On the same day as NYTimes front paged a story on the coming electoral meltdown. Chicago Trib follows suit in a front pager today that focuses on massive problems in Chicago and Cook County.

Like the Times, who modified their original headline yesterday shortly after publishing to refer to "Voting Woes" instead of "Voting Chaos" as it was originally described, the Trib turns backflips to downplay the concerns, blame as much as possible the poll workers and "human error," along with "glitches" and "hiccups," instead of placing blame where it squarely deserves to be placed: on the Voting Machine Companies and the Elections Officials who approved this garbage for use in our elections.

The headline is "Voting Glitches Feared on Nov. 7," but as a close reading of the article reveals, these are not "voting glitches." They are not even "glitches." They are FAILURES of the voting machine companies and elections officials. Period. End of story. Got that?

The story rightly refers to "a virtual meltdown" in last spring's primary in Chicago and Cook County, and goes on to add that vote totals can be completely fried...

So vote totals can be entirely "fried" and yet we're actually using this system on November 7th?! Moreover, note the language above that says it's "possible for workers" to fry the vote totals. Instead of the more appropriate, "it's possible that the poorly designed systems could have their entire vote totals fried."

As I've gotta hit the road to head up North for speaking engagements and meetings over the next several days, and as things are now melting down all around us, as predicted --- with some 20 days left until Nov. 7th --- my patience is just about worn thin with the apologists, liars, and those journalists, "advocates," and public officials who have no excuse to claim ignorance anymore.

So I hope you'll pardon the more graphic language I feel compelled to use below...

We spoke about the Democratic, and actually qualified candidate for California Sec. of State Debra Bowen yesterday.

So, equal time. Let's talk about the completely unqualified, partisan mouthpiece, the current Schwarzenneger-appointed California Secretary of State and accomplished liar, Bruce McPherson.

Oh, and as the end of yesterday's debate revealed, he's also a loathsome human being.

The two debated before the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board. It was broadcast live --- now available to watch on the web --- and very informative. Here are some thoughts of ours on several of McP's obfuscations lies comments during the debate.

NOTE: Quotes of his below aren't always exact, but damned near. With one of McP's quotes, however, we had to go back and check three times, just to make sure we heard him right. We did. And we're appalled.

He actually said, "Under Secretary of State Bowen, if that ever happens, I will tell you, the blind and disabled will not be eligible to vote privately and independently."

Bowen replied gracefully by saying his comment was "shameful" and "not [McPherson's] finest moment."

Our personal replies to that appalling comment, and McP's host of other lies, follow below, and are far less charitable. As you may know, the election for California SoS may prove to be the most important race for the future of the nation's electoral system. Our snarky, point-by-point rebuttal to the truth-challenged McP --- who is working for the voting machine companies, not the voters of California --- follows in full...

Nice of New York Times to start paying attention...now that it's too late to do much of a damn thing about it.

FLASHING now at DRUDGE REPORT...

UPDATE 7:35pm PT: Complete NYTimes story now up. "New Laws and Machines May Spell Voting Chaos". It's well worth a read!

FURTHER UPDATE BY JOHN GIDEON 9:00pm PT: The story reveals that many of the voting machines now being used in Yolo Co, California for voters with disabilities only work in Vietnamese. These machines are only being used in the county because SoS McPherson and his staff unfairly denied certification to Vote-PAD which was supposed to be used in that county.

FURTHER UPDATE BY BRAD 9:20pm PT: Looks like the NY Times, who hasn't done much of any reporting on this topic up until now has had second thoughts already. The original headline discussed "...Voting Chaos" but has now been softened to "...Voting Woes". I've got my money on "chaos", not "woes" this November. It's a shame they've backed off. They were so close to telling the truth. Sigh...

FURTHER UPDATE BY JOHN 8:10am PT: While my 'UPDATE' from last night says many machines only worked in Vietnamese the article actually says 'some machines' and I have now found that, in fact, 3 machines were affected. My apologies for the incorrect wording.

Is this sort of thing actually necessary? Apparently it is.

While the following 10 items seem painfully obvious, apparently these no-brainer items need to be issued as a "Voter Bill of Rights" by CA Secretary of State candidate Debra Bowen, given the mess we currently face (made possible, in no small part, by the hapless, duplicitous current CA SoS Bruce McPherson)...

