Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell's press release says the November 8th election was "a great success" and "a great day for Ohio voters."

And, what do you know? Diebold agrees!

The story on the ground in Lucas County, OH, however, seems to tell a very different story. More than just the 14 voting machines left in a hallway unattended for 10 days at the University of Toledo as reported by Joshua Boak in the Toledo Blade (so much for that secure chain of custody!), dozens of investigations are now underway in Lucas County for all number of problems that occurred on Election Day two weeks ago according to another Blade report, this one from Boak along with Jane Schmucker...

Note, that the investigation will begin after the results are already certified.

And a few more troubling items from the same article...

And finally, let's not forget that Lucas County is where Bernadette Noe, the head of their Board of Elections and Republican Party --- as well as the wife of indicted "CoinGate" hustler Thomas Noe - reportedly was found to have been instrumental in gaming the November ‘04 Presidential Election in that county.

The toon above was posted at HuffPo by Mamet, the day after the recent party at Arianna's (see this link about the party, if you didn't read it already, for a bit of additional trivia re: my relationship with Mamet who was also there that night.)

As well, if you missed it earlier this week at BRAD BLOG, HuffPo has cross-posted my followup article to my original piece on "The Staggeringly Impossible Results of Ohio's '05 Election" Please see the HuffPo version of the follow-up to enjoy the postings of a few always-amusing anti-democracy troll commenters there.

I will have an additional update tomorrow on the Ohio stuff as well, btw. Stay tuned...

Some fan mail this morning asks "on what planet did you learn English?"...

Our answer...The same planet on which the sender apparently learned to cherry-pick the information he chooses to read and use as the basis for an argument. Sigh...

++++EXAMPLE: If this emailer went to a restaraunt and ordered a steak and the steak involved was to be served medium-well as he ordered it, we suppose he'd have no problem when the steak was delivered to his table completely uncooked. After all, he got his steak and there is "EXACTLY ZERO DIFFERENCE" between what he asked for and what he received.

++++FURTHER EXAMPLE: Using the emailer's bullet-proof logic, if we were to refer to him as "a stupid prick," but he was really just stupid and not a prick at all, it would mean the "EXACT SAME THING!!"

(P.S. For other material the emailer chose to not notice from Murtha's original resolution --- above and beyond the stuff he chose to not notice in even the text he did quote in his impressive email --- see this previous item for the complete text of both Murtha's resolution, and the phony GOP resolution cyncially created to play politics with our troops instead of supporting them.)

In what can only be described as a cynical and partisan last minute stunt by the Republican-controlled House of Representative, GOP leaders have announced a sudden vote this evening on the "Murtha Resolution" which had called for the immediate phasing out of troops in Iraq and a deployment of a "quick-reaction U.S. force" of Marines in the region should trouble arise.

The GOP-modified version of Murtha's resolution, which had given numerous reasons for his call for a pull-out has starkly changed both the language and meaning of the original resolution in hopes that Republicans can force Democrats onto the record voting in favor of, or against, "immediate termination" of forces in Iraq.

The BRAD BLOG has obtained PDF versions of both the original Murtha Resolution [PDF] as well as the 3-line GOP-Amended version [PDF] version being put forward by House Leadership for the last minute vote this evening.

Congressman Murtha (D-PA) is a long time Iraq war hawk, strong advocate of the military and a combat veteran of both the Vietnam and Korean conflicts. In an emotional statement yesterday, he had called for the pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq.

After the preamble in Murtha's original resolution, which gives numerous reasons to support his call for troop withdrawal, the following statement is made:

The GOP revision, however, includes no preamble, and states that all troops will be removed immediately. This is it, in its entirety:

The AP has more on the all-out political melee now occuring on the House floor...

MORE... Debate/Vote scheduled for 7pm ET ... C-Span's live coverage here. (thanks for link to DaveF of Bare Knuckle Politics!)

As the State of California appears to now be bending over backwards in an attempt to give their elections to Diebold as reported earlier today, a lawsuit has been quietly filed in North Carolina by the http://www.eff.org\">Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to ensure that Diebold must play be the same rules as other vendors and that they abide by state law which they have been attempting to skirt through court filings.

Today EFF announced that they were going to court to prevent Diebold Elections Systems, Inc. from evading the North Carolina law which requires Voting Machine Companies to place their source code into escrow with the state. Diebold, one of America's largest Voting Machine Companies, apparently doesn't want to and has recently received a court-waiver to allow them to avoid doing so.

