On today's BradCast, it's another one of those impossible Mondays catching up with a weekend full of news in the Trump Era, and the seemingly impossible fight on behalf of voters who seek actually verifiable election results (which require HAND-MARKED paper ballots, according to a new letter from two dozen computer science, security and voting system experts.) [Audio link to show posted at end of article.]

Before we get to our guest today on that crucial issue which threatens elections oversight from Georgia to Los Angeles, a bunch of news and quick headlines from across the country. Among those headlines...

Winter weather crippled much of nation over the weekend and into the beginning of this week, from heavy rains and flash floods in recently fire-ravaged California, to monster snowfall in the Midwest, to icy conditions in the East. The latter succeeded in shutting down even parts of the federal government in D.C. that weren't already closed due to Donald Trump's continuing partial federal government shutdown --- now the longest in U.S. history --- to demand $5.7 billion for his promised, pointless and ill-considered southern border wall.

Decidedly not shutdown in D.C. this week are disturbing new revelations, as reported by New York Times late Friday, that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence probe of the President of the United States in 2017, to determine whether Trump was either a witting or unwitting agent of Russia. That, as Trump's Attorney General nominee William Barr, on Monday, released his prepared opening remarks in advance of his confirmation hearings this week in the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Despite his previous criticism of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe and his argument that Presidents cannot be investigated for certain things, Barr now says the Special Counsel investigation should be allowed to finish and its report should be made public.

In California, the state's largest private utility company, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), announced their intention to seek bankruptcy protection in light of tens of billions of dollars in potential legal liability for maintenance failures that helped spark a number of the historic and deadly fires that crippled the state during last year's record wildfire season. And, in Los Angeles, some 35,000 teachers at the nation's second-largest school district walked out, striking to demand higher pay and smaller class sizes.

Next, we turn to some election news, with New York state, one of the most restrictive in the nation when it comes to voting access, finally moving to update its system with a package of bills this week that include early voting, vote-by-mail, same-day voter registration and other long-overdue reforms.

In Georgia, meanwhile, two dozen of the nation's top Computer Security and Voting Systems experts issued a critical landmark letter [PDF] last week to the state's Secure, Accessible and Fair Elections (SAFE) Commission, essentially begging the panel, convened by former Republican Sec. of State and incoming Governor Brian Kemp, to not move the state's voting system from 100 percent unverifiable touchscreen Direct Record Electronic (DRE) systems to similarly unverifiable touchscreen Ballot Marking Devices (BMD), which print out a computer-marked and barcoded summary of voters' ballots. They call instead for hand-marked paper ballots, which they describe as "the best method for recording votes in public elections."

The letter notes that BMD systems are more expensive than hand-marked paper ballot systems but, more importantly, cannot be audited after an election to determine whether the results reflect the actual intent of voters. Despite the scientists crucial recommendation last week, and every comment --- other than from election officials and private voting system vendor lobbyists --- made by the public at last week's SAFE Commission hearing, Kemp's panel shamefully voted to recommend BMDs to state lawmakers.

But, while that virtually inexplicable action moves ahead in the Peach State under Republican rule, the nation's largest voting jurisdiction, Los Angeles County, under Democratic rule, has already decided to move to a pricey and similarly unverifiable touchscreen BMD system before the 2020 Presidential election!

We're joined today by MARILYN MARKS, a national leader in the fight for HAND-MARKED paper ballot systems. She heads up the non-partisan Coalition for Good Governance --- which filed several landmark lawsuits last year against Georgia's current unverifiable voting systems and in hopes of preventing their new ones.

"The point is a very, very simple point that the SAFE Commission --- and apparently L.A. --- pretends that they are missing," argues Marks. "They all talk about how they want elections that can be audited. Well, when you use these Ballot Marking Devices, the election cannot be audited, because the source document [the computer-marked, barcoded ballot] is not an original transaction. It cannot be audited. Therefore you cannot audit the results."

Making matters worse, even if every single voter manages to correctly verify the computer-printed, human-readable summary of voter selections, "what's actually cast and the actual official vote is a barcode. Now, none of us can read barcodes. I don't know what vote I'm actually casting. I am casting a barcode, but what in the world does that barcode actually say? That, to me, is a Constitutional violation."

We discuss that and the many other dangers of BMD systems being implement across the country --- with little or no pushback in places like L.A. --- as well as the differences between the proposed new systems from private vendors in GA and the publicly-owned one already coming to L.A. County. In short, despite a number of explanations offered to us by the County's Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan (shared on today's program) Marks argues there is little, if any, difference in the lack of verifiability and auditablity of such voting systems.

