A glitch (yes, a software glitch) found in WordPress this morning, the new software now in place for use here at The BRAD BLOG, kicked in and took us down for much of the morning. We're back up (as you can see) and still working through a host of other issues concerning comment problems and other matters. For now, we recommend you copy your comment to the clipboard before hitting "submit" just in case it doesn't post as it is supposed to on first try!

Please use this item to report any problems you may come across. We'll also keep our eye on the previous item asking for input on these issues.

Otherwise, please scroll down below this item for the latest actual news (on the questionable results of the Busby/Bilbray election and other matters) that I'm also trying to deal with at the same time...

*** IMPORTANT NOTE! *** Since we're still having a bug in the comments posting, PLEASE remember to copy your note (CTRL-C) before submitting it in case it doesn't post. If it doesn't, use paste (CTRL-V) to try again. The problem seems to take care of itself on second post attempt! We're working on it...

While I'm catching up and sifting through much incoming info on the already-tainted results of Tuesday's Busby/Bilbray special election for the U.S. House (CA-50), (BRAD BLOG coverage here, here, here and here, so far), Loyola University Professor/Ph.D. Ron Baiman has some analysis of numbers from Tuesday which he describes as something that "smells fishy in San Diego".

(UPDATE: I'd also like to point you to this comment by Jody Holder, in re: the security issues and requirements for Diebold machines as issued by CA's Sec. of State McPherson recently, and the apparent disregard and failure to properly implement those already-less-than-sufficient requirements. Holder, btw, is one of the plaintiffs in the recently filed suit against the state to stop the use and purchase of Diebold touch-screen systems in California. He's also an incredibly good researcher and analyst of this stuff.)

Also, please note the reported margin seems to be widening between Busby and Bilbray as absentee and provisionals are reportedly being counted, according to the San Diego County Registrar of Voters website. The intially reported 4,700 votes on Election Night has grown to some 6,100 votes at this hour.

Given Busby's concerted campaign, prior to the election, to encourage folks to vote by Absentee Ballot --- as the good Thom Hartmann was kind enough to tip me off to --- the increasing spread in the margin as absentees are tallied is certainly worth watching closely. Particularly with the odd absentee numbers reported that we covered last night.

I suppose prudence demands that I point out, yet again, that I've yet to report any of evidence of fraud in this race (at this time.) Nor have I said that Busby won the race, or that Bilbray --- or anybody --- stole the election.

I have, however, reported the irrefutable fact that the world's most easily-tamperable voting machines (Diebold's) were irreparably tainted by being sent home with poll workers days and weeks prior to the election, in violation of several clear warnings issued by CA's own Sec. of State, Bruce McPherson and the computer scientists at UC Berkeley that he commissioned to independently analyze the scores of known and now-admitted-by-Diebold vulnerabilities in their optical-scan and touch-screen voting systems.

That fact --- in and of itself --- is reason for a complete loss of confidence in the so-far reported results which are based on optically-scanned ballots and touch-screen machine-reported numbers and thus calls for a complete hand count of the paper ballots and "paper trails" before any credence should be given to the reported totals in such a close election with so many national ramifications.

It bears repeating to those who don't get this: The San Diego County Registrar of Voters office is paid with your tax dollars (yes, your federal tax dollars) to run an accurate election. The burden of proof that they have done so, and that the election results are accurate and verifiable lies with them. So far, they have offered no such evidence.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer's associate publisher, Kenneth F. Bunting deserves high praise for his mea culpa in re: the lack of mainstream media coverage (including at his own paper) on RFK Jr.'s recent copiously detailed article in Rolling Stone on whether or not the 2004 Presidential Election was stolen.

His op/ed today is a breath of fresh air and a must read. A very few key excerpts are below.

More to the point, we'll ask then, if Bunting might like to give a story such as the Busby/Bilbray stuff we've been reporting on the attention that it deserves before it becomes too late and the subject of a later "we shoulda reported on it back then" editorial.

Bunting's posted email address is KenBunting@seattlepi.com. Mine is TheBradBlog@cville.com if you'd like to give it to him along with kudos for his piece. I'd be happy to speak with any and all media types about what's going on here and help point them to where the bodies may well be buried...This story could very much use a bigger boat right now...

Okay, not really Diebold programmers. Some of the best actually! My old friend Ronny Brodin has worked his magic and I think the new software here --- that will allow us some really exciting new things soon -- is working pretty well so far.

Nonetheless, there's a bunch of stuff that will need tweaking and I thank you for your patience as we work out the kinks.