From EFF's press release issued today...

(Hat-tips to both John Gideon and David Edwards for alerting us to this story.)

Election reform advocates had hoped Diebold touch-screen voting machines would be permanently decertified in the country's largest "voting market" (as Diebold likes to refer to it) after a massive test of their AccuVote DRE machines earlier this year revealed a 20% failure rate. But a more recent test, secretly held at Diebold Election System's McKinney Texas headquarters, apparently in violation of California state law, has resulted in what appears to be a last minute about-face from California's Republican Sec. of State, Bruce McPhereson. The latest news has now thrown everything into doubt in the state concerning the future of electronic voting here.

Miriam Raftery of RAW STORY has the full skinny. Something smells very rotten in the state of California.

The original co-sponsors of legislation in the House of Representatives to require "paper records" on Electronic Voting Machines and many other security measures and improvements to the Help America Vote Act of 2002, have sent a "Dear Colleague" letter to other members citing the landmark report recently released by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the myriad security problems found after a year-long investigation into those machines.

In a letter from last Wednesday obtained by The BRAD BLOG, Congressmen Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Tom Davis (R-VA) asked colleagues to join them in support of H.R. 550, known as the "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act".

In their letter, the congressmen point out several of the key findings in the GAO report leading off with a quote from it that reads ". . . computer programs could access these cast vote files and alter them without the system recording this action in its audit logs.” [emphasis in original]

The legislation, which currently has more than 150 bi-partisan co-sponsors, has been languishing for some time as House Leadership has kept it from coming up for debate on the House floor or committee mark-up. H.R. 550 is currently "pending" in the House Administrative Committee, according to Holt's Communications Director, Patrick G. Eddington, but it has received "no debate, mark-up or hearing" as of yet. He added, "no Committee has specifically addressed H.R. 550."

H.R. 550 was introduced in April of this year. It was a reintroduction of a predecessor bill, H.R. 2239, which was first introduced in 2003, but was similarly never debated or voted on in any House committee.

The House Administrative Committee is chaired by Ohio Republican Bob Ney who held hearings last March on "Ohio Election Irregularities" in which he called only one witness from any "Voting Rights" group. That group, the self-proclaimed "non-partisan" American Center for Voting Rights, had been formed only days before the hearing, and as reporting by BRAD BLOG has revealed, was formed by two high-level Bush/Cheney/RNC operatives. Ney is also reported to be currently under investigation by the DoJ for his involvement in the ongoing Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

Amongst several other points cited in the letter from the GAO reports's findings: Ballot definitions on Electronic Voting Machines may be altered so that "the votes shown on the touch screen for one candidate would actually be recorded and counted for a different candidate."; Programming errror in a Pennsylvania county resulted in an undervote percentage of 80% in some precincts; An "unknown number of disenfranchised voters" as documented by California voting officials; Election monitors in a Florida county discovering a "flaw" in an Electronic Voting Machine ballot that allowed "ballots to be added to the canvas totals multiple times without being detected."; An Electronic Voting system in Ohio added nearly 4,000 votes for Bush in just one precinct during the '04 Presidential Election.

Though the GAO report was non-partisan, requested by the Chairmen and ranking members of three different U.S. House Committees, and was released last month after a year-long investigation along with a rare bi-partisan joint press release which lauded it, not a single wire service or mainstream American newspaper to date, that we know of, has devoted a single paragraph reporting on its release or the information contained within.

The complete text of Holt and Davis' letter to colleagues follows [emphasis in original] ...

In his first outing as one of the "new voices" to replace fired progressive columnist Robert Scheer at the LA Times, Jonah Goldberg forwards the wingnut CYA agenda by beginning to build a case that Bush may have lied the country into a war, but if he did so, it was okay since it was for "a just cause". He also regales his new readers by referring to those who disagree with him politically as "moonbats".

Finally, he goes on to gloat about it all over at Wingnut Central by making fun of those who protested Scheer's firing. Classy.

Great hire, LA Times!

...CONTACTS...
Jeff Johnson, new Op Ed page publisher
Jeff.johnson@latimes.org, voice: 213-237-5000 fax: 213-237-4401

Dennis FitzSimons, CEO Tribune Company
dfitzsimons@tribune.com, voice: 312-222-9100 fax: 312-222-1573

Letters to the Editor, Letters@LATimes.com

A page one story in today's Washington Post reports that a 51-page memo obtained by the paper, shows Dept. of Justice staffers had rejected a controversial new Photo ID requirement law for voters in Georgia, but that their recommendations were overruled and the measure was approved anyway by the Bush appointed Attorney General.

