in comments here] --- is now posted at the SoS TTBR page [PDF]. The LA Daily News summarizes the findings this way in today's paper...

A public hearing will be held on Monday in Sacramento so that the SoS may receive public input on how she should proceed, and whether the ES&S Inkavote Plus system should be recertified in advance of February's Presidential Primary.

Of particular note is the possibility that the hackable system may be used to vote on a Republican-sponsored ballot initiative to divide California's 2008 electoral vote by Congressional District which could be on the Primary Election ballot next February. Such an unprecedented measure, if passed in the Golden State, could well hand the November General Election nationally, to the Republican party given the large number of electors that would be thrown to the GOP if the current winner-take-all system of choosing electors in California --- the same one used by almost all other states --- is changed for proportional representation.

Reports of potentially fraudulent signature gathering, in order to see the measure added to February's ballot, have already surfaced.

Los Angeles County itself, a reliably Democratic-leaning county over all, carries an enormous number of votes for the state. It's the largest such county in the nation, larger even than two-thirds of the states in the country. Tampering with the vote tabulation in that one county alone, could easily change enough votes to see the Electoral College initiative passed successfully across the state.

Last week, Bowen announced a $15 million lawsuit against ES&S for the illegal deployment of uncertified AutoMARK voting systems across the state. The next day, San Francisco announced its own separate suit against the company, the world's largest supplier of voting systems, charging fraud, false claims and breach of contract.

Blogged by Brad from St. Louis, MO...

Things are really expensive in Marin County, California. For example, the cost to the county, so far, for each vote cast on their brand-new AutoMARK touch-screen voting machines has been $45,588.23.

Yes, that's more than $45,000 per vote for each of the 17 votes cast on the county's 130 machines over the last two countywide elections since they began using them.

And apparently, the county's elected Registrar of Voters, Michael Smith, really wants to continue using those machines, even though ES&S, the company which distributes them, is now being sued by the State of California for deploying uncertified AutoMARK machines in counties across the state, in violation of state law.

Nonetheless, Smith is asking CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen if he can continue using the uncertified machines in the upcoming Presidential Primary election next February, despite all of that, according to the Marin Independent Journal, who reports today:

True, the cost per vote on the AutoMARK in Marin will theoretically come down with each successive election in which they are used (depending on what ES&S charges the county to program them each time, plus the excessive costs of warranties). In a decade or two, at this rate, if the same machines are still in use, each vote cast would come at a bargain basement price of just a few thousand dollars a piece.

I did quick 10 minutes this morning on the nationally syndicated Stephanie Miller Show, as Guest Hosted by our friend Bree Walker. The topic: the latest in the Sibel Edmonds case. And if you're not yet familiar with the case, here's a quickie on what it is, why it matters and what you can do about it.

Here's the audio from my appearance this morning on Stephanie's show...

Apparently, one of the requirements for working as a reporter at the Washington Post is that you must remain as out of touch as possible with anything that matters.

According to ThinkProgress today, Watergate's investigative genius, Bob Woodward, smartly meets the requirements...

Check out TP for those facts (as if you need them), and how you can contact Woodward, and the rest of the clueless WaPo gang to give the poor folks some help on this very very (apparently) obscure topic.

BRAD BLOG's own dozens and dozens of articles --- apparently most of them just too "exclusive" --- on the topic, are posted right here in reverse chronological order.

May he never again be able to go out in public again without being brought face to face with his eternal shame...

The University of Florida's student paper has details. ThinkProgress has more details. RAW STORY has a previous similar incident for poor poor Gonzo.

He was paid $40,000, out of student tuition, to speak at the University of Florida, where a student was recently tasered after asking John Kerry uncomfortable questions. Nobody was tasered during Gonzales speech.

Video of the incident follows. NOTE: Though not seen in the following video, another protester, dressed in army fatigues and holding a sign which read "HABEUS CORPUS", also took the stage in front of Gonzales, as he again averted his gaze, before being similarly escorted away. Kudos to both of the two courageous patriots, as well as those who protested from the audience...