Have we mentioned that Bowen's victory in defeating McPherson is perhaps one the most important elections in the country if we hope to ever see Electoral Integrity in this country again? Sign on to support here...

UPDATE 10:28pm PT: Bowen and McPherson debated today. Video here. Haven't gotten to watch it yet, but McP would never out and out lie would he? Not before an important editorial board, right?

UPDATE 10:33pm PT: Whoops! Just watched the first five minutes and he already did! Go figure...I suspect there are many more to come.

UPDATE 10/18/06 4:37pm PT: Holy cow! Lies o' plenty! And more! Full coverage of the debate now here...

Haven't had time to check into this (I welcome folks in Missouri to please do so themselves!) as too much rolling fast and furious now. Galloglas at DU reports that the Missouri Secretary of State's office may be encouraging use of paper ballots on Election Day. He reports that they may be available for "optional" use and will NOT be counted as Provisional Ballots.

That's good news. But, as with California's SoS announcement we reported last week, it sounds like the SoS office in the "Show Me" state (...pausing to ponder the irony...) could use a bit of a nudge to do the right thing and develop specific plans and procedures for use of optional and/or Emergency Paper Ballots in every precint. See Galloglas' report. Sounds like they are well aware of our efforts here at The BRAD BLOG, so be polite and give them our best wishes!

Contact info for Missouri SoS/Election Division here.

We recently sent a letter, along with more than 50 other Election Integrity organizations and notable individuals, calling on SoSs, Governors, and State Election Officials to develop immediate plans and procedures for the use of Emergency Paper Ballots this November 7th.

You can contact your own state officials via email here. We also encourage you to call them on the phone. They'd love to hear from you!

An enormous number of superb documentary films that cover the topic of our American electoral meltdown are being released. Last week, I quickly ran a preview item on HBO's Hacking Democracy --- premiering Nov. 2nd on HBO --- which gives a first-hand account of the detective story as it has unravelled over the last three years concerning the many lies of the Diebold corporation. I've now seen the final cut and will have more details on that extraordinary film soon.

In the meantime, I was thrilled recently to get a look at David Earnhardt's breathtaking Eternal Vigilance: The Fight to Save Our Election System documentary, which tells the story of America's crumbling democracy and a few of the citizen patriots across the country who are attempting to save it.

Along with a focus on some of those folks, the film's emphasis is on the impossibilities which seem to have occurred in the tainted 2004 Presidential Election and the likes of which we may look forward to in the weeks and years ahead.

Earnhardt's film draws a great deal from a series of speeches and interviews filmed in April of 2005 during a National Election Reform Conference in Nashville, Tennessee.

I participated as a speaker at several events during that conference, as did computer programmer, whistleblower, and former lifelong Republican Clint Curtis who had, at the time, yet to even dream of running against a very close friend of the Bush clan, the corrupt U.S. House Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff) --- the very man Curtis has alleged asked him to create a vote-rigging software prototype when they both worked for the same Oviedo, Florida, software firm in 2000.

Curtis left the Republican party after being soured on them vis-a-vis his direct experiences with Feeney.

Earnhardt was kind enough to share with The BRAD BLOG the section of the film which introduces the basics of Curtis' vote-rigging claims about Feeney. It's a beautifully done segment --- and not just because it includes interviews with me as well, but it doesn't hurt! --- which should go a long way towards allowing folks to decide whether Curtis is "crazy" as Feeney's reprehensible smear campaign and website against him is hoping to trick voters into believing now that they've become Congressional opponents.

Here's the clip (about 8 mins) from Earnhardt's film which I found to be finally as uplifting and hopeful as it was maddening and heartbreaking. The entire film can be purchased on DVD at the website www.EternalVigilance.us where additional clips from the film are also available.

NOTE: There is yet another documentary, still in the works, wholly devoted to the Clint Curtis/Tom Feeney/Yang Enterprises, Inc., vote-rigging scandal and The BRAD BLOG's so-far two-year long investigation and reporting of it. That films goes into considerably more detail on the entire breadth of the allegations (including the Chinese spying, the mysterious death of the Florida Inspector General who was investigating Curtis' claims, etc.). We hope to have details and, perhaps a short preview from that film soon as well.