Georgia's new law was recently rejected as unconstitutional by two Federal Courts who equated it to a "Jim Crow-era poll tax" after its approval by the DoJ despite the recommendation against it by 4 out of 5 staffers in the DoJ's Voting Rights Act division.

The law would have required all voters to present a Photo ID at the poll, available for $20 to those who did not have one. The measure, which, like all such measures currently being pushed around the country by Republicans, is alleged to be disproportionately disenfranchising to minority (read: Democratic-leaning) voters.

Despite a complete dearth of evidence to demonstrate that Photo ID requirements are useful in combatting the non-existent epidemic of "Voter Fraud" in America, Republican legislators in Georgia and other states are attempting to ramrod such measures through their state legislatures. Even the creators of the Georgia law were unable to cite a single example of fraud in the state which would have been held off by the new legislation.

Indeed, the self-described "non-partisan" GOP front-group calling itself the American Center for Voting Rights has been fervently attempting to perpetrate the hoax of a "Voter Fraud" epidemic on voters for at least the past six months. They've made the cause their number one plan in attempting to further disenfranchise millions of minority, elderly, poor and urban-dwelling voters, all of whom are far more likely to vote Democratic and not own drivers licenses.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, parts of which are up for renewal by this Justice Department in 2007, requires states such as Georgia to have any such new laws that may effect voters to be "pre-cleared" by the DoJ.

According to WaPo...

UPDATE 12/2/05: Bush DoJ does it again! This time with a unanimous decision against Tom DeLay's Texas redistricting! Turns out that too was overruled by his DoJ cronies!

UPDATE 12/10/05: Now the DoJ has barred staffers from offering opinions at all! Democracy crumbles...

For more information on the "non-partisan" tax-exempt ACVR scam and the snakeoil salesmen who invented it, Bush/Cheney '04 National General Counsel Mark F. "Thor" Hearne and RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, please see BRAD BLOG's full Special Coverage of the "American Center for Voting Rights" at https://BradBlog.com/ACVR.

(Roaring 20's anybody?)

The Corporate Mainstream Media may not give a damn about our democracy. Neither might the bulk of our politicians on both the Left and Right side of the aisle. But clearly the citizens do, and even one rightwing blogger who has recently seen at least some of the light...

The response to our article on the "staggeringly impossible" results of last week's election in Ohio on several Election Reform initiatives which would have struck deep into the heart of far-right Republican Ohio Sec. of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has been notable to say the least.

We felt the report was notable enough that we decided to cross-post it both at BRAD BLOG and at HuffPo, where --- though it was never added to the front page as a "featured blog" --- it has already received an extraordinary 93 comments as of this posting.

To give you an idea of what that story documented, here are the numbers from just one of the four Election Reform initiatives which all ended up failing by numbers which defy reasonable explanation when compared to the historically accurate Columbus Dispatch poll, completed and published just days before the Election in the Buckeye state:

ISSUE 3 (Revise campaign contribution limits)
PRE-POLLING: 61% Yes, 25% No, 14% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 33% Yes, 66% No

The results on that issue alone was so far askew that it was enough to give the usually dubious Mark Blumenthal of Mystery Pollster pause enough to comment, "These results had MP seriously wondering whether the pollsters or election officials had mistakenly transposed 'yes' and 'no' in their tables."

See the original post for a comparison of Polling vs Final Results for all of the initatives, but suffice to say while the one above was the most inexplicably out-of-whack, the others, with the exception of Issue 1 --- which was the only one supported by Ohio's Republican Governor and on which the Dispatch poll was virtually right on the money on "Yes" voters --- all of the initiative Final Results bring the entire election machinery in Ohio once again under deservedly fresh scrutiny.

(We'll remind you that Ohio's results in the '04 Presidential Election squeeker, where just 6 votes for Kerry instead of Bush at each precinct would have changed the entire result for the nation. And also that the results from that election remain completely suspect, largely uncounted, and never recounted according to state law even while several elections officials have either been indicted or remain under investigation for their role in gaming that fiasco...the one in the state which gave Bush enough electoral votes to claim the Presidency).

