Reporter Dennis Domrzalski's terrific scoop deserves to be read in full, so I won't quote much of it here.

The short version, however: New Mexico's ABC field producer and KKOB afternoon drive news reporter, Laura MacCallum, a 32-year news veteran, has quit her job after her stories on an alleged vote-buying scheme by Republican Rep. Heather Wilson at the recent delegate nominating convention in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, were scrubbed from her station's website hourly news cycle by the News Director, after alleged pressure from Rep. Wilson.

The sitting Congresswoman is angling for an upgrade, as she hopes to be the state's Republican nominee to fill the Senate seat being vacated by outgoing Republican Pete Domenici. MacCallum's report, sourced by at least three different people, including herself, said that voters showed up to the delegate convention and claimed they were being "paid $35-an-hour (for two hours)" by Wilson's senate campaign and the congressional campaign of Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White, "and that the campaigns had also paid their $30 registration fees."

I just spoke with Domrzalski, and he underscored again, as he did in his story, that "Wilson’s spokeswoman flat out refused to answer the question" when asked if he asked her if the reports were true.

Such a scheme, if true, would be a fourth-degree felony, according to New Mexico law. But as remarkable as those charges are, even if having the ring of truth, given what we already know about Wilson, the response, including the memo sent from KKOB News Director Pat Allen to MacCallum, is almost as remarkable...

The ever-necessary caveat: Most problems and failures with election systems don't fully begin to reveal themselves until the night of, and, more often, the days and weeks following the elections.

That said, this from RAW STORY's compilation article of various reports of trouble so far today, coming out of Ohio...

On the other hand, for some good news --- at least for now --- Cuyahoga County (Cleveland)'s new Election Director Jane Platten reports that things were going well there so far today, in the county which has been the center of much controversy for a number of reasons, not the least of which was its recent switch from Diebold touch-screen machines to paper ballots to be scanned at the county by ES&S machines. As of noon today, Platten said things were going "exceptionally good" and that all precincts had been able to open on time. For a change.

In Dayton's Montgomery County, where the report of Diebold touch-screen machine failures above comes from, things are not going quite as well...

As we wait for the next round of thousands of disenfranchised voters to emerge from OH, TX, VT, RI, or beyond, Los Angeles County has finally finished counting its infamously disastrous "Double Bubble" ballots from the Feb. 5th Super Tuesday Primary in California.

The final numbers, in just in time to meet today's local certification deadline, are supposed to hearten us because the county Registrar's office chose to not count only some 12,000 valid, legally cast votes in the state's open Democratic Primary.

What a victory! It's kinda like celebrating the great success of the troop "surge" in Iraq where "coalition" fatalities have plummeted from pre-surge levels of 2.39 dead troops per day all the way down to 2.37 dead troops per day.

As we predicted, many of the districts counted resulted in very lopsided results. That was likely due to the horrible, unfair counting scheme the Registrar's office decided to use. The scheme disproportionately, and almost randomly, tossed out thousands of votes for some candidates, but tallied all of those for others --- even when they were all cast in the very same precinct, by the very exact same method. According to the results of this "supplemental count," as posted at the Registrar's website [PDF], it looks like our fears have come to pass in that department as well.

But there is a bit of actual good news in all of this, small comfort though it may be. Our concerns about the newly discovered uncounted provisional "Double Bubble" ballots, that we reported on Friday, were heard, even if our other concerns --- as attributed to us by name in today's Whittier Daily News coverage of the final tabulation --- were summarily dismissed by acting Registrar Dean Logan for unspecified "legal" reasons, according to that news report...

Hannity & Colmes' guest lineup tonight, there to give us the inside skinny on tomorrow's "do or die" Democratic Primaries in Ohio and Texas on "America's Election HQ"...

Yup. Rove, Coulter, Morris, and Luntz. Guess they're needed to add balance to the Democratic powerhouse that is Alan Colmes?

BRAD BLOG FLASHBACK: Long time readers may remember the guest lineup announced for H&C's 2004 Presidential Election Eve show, as we reported at the time...