As mentioned, this is likely the worst possible time for this, but we've had no choice other than to expedite this long-planned move since the hack/spam attacks have gotten so bad, bringing the whole site down several times a day.

You'll notice some new stuff already. Amongst them, a new "PRINT THIS" option which will also be handy for those who have trouble reading our yellow-on-green color scheme since it's straight black-on-white instead!

More soon on the new features we'll be able to put in place before long! But as it's 4:45am and I've only slept about 3 or 4 hours over each of the last 4 or 5 days, I'm gonna knock off and hope all is well when I wake up to begin tweaking some more of the still-existing "glitches"...Leave comments here if you spot any problems, please, and I'll try to handle them in the morning!

Thanks for all of your support, patience, and understanding... Brad

===============

For those stopping by for our coverage of the questionable Francine Busby/Brian Bilbray U.S. House special run-off election to replace the disgraced "Duke" Cunningham last Tuesday, here's the key articles so far:

Palast's ARMED MADHOUSE is coming to a city near you (though Friedman and Quickley are staying put in Los Angeles where our front doors, by way of complete and true coincidence, happen to be about 10 feet from each other's.)

See this earlier BRAD BLOG item for some exclusive Palast, Ed Asner and Friedman audio as taken from the recording sessions for the audio version of the book (which had been at #1 on the Amazon.com audio book charts earlier this week, btw!)

One might have thought that Ohio's blatantly partisan state election administrator, Republican Sec. of State and now-gubernatorial candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell would have hit his ethical rock-bottom long ago. But think again...

In related recent news concerning the morally and ethically bankrupt Blackwell:

We'd list more, but we'd hate to crash your system with the impossibly long download of crimes that Blackwell has committed against the very voters that he was elected to serve.

I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation for this. There always is.

As ever, it underscores the need for verifiable elections, and begins to remind us that the folks who give a damn about this down there in San Diego County better damned well be keeping an eye on the chain of custody for those paper ballots and "paper trails" as they are being theoretically "counted" by the SD County Registrar of Voters.

According to this web page from the SD County's Registrar of Voters office, as of 5pm last night, the number of uncounted absentee and provisional ballots in the entire county of SD has decreased by 2,000 from the reported 68,500 that were announced as "still to be counted" on election night.

The number of votes in the now-questionable Busby/Bilbray U.S. House (CA-50) special election, however, has been increased by 8,000 votes.

Since the number of votes in the CA-50 race is a smaller subset of the total votes within SD County, one would think that if 2,000 absentee or provisionals were counted for the entire county, the number of votes in CA-50 might go up by a fraction of that number. Instead, they've gone up by 8,000, according to the county's website!

So far, I've been unable to get any comments from "quotable sources" at the Registrar's office on the reported updates. Very few in the office, apparently, are allowed to speak on record to the press for some reason.

As mentioned, no doubt there's a perfectly good explanation for all of this. Right? It's just that you and I may never know it. And, if we do, the election officials will likely never have to prove that their explanation --- or the veracity of their reported vote counts --- is valid. To anybody.

UPDATE 6/13/06: On Thursday afternoon, Cathy Glaser of the SD County Registrars office says she sent out the following notice on the heels of the above report. She's only just sent it to us today:

Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland held a presser yesterday demanding that his opponent, J. Kenneth Blackwell recuse himself from administering his own election contest this November.

Predicably, the rule-of-law-impaired Blackwell declined to do so. True to his nature, obnoxious Blackwell spokesperson, Carlo LoParo showed his usual disdain for Ohio's voters when he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in response: "Their contentions are absurd. Someone else should administer the election? How can they even stand up there with any credibility and talk about that stuff?"

Blackwell and LoParo. Perfect together. God save the Buckeye State.

Back to the concerns about the Busby/Bilbray special election results shortly...But until then...

The attorneys for alleged felonious vote fraud scammer and Republican hate-monger, Ann Coulter, have asked for special treatment by the Palm Beach County, Florida Supervisor of Elections office, according to a documents obtained exclusively by The BRAD BLOG.

In a letter (posted in full at the end of this article) written by Coulter's newly retained attorney, Marcos Daniel Jimenez --- a legal-eagle ally of the White House, involved in Bush/Cheney's 2000 Election "victory" in Florida --- the deservedly-derided GOP pundit has asked for the special privilege of having correspondence sent to her attorney, instead of to the address where she registered to vote in the Sunshine State --- the address of her real estate agent's house, where she never lived...

From AP today...