Please pass the permalink to this article far and wide to help counter the hundreds of thousands of corporate PAC and RNC dollars that Feeney is using in his shameless attempt to discredit Curtis.

While you're at it, if you'd like to help unseat Feeney, one of the most corrupt members of Congress, please donate to Curtis' citizen-funded campaign. We've spoken to him recently, and he continues to be upbeat about his chances, but while the national Dems have still failed to help his campaign (as with so many others across the country), it's up to the people to help someone who will fight for electoral integrity get into the U.S. Congress!

(Hat-tip Hotpotatomash for help with the video!)

The publicity email sent to us this morning from filmmaker David Earnhardt follows in full...

The BRAD BLOG has obtained an EXCLUSIVE partial transcript from a recent, unaired interview by a major broadcast network with former U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) chair Rev. DeForest Soaries.

Soaries was appointed by George W. Bush as the first chair of the commission created by the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in the wake of the 2000 Presidential Election Debacle. In the interview, available here for the first time, Soaries excoriates both Congress and the White House, referring to their dedication to reforming American election issues as "a charade" and "a travesty," and says the system now in place is "ripe for stealing elections and for fraud."

Having resigned from the commission in April of 2005, Soaries goes on to explain that he believes he was "deceived" by both the White House and Congress, and that neither were ever "really serious about election reform."

The explosive comments are the latest evidence highlighting serious deficiencies in the federal body, created by HAVA for oversight of elections systems, including new electronic voting devices, and standards for the use and security of those systems.

In the unaired interview, conducted last August, Soaries says there are "no standards" for voting systems and that Congress and the White House "made things worse through the passage of the Help America Vote Act."

Due to underfunding and lack of attention to the EAC and the Election Reform it was supposed to oversee, Soaries says we now have an "inability to trust the technology that we use" to count votes in our American democracy, even as "we’re spending a billion dollars a week in Iraq."

"We know more today about how to build a machine to take pictures of rocks on Mars than we know about how to build a machine to safeguard the American right to vote," complained Soaries in the interview.

On Electronic Voting System standards --- which HAVA mandated would be created by the EAC --- Soaries blasts both the White House and Congress for failing to supply them with the needed resources to complete the mandate, both for the federal government and the states that were relying on them to do so.

"[T]he states were forced to comply and they were asking us for guidance. We were ill-equipped to provide guidance. We didn’t begin our work until January 2004 and we spent the first three months of our work looking for office space. Here we were, the first federal commission, responsible for implementing federal law in the area of election administration and for the first three months we didn’t even have an address. And we physically had to walk around Washington DC looking for office space. This was a travesty. I was basically deceived by the leaders of the House, the Senate and the White House."

"Someone has got to be able to say, no one in America should use machine 'A' ever again," he says, in reference to the EAC's failure to decertify electronic voting systems even after they have been proven to be easily vulnerable to hackers and tampering.

"And if it’s not EAC," he continued, "it’s got to be someone. Someone in America has got to hold America accountable for protecting the most fundamental right in a democracy and that is the right to vote."

The straightforward comments from the EAC's first chair are in stark contrast to the actions of his Bush-appointed replacement, the current EAC head, Paul DeGregorio. The outgoing chair, DeGregorio, whose term has now ended, made news several days ago when it was discovered he had allowed the commission to withhold the release of a May 2006 report revealing claims of epidemic "Voter Fraud" --- as made by GOP operatives in order to push an agenda calling for restrictive, unconstitutional Photo ID laws at polling polaces --- are wholly unfounded.

Where Soaries was disappointed at the lack of interest by officials for true reform by the EAC during his tenure, his successor appears to have been using the post as an arm of the White House to continue its manipulation and perversion of the American electoral system.

UPDATE 7:27pm PT: The folks from KTLK in Los Angeles called to say they will have Soaries on the "Harrison on the Edge" show tonight to discuss this interview at 8:30pm PT. You can listen online here...

The transcript of Soaries comments, as taken from the unaired August 2006 interview are posted below…

Good news for voters and democracy in Missouri!