We ran an email campaign back then, haranguing them to add at least something resembling balance, which they eventually did by dumping Weld and adding Terry McAuliffe. Even though the clever little liars at Fox "News" still managed to figure out how to tilt it Right anyway.

Perhaps we're missing something here?

Our friends at BuzzFlash have their top screaming headline set currently as...

...which links over to a quick report over at the Texas blog Burnt Orange Report (also good folks, as much as we know about them.)

"Ominously"?

The quick BOR article by Glenn Smith is headlined "Clinton Caucus Disruption/Vote Suppression" and appears to be at the end of a chain of increasingly panicked blog items which began with a report from Dallas Morning News, quoted as follows by Smith...

I spent most of yesterday and today on the phone with attorneys and officials trying to sort out the continuing, disastrous mess concerning the "Double Bubble" ballot fiasco from Los Angeles County's February 5th Democratic Primary.

That, despite what we see as this week's premature declaration of "Victory!" on Tuesday from our friends at the Courage Campaign, followed by their "We won!" email on Wednesday, as they celebrated after the county's acting Registrar announced his plan to count some (though by no means all) of the 50,000 or so still-uncounted ballots cast by Non-Partisan (NP) voters who had attempted to vote in the open Democratic Primary on "Super Tuesday."

During a late-night phone call from a local Election Integrity advocate last night, however, I was told that situation is even worse than previously reported or even known --- even by the county's elections officials --- to date, as another set of thousands of legal ballots may go uncounted, even under a new tabulating scheme being implemented by county officials...

Bad news and/or good news, depending on how you wish to look at it...

First this...

Followed by this reassuring(?) update to the same article, posted 57 minutes later...

Why must it always come down to Ohio?

[UPDATED 2/27/08 2:00pm PT, after speaking with Bowen's office about this. The update, which includes her current response to Logan's proposed counting scheme, is posted at the bottom of this report.]

I hate to counter the adulation of so many of the good groups out there claiming "victory" and "a happy ending" today in the "Double Bubble" ballot dispute in Los Angeles County, but I must. The "victory" they are now referring to, with the best of intentions, as "Great news!" is much less than it appears. Though if you don't look closely, it might otherwise look like a "victory." Unfortunately, it isn't.

Unless something changes, and quickly, Los Angeles County's acting Registrar of Voters Dean Logan is preparing to disenfranchise thousands of voters who cast legal ballots in the Super Tuesday Democratic primary election.

In the 3-page letter [PDF] sent by Logan to CA Sec. of State Debra Bowen yesterday, the recently-arrived, but still-befuddled, county clerk details how he now plans to potentially toss out thousands of votes, while inappropriately awarding disproportionate votes in favor of only some candidates, in response to the "Double Bubble" ballot debacle reported by The BRAD BLOG (most recently here), in great detail previously...

Kudos (for a change) to AP for their report today into what happened during the Super Tuesday Democratic Caucus in New Mexico, where thousands of long-time registered Democratic voters were knocked off the rolls, leading to some 17,000 provisional ballots being cast (11% of all votes, up from 4% four years ago.)

What has changed since 2004, just four years ago? For a start, the private, constantly failing voting machine company ES&S has taken over management of the registration rolls. At the same time, Secretary of State Mary Herrera's office seems to be in complete denial of the problem, which could drastically affect the ability of legally registered voters to cast proper ballots in the state come this November, when the race could be as razor-thin in New Mexico as it was in 2004.

The AP report picks up on one of our own, covering the privatization of NM's (and several other states') voting rolls, as filed here just after Election Day, when the mess first began to emerge.

Get a load of just a few of the disturbing details, on the thousands of voters knocked off the rolls and the SoS-in-denial, from the surprisingly good AP coverage by Heather Clark...

Hilarious...If a little too on-the-money, in too many regards. A MUST VIEW.

Congrats in advance, Mr. McCain. Enjoy...

(P.S - The company name is correctly pronounced DEE-bold, as opposed to DIE-bold. Just so's ya know. Since it drives us crazy. Beyond that, hat-tip John Gideon of VotersUnite.org.)