Congratulations to the State of Arkansas for putting voters and the integrity of their votes over the a horrendously flawed federal statute (HAVA) rammed through Congress by a soon-to-be-indicted criminal.

If it wasn't the disasters that AR has faced so far this year in ES&S's disastrous administration of elections in that state, perhaps it was the morality tale that played out on ES&S equipment in Pottawattamie County, Iowa last Tuesday that pushed them over the edge. Either way, glad to see it. We hope the other 45 states where ES&S runs elections (or, more aptly, ruins elections) will take note.

For a bit more background on the ES&S disasters in Arkansas, see this:
ES&S MELTDOWN: Arkansas Remains an Utter Disaster...
or this:
ES&S MELTDOWN: ARKANSAS PRIMARY A DISGRACE, DISASTER!
or search BRAD BLOG for "Arkansas".
(Hat tip to Doug K.)

Given what we know about Diebold voting machines (both optical-scan and touch-screen), several folks have written to ask: "Are you sure they actually allowed poll workers to take these machines home with them" prior to the Busby/Bilbray U.S. House special election in CA-50th?

Yes. I'm sure. And yes, I confirmed it with someone in the media office at the San Diego County Registrar of Voting before I wrote my initial story on all of this. She asked me to keep her name off record, and so I'm doing so. Feel free to call and ask them yourself however: (858) 565-5800.

While you're talking to them (politely), ask how they intend to prove that the results of the Busby/Bilbray special election are accurate now that the chain of custody for the electronic voting machines --- which have been shown to be exceedingly prone to easy, passwordless tampering --- has been corrupted by sending them home for days and weeks at a time with voluneer poll workers. Also ask them how many absentee and provisional ballots there are in the race. Feel free to report your answers in comments here. If you can get any.

To help confirm the sleepovers of the easily hackable Diebold machines, here's a clip or two from a couple of emails I've received on all of this since posting my original story and this morning's follow up:

And this from Pamela Smith, the Nationwide Coordinator for VerifiedVoting.org and Verified Voting Foundation, who's in San Diego County...

UPDATE 6/9/06: I just noticed the following comment left on one of my original Busby/Bilbray article, from reader Patti Newton, who reports she had a similar experience as a San Diego County poll worker in Busby's district. Here's part of it:

UPDATE: 6/9/06: New numbers reported from San Diego county...

ABC News is featuring this AP story on their website:

Okay, AP. Prove it. I dare you. You can't.

Not without a 100% manual, hand-count of all the optically-scanned paper ballots and touch-screen "paper trails" from Tuesday's CA 50th Congressional district race for the U.S. House of representatives. And even then, depending on the margin of difference after the op-scan ballots are hand-counted, you will be unable to prove that the race was decided correctly if it should turn out the number of votes cast on touch-screen machines was more than the margin of difference after the op-scan ballots are actually counted (by hand!)

The deafening, dumbstruck silence after I posted my article yesterday, headlined 'Results of Close Busby/Bilbray U.S. House Special Election in Doubt!,' is deafening.

Yes, I know the headline is unsettling. As are the implications of the piece. I will hope, however, that most of you who know what I report at The BRAD BLOG also know that what I report, I source with independently verifiable information. So you don't need to trust me. And you shouldn't. No more than you should trust the words of San Diego County's Registrar of Voters.

The arguments presented in yesterday's article are airtight. The have been vetted by a number of election experts and computer scientists. So far, not a single human being has presented me with a flaw in my logic or contentions.

Mind you, I have never reported that any election was "stolen." Not even the 2000 Presidential (which wasn't stolen, as much as given away by the Supreme Court), nor the 2004 Presidential Election, which evidence shows would most likely have gone to Kerry had the votes actually been counted. But I have never claimed that election was "stolen" either, because we simply do not know. Until there is evidence, I do not report it as such.

I am not saying, in my article yesterday, that the Busby/Bilbray election was "stolen" either.

Nor have I charged there has been any fraud. This is (for now) about confidence in verifiable results in an American election. So far, there is no basis to have any.

Nor am I one of those who believes that legitimate elections can only be carried out on 100% hand-counted paper ballots.

This one, however, given the specific machines in use, which have been proven to be easilly tamperable and hackable, without a trace being left behind, (and admitted as such by even the company who makes them!) is a different matter. Add to that, security measures were completely compromised by sending the machines home with poll workers, in some cases, for weeks at a time, prior to the election and we've got a no confidence case on our hands.

The burden is now on elections officials --- who we pay to run accurate elections --- to prove the race was counted accurately. Let's see them do it.