Finally, we take just a few listener calls on all of the above on our way out today...

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On today's BradCast: We continue our coverage of fallout following this past Tuesday's midterm primary elections in eight states, as the counting and canvassing moves forward. [Audio link to show follows below]

In California on Wednesday night, Sec. of State Alex Padilla (D) sent a stern letter to Los Angeles County's Registrar Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan demanding answers and actions following a still-unexplained "printing error" that resulted in the names of more than 118,000 registered voters (including Fonzie!) being left off the printed rosters at more than 1,000 polling places.

Voters found missing from the rolls were to have been given provisional ballots on Tuesday, according to Logan, but there are questions as to whether all of them were. Also, there are concerns about whether those provisional ballots will all, in fact, be counted (or tossed for bad reasons, as some provisional and vote-by-mail ballots are), and if those ballots will be included in the county's 1% post-election manual "spot check", meant to determine whether hand-marked paper ballots were tallied as per voter intent by the county's computer tabulators. A new state law adopted last year exempts both provisional ballots and late vote-by-mail ballots post-marked by Election Day (which may arrive several days after the election and still be included in tallies) from that mandated 1% "random audit". We've got a bit of exclusive news on that front today.

That disaster was not the only problem for voters on Tuesday in L.A., the nation's largest voting jurisdiction. One blind voter reports on her failed attempt to vote on four separate audio voting systems for disabled voters at three separate polling places. All four machines failed to work, echoing a very similar problem that I had while attempting to vote on those very same systems in L.A. ten years ago. In a 2008 primary, 4 out of 12 of my own votes were misprinted by the computer-marked paper ballot audio voting system. (Luckily, I'm not blind, so was able to notice the computer-printed failure before casting the ballot!) Two years later, in 2010, when I tried the system again, it failed to work altogether on two different machines.

Also in CA on Tuesday, voters in a recall election successfully removed a state judge who had issued a controversially lenient sentence to a Stanford University athlete last year following his sexual assault of an unconscious woman. Another recall election, engineered by state Republicans, resulted in the removal of a Democratic state Senator for having voted in favor of a gas tax hike last year. The successful recall strips Dems of their two-thirds super-majority in the state Senate, which is required for the passage of any new state taxes or fees.

In Alabama, the unbalanced Republican Sec. of State John Merrill --- who blocked me on Twitter last December for being correct about the state's computer tabulation systems, before sending a barrage of insanely bizarre emails to me last week --- won his primary for re-election on Tuesday.

And Joseph Siegelman, son of the former Democratic AL Gov. Don Siegelman, (both guests on the show over the years) won his primary for Attorney General in the state. Depending on the results of a primary runoff on the GOP side, Siegelman may be running this November against a former AL Attorney General who was part of the GOP cabal who helped imprison his father on seemingly trumped up bribery charges more than a decade ago. (Tune in for a wild summary of the incredible GOP corruption in that state around all of that, which still echoes throughout state politics today. And, with all of the madness I quickly summarized on the show, I now realize I forgot to mention, incredibly enough, that the George W. Bush-appointed federal judge who convicted and sentenced Gov. Siegelman was later forced to resign after being arrested for beating his wife!)

And, in South Dakota, some remarkable fallout from a Sheriff's race in one county, underscoring, yet again that elections have consequences and that so-called "Right-to-Work" states are anything but.

Then, after a smart observation from longtime BRAD BLOG reader "Dredd", who points out that more Americans appear to have been killed by one climate event --- Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico --- than in our (so far) 17-year long war in Afghanistan, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report. Among other things in today's report, still more outrageous corruption news revealed from EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. But, we had more on that front than we could fit into our GNR today --- and more that has broken since recording it Wednesday morning --- so we follow up with that additional news about Trump's kleptocratic EPA chief, including a Republican U.S. Senator who has some choice words for the shockingly still-employed Pruitt...

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More than half a million ballots remain to be processed and tallied from California's June 7th Presidential Primary, and thousands of those votes have just been saved. On today's BradCast we speak to a citizen vote count observer in Los Angeles County who, through her diligence, just days ago, helped change L.A.'s process for determining which provisional ballots will be tallied, potentially saving tens of thousands of Democratic votes from being tossed in the bargain. [Audio link to complete show posted at bottom of this article.]