The original report we filed, discussed an article by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman of the Free Press in Columbus where they've been detailing an extraordinary amount of the election chicanery and "irregularities" under the iron-fisted rule of Blackwell, the Ohio elections arbiter and Bush/Cheney '04 Co-Chair in a state which is currently a snakepit of Republican machinery and out-and-out corruption.

Amongst the comments at both BRAD BLOG and HuffPo where the blog item was posted, a few, as expected, have knee-jerked that it must have been the Columbus Dispatch polling that was wrong, rather than the Final Results reported by the State which added brand-spankin' new, and wholly unaccountable, unrecountable, untransparent, and undemocratic Electronic Voting Machines for the first time in this election to 44 of its 88 counties. Machines which use secret software on which voters are asked to trust --- but not verify --- that their votes will be recorded accurately...or at all.

In addition to those 44 counties (41 of them using the same machines by Diebold, Inc. that the Republican Sec. of State in California recently decertified for their 20% failure rate), several other counties already use Electronic Voting Machines, and nearly all of them use electronic tabulating machines of one brand or another to count those votes.

We spoke yesterday to Fitrakis about the Dispatch poll's "historic accuracy" (which he described as "legendary" in our phone call) and about the various wingnuts who predictably presume the polling, instead of the election results, were wrong...

RAW STORY scoops Woodward on Woodward scoop by revealing what Woodward wouldn't.

The just posted story at RAW reports that "attorneys close to the investigation and intelligence officials" identified National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley as having revealed Valerie Plame/Wilson as a "CIA analyst" to WaPo's Bob Woodward.

Hadley's leak to the reporter who gained fame via his investigative work with Carl Bernstein on the Watergate scandal, would have occured prior to any other known leaks to journalists on the matter, and prior even to Joe Wilson's now-infamous NY Times Op/Ed which was critical of the Bush Administration's assertion that Saddam had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger.

They've already come under some harsh criticism (also here and here) from the left for their far-right leaning Editorial Board and unbalanced collection of blogs, but the group previously known as Pajamas Media has opened for business-proper today under the name "Open Source Media". Discredited former NY Times "journalist" Judith Miller was the keynote speaker at their launch. (Both BuzzMachine and Kos have some worthy thoughts on that).

OSM was founded by rightwingers Roger Simon and Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs. The latter blogger, at least, being quite fond of disparaging his political opponents by labeling them as "moonbats".

Nonetheless, and despite their currently massive lack of editorial "balance", several of their staffers have claimed in various recent conversations I've had with them that they hope to change that hard right tilt in the near future. The proof, however, will remain in the blog pudding.

During their testing phase, I participated in a "BlogJam" with three other bloggers for them. That's their term for an online debate forum. The no-brainer topic about which we debated a week or two ago was "Are left-right politics becoming too polarized?"

That debate is now available online here as one of their first offerings.

I had fun doing it, as you may be able to tell. You'll let me know how I did...

A group of 16 former intelligence officials sent a letter to George W. Bush earlier today expressing their outrage over "the breach of trust between this Administration and members of the intelligence community that has resulted from the Valerie Plame case."

The letter is described by former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson as having been signed by a "bipartisan" group "representing a variety of political views."

"We are agreed on one thing," said Johnson in an Email receved by The BRAD BLOG this evening, "we are Americans and believe this country is worth defending."

Johnson had been a classmate of Valerie Plame/Wilson's during training at the CIA.

The missive, sent late this afternoon from a variety of former and retired officials, calls on George W. Bush to keep his "promise to restore honor to the White House," and demands accountability for any staff members "implicated in the leak of Valerie Wilson's classified identity." It goes on to decry the "bond of trust" that was "shattered with the exposure" of Wilson's identity.

One White House official, so far, I. Scooter Libby, has been indicted on charges relating to an ongoing investigation into the matter by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

The former intelligence officials express that whether her exposure was "unwitting or intentional" the action's by Administration officials has destroyed both Wilson's career and her intelligence network "which was devoted to protecting this country from the threat of weapons of mass destruction."

They call on Bush to "immediately suspend the clearances of all White House personelle" who spoke to reporters about Wilson's CIA affiliation while taking the occassion to remind Bush about Dick Cheney's dismissal of the Air Force Chief of Staff who inadvertantly disclosed classified information to the press.

The letter, which was CC'd to several members of Congress, follows in its entirety...