Some guy named Patrick Ruffini, at the right-wing Townhall blog of right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, is using the space to disinform readers as to the reasons for the current shutdown of the FEC. And he's dishonestly misrepresenting a BRAD BLOG article from last year (we're the "left-wing blogger" he links to in his comments below) in order to help fool his presumably gullible readers...

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has found a self-financed millionaire to run against Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff) in the 24th congressional district in Florida. That Suzanne Kosmas brings her own money to the game is apparently good enough for the DCCC, never mind her positions on anything, and whether or not they've already got another candidate in the race who has demonstrated his dedicated fealty to the party, his progressive credentials, his effectiveness on the stump, and his ability to take on Feeney with a great deal of success, as he did in 2006.

That candidate, who has declared he will be running again for the nomination in 2008 to take on the corrupt Feeney once more, is Clint Curtis, the man who worked with Feeney back when they were both Republicans --- when Feeney served as both speaker of the FL House even while serving as the registered lobbyist for a computer firm with state contracts --- and back when, as Curtis alleges, Feeney asked him to create a touch-screen vote-rigging software prototype back in 2000.

Nonetheless, the Democratic Party insiders of the DCCC --- and now, apparently, the corporate mainstream media --- have determined that their choice for nominee, comes before the people's, and before even a single vote has been cast.

Here's the letter that I wrote to WFTV, after they, and their reporter, Scott MacFarlane, recently sent the message to voters that they should just fuck off and not bother turning out to vote, because, according to them, Kosmas is already "Feeney's 2008 Democratic opponent"...

WTF?

(Hat-tip RAW STORY)

UPDATE 2/22/08: Secret Service responds. Says "no security lapses at that venue."

Our friends Bobby Kennedy Jr. and GoLeft.tv interview another of our friends, Election Integrity hero Ion Sancho, the legendary Leon County, FL, Supervisor of Elections, on the election messes in New Hampshire, Florida, Los Angeles, and everywhere else. (And thanks for the kind hat-tip, guys...even though The BRAD BLOG never claimed there was fraud in NH. But we're happy to let that slide, since the interview was live, and you might have been talking about someone else. And we know you mean well.)

WARNING: Markos Moulitsas and the other front-pagers and gatekeeping denialists at Daily Kos should not watch the above interview! If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a user record over there, you should go ahead and ban him right now! Make sure he's never allowed to write at dKos! In this interview, he has the temerity to talk about concerns with the way the New Hampshire Primary Election was conducted! Can you believe it?! And he's even a Hillary Clinton supporter! Clearly, he, like The BRAD BLOG, is "doing far more harm than good," as you like to say, for the Election Integrity movement! What will the Democratic Party and the Mainstream Corporate Media say about your site if that "nutter" Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is allowed to post over there?! Quickly --- before he damages the credibility of your site --- you better go ahead and ban RFK Jr. in advance! As you know, better safe than sorry, boys!

In response to critical comments by former Republican Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, rightwing talker and self-proclaimed "Dean of the Limbaugh Institute for Conservative Studies," Rush Limbaugh, offered a fresh and perhaps telling explanation this morning for his ongoing attacks on presumptive Republican Presidential nominee John McCain.

"We're trying to avoid a fifty state landslide!" Limbaugh shouted angrily in reply to the comments from Eagleburger, who had slammed him and fellow Republicanist entertainer Sean Hannity of Fox "News" and ABC Radio.

"I don't know who elected Rush Limbaugh or Hannity as the heads of this conservative movement," Eagleburger says at the beginning of a clip from MSNBC last night that was aired on today's radio show. "They throw that word around as if it was theirs and theirs alone."

"I thought I was a conservative, but that doesn't mean that I have to buy off on everything these poobahs thinks is what's necessary to be a conservative," continued the former Sec. of State, before defending what he sees as McCain's conservative national security credentials.

Eagleburger's slam would lead to a telling outburst in reply from Limbaugh (full audio posted at the end of this article)...