First today, the latest on the breaking news out of Turkey where an apparent terror attack had killed at least 28 people by air time today. Then, U.S. House Republicans release their final Benghazi report, for what it's worth, and Donald Trump continues to plummet in national polls, even as he remains quite competitive with Hillary Clinton in swing states.

Then, I'm joined by Julie Tyler, Los Angeles filmmaker and citizen vote count observer with Ballots for Bernie, to discuss how her oversight of on-going Provisional Ballot processing in L.A. has resulted in thousands of Democratic Primary votes cast by "No Party Preference" (NPP) voters being included in the tally, instead of being tossed out, as originally planned by election officials.

Indeed, The BRAD BLOG confirmed late last week with L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan that the County changed its process for determining voter intent after Tyler noticed that some provisional votes cast on Democratic ballot cards (instead of NPP-Democratic "cross over" cards) were being discarded under Logan's original process.

"I have further reviewed that category of provisional ballots," Logan said in a statement he sent via email, "and I am in agreement that the ballot card itself is sufficient to indicate voter intent to participate in the Democratic primary under the liberal construction clause of Elections Code 14312; therefore canvass staff has been instructed to process all such ballots as NPP-DEM cross over ballots and to prepare them for tabulation in subsequent updates as scheduled."

He went on to explain that, "while there is no process for a challenge to the determination of voter intent on provisional ballots, the election official does have to authority to identify the need for and to take corrective action during the canvass period. I am exercising that authority with regard to any provisional ballots processed and counted prior to the clarification listed above. Those ballots are being identified and will be re-processed as NPP-DEM cross over ballots and will reflect a vote cast in the Presidential contest, if any." Logan told me that some 2,801 ballots processed under the original interpretation of the rules were reprocessed under the new ones, and the more than 100,000 still-unprocessed provisionals in L.A. County will be verified and tallied under the new interpretation of the rules as well.

Tyler and others observers estimate some 60,000 votes may have been otherwise tossed, and tells me (though I haven't confirmed this part) that the CA Secretary of State is instructing other counties to similarly review their procedures for the inclusion of provisional Presidential votes from the June Democratic Primary, which Clinton still leads over Sanders, with the statewide margin very slowly narrowing and more than half a million ballots still untallied statewide as of today, in advance of the July 8 state certification deadline.

"It's our democracy, and it doesn't happen in a vacuum," Tyler tells me on today's show, while explaining how she noticed the problem initially and brought it to the attention of election officials, emphasizing "how important it is for observers to be on hand when these tallies are being done, for this very reason."

"It's not something that those people do over there. We have to take part. Frankly, I found the whole thing fascinating," she says, urging others to participate in this crucial aspect of our elections and noting "how empowering [it is] to know that, simply being there and observing, you can find errors and weigh in...Everybody has that power." Thank you, Julie! Couldn't agree more!

Finally today, we finish with our latest Green News Report on Volkswagen's $15 billion settlement with U.S. customers, as part of their emissions cheating scandal, Transcanada's $15 billion NAFTA complaint over U.S. rejection of the KeystoneXL pipeline, and much more...

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On today's BradCast, Bernie Sanders meets with President Obama, who endorses Hillary Clinton; A look at recent convention battles and whether they suggest Sanders should drop out before the DNC's July convention; And we receive comment from Los Angeles County's chief election official on the seemingly alarming number of Provisional Ballots handed out to voters on Tuesday in the nation's largest voting jurisdiction.

First up, some breaking news from the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which has now upheld the Constitutionality of restrictions on concealed carry weapons. Then, Bernie Sanders meets with President Obama at the White House, vows to work with Hillary Clinton to defeat Trump, but promises once again to continue his fight through next week's primary in D.C. and all the way through the Democratic National Convention in July. And President Obama finally endorses Hillary Clinton.

Next, we're joined by John Judis, formerly of The New Republic, now a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of seven books, included his latest, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. Judis, who voted for Sanders, nonetheless argues that it's now time for Sanders to bow out and endorse Clinton. He cites two recent historic examples of convention floor fights (Ford/Reagan in 1976 and Carter/Kennedy in 1980, not to mention the mess in 1968) to buttress his case.

Earlier this week at Talking Points Memo, Judis, who acknowledges "Clinton has a lot of weaknesses", nonetheless argued that Sanders should get out after California and endorse Clinton no matter who ended up winning the primary here. "What concerned me was that the Sanders people would take a win in California as a reason to really go fight it out at the convention, and I thought that that would be a terrible mistake for the party and for the country, because of what I've seen happen at those kind of conventions," he tells me today. "It's in the interest of people who are Democrats, liberals who are queasy about Donald Trump becoming our next President, to do what they can to help her. And having a big convention battle will not help her." He offers much more on today's show.