Bad news for Mark F. "Thor" Hearne II, the democracy-hating, snake-oil selling, high-level GOP/Team Bush operative and the insidiously evil man behind the entire phony disenfranchising Photo ID legislation movement across the entire country through his phony "non-partisan" front group, "American Center for Voting Rights" (ACVR), whom we exposed long ago.

The most satisfying part of this, perhaps, is that "Thor" is from our hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, where's he's been pushing his powerful, behind-the-scenes buttons fighting in favor of this crap for years.

On calls and deadlines right now, so can't give much more info for the moment. Will try to update as needed later...Just out from AP...

Over on dKos, diarist "histopresto", a new Ohio "Precinct Election Official" in-training, shares his first-hand account of his recent training session.

Not only was he stunned to hear of the meltdown the state experienced with its new voting equipment during their May primary (psst, histo, I know Markos doesn't find such things important, but we do, so maybe that's part of why "it wasn't publicized" as you mentioned...It certainly was over here at The BRAD BLOG!), but after he details all of the primary election problems he came to learn about, he adds "Amazingly enough, after all of these technical problems were addressed by various fixes, the big thing that was stressed by the trainer had NOTHING to do with voting machines. Instead, they spent most of their time talking about the new VOTER ID requirements that people are going to be encountering this November."

Sigh...He goes on to report:

Check out the full report...

(Hat-tip emailer Sharon A.)

Every California voter who wishes to vote on a paper ballot in this year's general election may do so, The BRAD BLOG has learned, according to an October 3rd, 2006 memo issued by the California Secretary of State's office!

The terse, single-page internal memo, sent to "All County Clerks/Registrars of Voters/Vendors" on CA SoS stationery (download complete memo here [PDF]) instructs elections officials across the state that they should "have an adequate supply of paper ballots" if electronic voting machines should break down or "if a voter chooses not to vote on electronic equipment."

Written by CA's Asst. SoS, Susan Lapsley, the memo was issued in apparent response to our recent call for Congress to introduce and pass immediate "Emergency Paper Ballot" legislation. While bills were subsequently introduced in both the House and Senate, neither chamber succeeded in voting on the legislation before adjourning for the election recess. Eagle-eyed BRAD BLOG readers may remember Lapsley as the one behind the Busby/Bilbray fax to Congress, declaring the Republican Bilbray the winner of the recent CA50 U.S. House Special Election to replace "Duke" Cunningham weeks before it was certified, while thousands of votes remained to be counted --- and well after we had already exposed that the tainted election included voting machine "sleepovers" with poll workers in the days and weeks prior, in contravention of both state and federal law.

Lapsley's memo was written just after Congress adjourned and prior to the letter [PDF] we sent last week, along with more than 50 other Election Integrity organizations and leaders, to all 50 Secretaries of State and Governors calling on them to institute immediate plans and procedures for Emergency Paper Ballots.

The good news here, as we see it, is that all California voters across what Diebold refers to as "the country's largest voting market" may now demand paper ballots when they go to the polling place this year. This will be crucial in counties such as San Diego and San Joaquin, where the Registrars of Voters have chosen to side with the voting machine companies instead of the voters by supplying only hackable touch-screen Diebold voting machines for their citizens this year.

In enormous Los Angeles County, which includes some 8 million voters, such dangerously unreliable touch-screen systems are used only for early voting. It seems clear, however, from Lapsley's memo, that even early voters in LA County may now choose to vote on paper ballots instead!

From the CA SoS' memo...

Seems clear enough to us. And, we believe, it's very good news for the voters of California in general.

With that in mind, however, some Election Integrity Advocates have expressed concern about the vagaries and other dangers of the Lapsley memo, including the Democratic Secretary of State candidate Debra Bowen and election attorney Paul Lehto, both of whom we have immense respect for...

We were about to blog Washington Post's article today on the "inexplicably upbeat" moods of both Bush and Rove these days.

As we're up against it right now, hammering away on a number of deadlines, several breaking items we're trying to dig into, helping to coalesce VelvetRevolution.us' continuing Election Protection Strike Force efforts, while preparing and packing to bug out for a number of upcoming speaking engagements and meetings around the state, we're happy to see that HuffPo's Bob Cesca has already dug into this one for us....

Cesca continued...