I do not champion, nor traffic in, "conspiracy theories," as those of you who know my work likely already understand. What I reported in yesterday's story was not editorial or "conspiracy theory," but plain scientific fact, resting on an enormous body of peer-reviewed, undisputed, scientific evidence. The contention offered in the piece then is summarized thusly --- presuming the integrity of the chain of custody for the paper ballots and the "paper trails" is still demonstrably secured:

Unless every optically-scanned ballot is counted by hand --- and only if the resultant margin after that count is larger than the number of votes cast on the touch-screen systems --- can there be any confidence that the results of the U.S. House race for CA's 50th congressional district are accurate.

I challenge anybody to prove otherwise. Anybody. It cannot be done.

I welcome any and all questions about the logic or accuracy of my contentions. So far, I have received none.

If, after reading yesterday's article in full --- and asking any questions of me concerning the logic or evidence (I will try to keep an eye on comments left here) --- you still do not understand what's going on here, and what's at stake in your elections, then you are simply heading into November while whistling past democracy's graveyard.

That goes for you, AP. (And ABC, since you're running the article on your site and yet have failed to run extremely important stories on American election integrity issues which, unlike AP's story, are demonstrably provable and feature actual evidence.)

Do you both, AP and ABC, stand behind this report? If so, I dare you to prove the contentions made in your article are backed up with any verifiable evidence. You can't. And you won't. The contentions made in my article, however, certainly are. I feel it's my responsibility to be sure of that when I file a report. Why don't you?

Elections should be verifiable and provable. This one, at least as of now, is most decidely not.

UPDATE: SD County Poll workers write in about voting machine sleepovers...

UPDATE: 6/9/06: New numbers reported from San Diego county...

More shortly concerning my reporting on the questionable Busby/Bilbray elections results in the U.S. House special election to fill "Duke" Cunningham's CA 50th congressional seat. In the meantime, this article from yesterday's Daily Nonpareil in Iowa, about Tuesday's Republican primary there, underscores precisely what I was talking about in my report on Busby/Bilbray yesterday.

After optically scanning absentee ballots in a Republican Primary on Tuesday in Pottawattamie County, a popular, long-time incumbent was trailing a first-time college student candidate by 20 votes. Since that seemed odd, the County Auditor decided to count the absentee ballots by hand and indeed found that the incumbent had won the count instead!... By 128 votes instead of having lost it by 20!

Anybody beginning to get this yet? (...thump, thump...is this thing on?...)

In this case, the new optical scan computers being used for the first time were reportedly made by ES&S. (The ones used in Busby's San Diego race were made by Diebold). Here's more details...

Were it not for the Busby/Bilbray issue reported here earlier today --- which is serious as a heart attack, and about which we'll have more tomorrow --- we would have covered this more indepth. In fact, we've got additional new documents from the Coulter case, which will have to wait until another day because we're buried in the other story for the moment.

But quickly, for now, if this report from the New York Daily News is accurate, the allegations against Coulter surrounding her alleged felony voter fraud, and now more, in the state of Florida, have just gotten a lot worse for her...

To be clear, at this hour, we have no evidence to show that Democrat Francine Busby --- running in yesterday's special run-off election in San Diego against Republican Brian Bilbray to replace the disgraced Republican Randy "Duke" Cunningham for the U.S. House (CA-50) race --- actually won it.

Neither do we have evidence to believe that Bilbray actually won it.

We do, however, have copious and documented evidence to suggest there is no reason in the world to have any faith that Bilbray won the race.

The fact that the thin margin between the two at this hour (with "100% of the votes counted", according to the CA Sec. of State's website) is a mere 4,732 votes --- in a race where 125,882 votes were reportedly cast in a county with more than 355,000 voters registered --- is not even the largest question. Neither is the so-far unclear question of how the race will be affected by the 68,500 absentee and provisional ballots still to be counted in San Diego County according to the SD Registrar of Voters website at this hour.

The biggest concern about the race, by far, is that San Diego County uses two types of Diebold voting systems --- optical-scan and touch-screen --- both of which have not only proven to be disastrously unreliable in San Diego County and California in the past, but have also been demonstrated over the last six months to feature dozens of exceedingly well-documented and remarkable security vulnerabilities, making them extremely accessible to tampering. Especially if anyone has unsupervised physical access for more than a minute or two with them.

The voting machines used in Tuesday's election were sent home with volunteer poll workers the night before the election, according to the San Diego County Registrar of Voters office today. As well, The BRAD BLOG has received reports that in some cases, poll workers may have had the machines alone at their houses, unsupervised, for a week or even two prior to Tuesday's election....