Finally today, the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan offers us response to concerns about the seemingly huge number of Provisional Ballots cast during Tuesday's primary. As we reported in detail on yesterday's BradCast (which included a bonus second hour of callers from across Southern California, both voters and poll workers alike, describing problems at the polling place on Tuesday), voters cast some 240,000 provisionals in L.A. County alone. Between those and the still-untallied Vote-by-Mail ballots, there still more than half a million untallied ballots in the County.

But, following yesterday's program and my query to Logan about the large number of provisionals, he conceded the number does appear "high, but not disproportionately so, compared to other major elections and given the Primary-specific elements everyone was dealing with." Today, as he had promised, he sent more details with provisional ballot numbers from recent comparable elections in 2008 and 2012, which he believes supports the case that the numbers from Tuesday aren't as disturbing as they may seem at first glance.

Logan also responds to concerns about the many reports we've been receiving and reporting on since Tuesday regarding voters being told they had requested a Vote-by-Mail ballot when they attempted to vote at the polling place, even though the voters say they had made no such request. He explains that he's found a number of such voters had registered online and --- either accidentally or due to poor "design of the original online registration application" --- had selected the box that would have made them a Permanent Vote-by-Mail "without intention or understanding". He adds, however, "that is speculative" at the moment, as more investigation and counting of those ballots moves forward. He has told me that L.A. County generally is able to verify and include about 85 to 90 percent of provisional ballots in their final certified results.

His complete response, and a few thoughts of my own in regard to this latest mess --- and so many before it --- now serving to mar confidence in the results of another important election, on today's BradCast...

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On today's BradCast, I'm joined by Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan to discuss a blizzard of questions, concerns and confusion faced by voters here in CA in advance of the state's highly-charged June 7 Presidential Primary in the nation's single largest voting jurisdiction. [Audio link for the complete show is posted below.]

Logan describes the new laws and systems in place for this year's election as as "uncharted territory" for voters. He goes on to respond to a pile of questions --- from both me and callers --- about the state's insanely confusing system of both open and closed partisan primaries, as well as Vote-by-Mail issues and misconceptions, and a number of concerns about voter registration purges, poll worker training and much more. Here in Los Angeles we have nearly 5 million registered voters --- more in this county alone than 42 of the 50 states. So, Logan clearly has his work cut out for him. The number of excellent questions from listener callers alone underscores both that point and the amazing number of moving pieces that will need to be held together to avoid disaster on June 7th.

The County Clerk also speaks to a lot of the misinformation that has circulated, of late, concerning CA elections in general and about Los Angeles County specifically. For example, he tells me that 85% of Provisional Ballots in the last general election were, in fact, confirmed as having been cast by properly registered voters and were included in the final tally. Yes, he says, voters registered with "No Party Preference" in California can vote in the Democratic Presidential Primary, but must request a "Democratic Cross-Over" ballot at the precinct or by mail (if they receive a Vote-by-Mail ballot request by March 31). Yes, a "No Party Preference" VBM voter may still vote at the precinct in the Democratic, Libertarian or American Independent Party primaries, even if they've already received a VBM ballot for a different party, so long as that ballot is surrendered at the polling place on Election Day. No, those NPP voters cannot vote in the Republican, Green, or Peace & Freedom Party primaries, which are closed to all but registered party members.

Frankly, there's too much to summarize here. So, please give the show a listen. It's incredibly informative.

Also, today, I share the response I recently obtained from Orange County, CA Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley, concerning a viral video posted by a pollworker-in-training (and Bernie Sanders supporter), who alleges that she was misinstructed by her trainer on the proper procedures for "No Party Preference" voters who might wish to vote in the Democratic Primary. Kelley told me he was confused by the woman's video, because, he says, they "surveyed many poll workers in the class in question, as well as our trainer, and they have a very different view of the interaction" she discusses on the video. He tells me that, "in an abundance of caution" the County has reiterated the proper procedures to all pollworker trainers and have posted a video that "clairifes our efforts to ensure proper training of the rights and options for NPP voters".

And then, the woman who posted that viral video, Ashley Beck, happened to call in to the show with her own response to Kelley's response!