UPDATE: Blogger and BRAD BLOG commenter Scottmandubious has a similar take to Cesca's, and may have even posted his first. In either case, we just noticed, so check him out as well...

Following up on our Wednesday coverage of the four- month-old report on "Voter Fraud," which the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) refused to release when they discovered the report points to just how little such fraud actually occurs. The facts don't lie, despite the loathesome high-level GOP/Team Bush operatives who call themselves the "non-partisan" American Center for Voting Rights' (ACVR), and their ongoing disingenuous and well-funded efforts to establish that voter fraud is rampant, perpetrated almost exclusively by Democrats, and must be cured by disenfranchising and unconstitutional Photo ID requirement laws at the polls (although not for absentee or military balloting, of course).

We've now had a chance to review the unreleased report [PDF] in full. It's just twelve pages. But it slams the notion that there is any massive problem in America with "Voter Fraud", despite ACVR's continuing campaign to suggest the problem is an epidemic --- versus all of the many other forms of disenfranchisement that really do occur and really do threaten our democracy.

"There is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud," the report explains, "or at least much less than is claimed, including voter impersonation, 'dead' voters, noncitizens voting and felon voters."

The report singles out ACVR as the only named proponent of the discredited notion that voter fraud is plaguing the country --- ACVR is ignominously named as dissenting three times in the report! --- so it is little wonder they didn't want this report to see the light of day.

ACVR's main perpetrator and Democracy-Hater-in-Chief, Mark F. "Thor" Hearne II, was actually a part of the "working group" assembled for this report. Notably, Hearne failed yet again to mention that he was the National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. in his bio at the end of the report.

Similarly, Hearne withheld that information in his testimony on behalf of ACVR during now-disgraced Rep. Bob Ney's U.S. House Adminstration Committee hearing in March of 2005. ACVR was the only "Voting Rights" group invited to discuss the travesties of Election 2004. He testified only that he was a "longtime advocate of voter rights" and must have just forgotten to mention his Bush/Cheney connections...or that the ACVR had been formed just three business days prior to the hearing!

The EAC's buried report points to problems not with voter fraud, but instead with minority voter intimidation, improper purging of registration rolls, dirty tricks, and all sorts of things that the loathesome ACVR con-men have spent enormous amounts of money trying to smoke-screen, via propaganda reports hoping to fool America into believing that double-voting, dead people voting, and non-citizens voting is the real threat to democracy.

It's not. But anti-American monsters like Thor Hearne definitely are.

The biggest problem, the EAC's unpublished report finds, is absentee ballot fraud; a problem that is decidedly not addressed in any way by the despicable Photo ID laws that Hearne and friends have been promoting in statehouses around the country. He and his evil compatriots were even able to convene a phony "blue-ribbon" panel last year on Election Reform, chaired by Bush Family crony James A. Baker, in order to endorse the call for a national Photo ID requirement at the polls. (Who better to lead an Election Reform panel than the man who went to the U.S. Supreme Court in order to keep voters from having their votes counted in Florida in 2000?!)

Apparently snake-oil salesman Hearne was unable to fool the rest of the folks working on the EAC report into believing he wasn't utterly full of shit (as previously reported in exacting detail by The BRAD BLOG.)

Consider this embarrassing ACVR moment from the EAC's buried report...

Kudos, btw, to Candorville cartoonist Darrin Bell, who has had his sharp eye on this issue for a while. His strip is widely syndicated (it's in our copy of LA Times for one), so his coverage of "Liebold" should be receiving quite a few eyeballs today.

He contacted us this morning to alert us to today's toon, along with the promise that "there will be more to this storyline as the election approaches."

He asks that we also point folks to the main Candorville website. We're happy to oblige!

Late last year we wrote about the email exchanges between GOP uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff and associates describing their strategies for using Christian "wackos" at the polls. They were playing them for chumps.

Now, a former Bush Administration official from the White House's "Faith-Based Initiatives" office reveals further how Bush and the Republicans in power did little more than play their Christian Evangelical supporters as suckers who they could trick into turning out to the polls.

In the book, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction, author and former Bush official David Kuo, a real Christian and conservative, explains how Karl Rove referred to their so-called Christian "Values Voters" as "the nuts," "out of control," and "just plain goofy."