It all made for very lively radio today --- with all of that and much more, including today's breaking news about alleged violations of provisions of the Federal Records Act by Hillary Clinton, according to a new audit of her use of a private email server, issued by the U.S. State Department's independent Inspector General.

Listen up! (And, please note, we'll have guest hosts in for The BradCast over the next couple of days! Be nice to them! And enjoy!)

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California State Sen. Alex Padilla continues to mislead the public about SB 360, his radical election reform bill passed recently by the state legislature along partisan lines, and now waiting for a signature, or veto, from Gov. Jerry Brown.

The bill, as we explained in our detailed exposé last week, would end all federal testing of new e-voting systems in the state of California. The use of only federally-approved voting systems had long been a requirement in the state. Moreover, the measure would grant unprecedented sweeping executive powers to the Sec. of State to approve new voting and tabulation systems for use in real elections without any certification testing at all, even by state auditors.

Coincidentally, Padilla, the bill's sponsor, is also a leading 2014 candidate for Sec. of State in California.

Last week, we explained how Padilla has been cynically selling this bill for many months as necessary in order for jurisdictions like Los Angeles County to own their own non-proprietary voting systems. Who, after all, other than private voting machine companies (and/or folks who'd like to use such systems to game elections), would be against the idea that voting systems should be publicly owned by the jurisdictions which use them to run their own public elections? But that explanation doesn't really tell the full story.

L.A. has been in the process of developing a new, publicly-owned, 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting system for some time. (See a new video of their design concepts, all quite troubling for those of us familiar with new, touch-screen e-voting systems, right here or at the bottom of this article.) The county has said they hope to sell their new system to other counties in the state and across the country. But, what Padilla doesn't mention to lawmakers or to the public while pitching his legislation, is that L.A. already owns their own current voting system and has for many years.

"I've introduced a piece of legislation that doesn't mandate, but allows, at the county level, county governments to own their voting systems," Padilla misleadingly announced on KSRO the day before the bill was finally approved by both chambers of the state legislature earlier this month. He cited L.A. County's development as the reason that counties should be able to own their own voting systems...which, he didn't mention, L.A. already does.

The audio clip of the KSRO interview is featured on Padilla's web page...

You can listen to Padilla's brief, 9/5/2013 interview on KSRO here [appx 4.5 mins]:

Since SB 360's introduction back in February, Padilla has been quoted similarly, and misleadingly, in every press release we've seen issued by his office, touting that "Allowing counties to develop, own and operate voting systems will increase voter confidence in the integrity of our elections."

The next, even more misleading part of the oft-used Padilla quote, has been modified only slightly in his press releases since the bill's introduction last February...

The good news: When the largest voting jurisdiction in the nation gets its new voting system, perhaps as early as 2015, it will not including Internet Voting, according to Dean Logan, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk of Los Angeles. The bad news: It will very likely include touch-screen computers and, with them, 100% unverifiable voting.

I interviewed Logan last week on my KPFK/Pacifica Radio show [full audio interview is at the bottom of this article], and we had a very informative discussion about what voters in Los Angeles may have to look forward to in the coming years, as well as many of you in the rest of the country, since the new system is being designed with an eye towards selling it to other counties in California as well as in the rest of the country.

So this is not just a local L.A. story. It's likely to affect the way that votes are cast and tallied in much of the nation. It's well worth paying attention to, even if, unlike me, you don't live here.

Los Angeles County alone "has more voters than 42 of the 50 states," according to Logan's office. It features nearly 5,000 precincts. Well over 3 million votes were cast in this one county alone during the November 6, 2012 Presidential Election. When Logan took over the job of Registrar after our previous one resigned, suddenly, just months before the 2008 President Election, he had a monster of a job to take over. It's still a monster. And it may soon get even more gargantuan as he attempts to re-work, re-design and, indeed, re-think how voters vote here, and as we move from our current publicly-owned voting system to our next publicly-owned voting system. (L.A. is one of the very few jurisdictions in the nation which owns, maintains and designs its own system. Most similar systems in the rest of the state and nation are proprietary, owned by the private companies which make them, and don't allow even the election officials in those jurisdictions access to their "trade-secret" software and source code.)

While, happily, Logan offered me some assurance that we won't be casting votes over the Internet with his new system --- an assurance that should bring some measure of relief to both Election Integrity advocates as well as the consensus of computer science and security experts who are also experts in voting systems --- there is still much cause for concern, as this still-unknown voting system begins to take shape...