Tucker Carlson spoke about the "pure contempt" that the Republicans actually have for the Christian base recently on The Chris Matthews Show (short video here). MSNBC ran a longer segment detailing the explosive revelations found during their exclusive look at the new book (video at RAW STORY).

We realize this item came out a day or two ago, but we think it's worth pointing more attention towards.

So will you dyed-in-the-wool far right Christian voters fall for the same trick again this November by supporting candidates who loathe you and are using you for everything you're worth (money and a vote)? We'll see...

UPDATE 6:08pm PT: The video from Part II of MSNBC's report is now here, courtesy of Crooks & Liars...

Poor, poor, corrupt, ethically-challenged, morally bankrupt Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff). Can't even run a smear campaign without getting into trouble, screwing it up and seeing it backfire.

As we reported several weeks ago, the feckless Florida Republican launched a "Crazy Clint Curtis" smear website and blogsite, to attack his whistleblower-turned-congressional opponent with doctored photos and doctored facts.

The Tom Feeney for Congress Campaign's shameful tactics continue to fizzle, apparently, as they have been forced to remove their smear blogsite, which had been set up on blogger.com to attack Curtis. The removal of the site, and the link to it from the main smear-site, comes not a moment too soon: we had planned to run an item on Feeney's latest demonstrable lie, which we had noticed was recently posted on the smear blog. The blog, which had been at CrazyClintCurtisBlog.blogspot.com is now redirected to an innocuous search page, with no trace left behind.

In a blog item Feeney posted on the site --- before he "disappeared" it --- he charged that an article published in Hustler about the mysterious 2003 death of Raymond Lemme "was based on the delusions of Clint Curtis's murder conspiracy theory," or some such nonsense.

As it was "we," Brad Friedman, who actually wrote the article in question [PDF], we can tell you that it was based on nothing of the sort. It was based on the mysterious and still unexplained circumstances surrounding Lemme's death, which the Valdosta, GA police had initially ruled a suicide, but then later reopened the investigation after The BRAD BLOG reported on an affidavit filed by Curtis. Curtis alleged that his former employer YEI had harbored Chinese illegal aliens spying for China (later confirmed), overbilled on state contracts (later confirmed), and that Feeney, who also worked for the firm as lobbyist and attorney --- while simultaneously serving as Speaker of the Florida House --- had requested Curtis to create a software vote-rigging prototype (not yet confirmed, but similarly not disproven.)

Lemme was an investigator from the Florida Inspector General's office, looking into the charges Curtis originally filed with the state of Florida in early 2001. In his sworn affidavit, Curtis says that Lemme told him in June of 2003 that his final report was almost complete, and that he'd found the corruption "went all the way to the top." Two weeks later, Lemme was found dead in Valdosta, Georgia.

Our story on Lemme's death detailed the many contradictions between the official police report and the unearthed photographs of the death scene --- photographs which the police report originally stated were taken at the scene but unavailable, due to a "failure in the camera's flash memory cards."

And now, Feeney has scrubbed the smear blogsite altogether, in what appears to be the latest misstep in the Congressman's bizarre and shameful campaign.

Previous follies in Feeney's smear campaign include (but are not limited to):

All of this from a man who issued a news release in the early morning hours after Curtis's landslide victory in the Florida primary. Quoth Feeney: "Serious times demand serious leaders and Curtis is not even in the same solar system as the rest of us."

Really? Which solar system are you in, Mr. Feeney? We're still waiting for your "serious" leadership, or at least a serious campaign on both the issues and allegations.

For his part, Curtis recently issued a press release calling on Feeney to explain what he knew of Florida colleague Mark Foley's sexual predator issues and when he knew about them. As a GOP Deputy Whip in the U.S. House, Feeney is a part of the Leadership who had been reportedly made aware of Foley's predilections long before the information was publicly revealed.

So far, Feeney has refused to comment on the record, to our knowledge, concerning the Foley matter.

He has also refused to take a polygraph test concerning Curtis's allegations and has denied, but not answered to, them. Curtis, who gave an account of the remarkable story in video-taped sworn testimony to a Congressional panel in late 2004, successfully passed such a polygraph on his own in early 2005.