On today's BradCast: We wouldn't blame you if you felt like averting your eyes from the desperate, usually-sad, often-hilarious, chaotic and so far failed attempts by the incompetent Team Trump to somehow try and steal the 2020 election any way they can. Yes, that's still going on. It's our job, however, to keep our eyes on it, and so we do again today, as things continue to fall apart in all new ways with each passing hour for Donald and what's left of his legal team. [Audio link to show follows summary below.]

Today, we cover the ongoing chaos the Trump Campaign is attempting to wreak in at least four different states. So far, only in Georgia has an election official who has buckled to pressure from Trump and fellow Republicans. Of course, he's a Republican himself and is doing a lousy job of it. But, in almost every case, the strategy --- such that there is one --- now seems to be to target the votes of African-Americans to be tossed out.

In Wisconsin today, the Trump Campaign plunked down $3 million to pay for a partial recount in the state. A full count would have cost the cash-strapped campaign $7.9 million. They have asked for counts only in heavily African-American Milwaukee County and Dane County, in a state where Joe Biden currently leads Trump by about 20,000 votes. In requesting the partial count they are doing what Republicans were outraged by in Florida in 2000 in the Bush v. Gore case, when Gore sought recounts only a few counties. The GOP, at the time, succeeded in forcing a statewide recount instead, which they were able to convince the U.S. Supreme court to block entirely. (Extra fun and irony today for those who noticed that Eric Trump complained in 2016 about the Presidential recount that year in the same state because the cost "Could Have Saved at Least 5,000 Children's Lives." He also falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton had anything to do with that recount. In fact, it was sought and paid for by the Green Party's Jill Stein for less money than the Trump Campaign sent to the Badger State today.)

In Pennsylvania, where Biden appears to have won by almost 82,000 votes, Rudy Giuliani made an absolutely hysterical jackass of himself during a federal court hearing on Tuesday. He hasn't argued a case in federal court for 30 years, and boy did it show! Just part of the fun included his opening argument in which he declared the case was about "widespread nationwide voter fraud!," before later admitting under questioning from the U.S. District Court Judge during the same hearing that "this is not a fraud case." That was hardly the only way in which he beclowned himself, especially as he focused on leveling baseless claims against the voting in heavily-minority Philadelphia. But it should also be noted that he declared his evidence-free case "a classic violation of equal protection....This is exactly Bush v. Gore!" That's fun, considering his campaign then violated a basic tenet of that 2000 case with their request for a cherry-picked partial recount in WI today.)

In Michigan on Tuesday night, the two Republicans on the Board of Canvassers in Wayne County refused to certify the November 3rd results due to claims of irregularities in the county's largest city, Detroit. (Seeing a pattern here yet?) The irregularities in question, apparently, regard small inconsistencies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters signed into the pollbooks in a number of precincts in the county, in a state where Biden appears to have won by almost 160,000 votes. Despite a higher number of inconsistencies during primaries in the County earlier this year --- and a larger percentage of inconsistencies in majority white cities in the same County --- the Republicans on the Board certified the spring primaries without a problem. Their refusal to certify the general election deadlocked the Board at 2 to 2 and prevented certification for a few hours on Tuesday night. Brutal public comments at the Board's hearing and agreement to ask the Democratic Sec. of State for an audit of Wayne County's discrepancies, resulted in certification after all, by a unanimous 4 to 0 vote in a new vote by the Board held just three hours later.

But much of today's show is focused, however, on the absurd clown show that has been underway in Georgia for the past week, where the Republican Sec. of State, Brad Raffensperger, buckled to pressure last week from Trump and fellow Republicans who hold him responsible for the fact that Trump appears to have lost there by about 13,000 votes.

Last week, when Raffensperger announced an unprecedented statewide "audit, recount and a recanvass all at once," we explained on the program how that's not actually possible or even legal. This week, Raffensperger quietly admitted as much, sending out a letter to County Elections Officials [PDF] to notify them that "after evaluating the audit procedures...the original results...tabulated on and after election day, and certified by the county election superintendent, should be the results that your county certifies as the November 2, 2020 General Election Totals."

In short, the so-called "Risk-Limiting Audit" of 100% of the ballots cast in GA's Presidential race was not a "hand recount" as many media outlets have been misreporting it, but a largely meaningless exercise meant to try and appease our cry baby President, as my guest today, JEANNE DUFORT of the Coalition for Good Governance, describes it. Dufort has been on the ground in the state where she has also been a voter plaintiff in some of the Coalition's lawsuits. They are plaintiffs in a long-running federal case seeking to ban the state's use of new, unverifiable touchscreen voting systems made Dominion Voting Systems. (The same lawsuit succeeded in obtaining an order from the federal judge that banned the state's previous, 20-year old, unverifiable touchscreen systems made by Diebold. Despite recommendations from cybersecurity advocates and voting systems experts, Raffensperger chose to move to the new $100+ million touchscreens that are similarly unverifiable.)

Over the past 48 hours, two Republican-leaning counties discovered about 2,700 votes each that had gone either unscanned or unreported to the state previously. Those would have been discovered in the normal course of regular post-election canvassing, and netted about 1,000 votes for Trump overall. That will decrease Biden's final state certified margin from about 14,000 votes to about 13,000 votes. He will still be declared the official winner. After state certification on Friday, Team Trump will then have an opportunity to seek an official "recount" (as opposed to Raffensperger's pretend one) in which, by state law, the ballots will scanned again by the same computers that scanned them the first time. So that is also unlikely to change the final results.

Dufort explains today what she was able to observe over the past week during Raffensperger's "audit"/"recount"/"recanvass" which amounts to little more than Election Integrity Kabuki Theater. But, she tells us, there were still a few lessons to be learned from it all, as elections officials, poll workers and count observers who have been working for weeks amid a deadly pandemic, will now have to prepare very quickly for the two January 5 U.S. Senate runoffs in GA that will determine which party controls the Senate next year. Early voting begins on December 14th, not long after some municipal elections are also held in some counties on December 1st. All while carrying out another "recount" which Trump will almost certainly request after Friday's state certification. After all, there were a lot of --- you-know-whos --- that cast ballots against Trump in the city of Atlanta. That can't stand, right?

"The big thing is this is theater," says Dufort, speaking for herself, not the Coalition. "We've been calling for this [unverifiable Dominion Voting] equipment to be banned in the same way our lawsuit got the last Georgia system banned. So we are not fans of this equipment. But it's really ironic to see the same legislators who forced this $100 million purchase on the state to now be saying, 'Hey let's return it to the vendor! Let's get rid of it! It's a terrible system!', because they didn't get enough for their money. They didn't get a President for their money, and it's not clear they're going to get two Senators for their money. So it's kind of a funny time in Georgia."

Finally, we close with some listener mail that may hit the nail on the head: Trump isn't trying to getto 270 electoral votes. He's trying to take enough votes away from Biden so that he gets less than the required 270, so the election must be thrown to the House where the Constitution allows for minority (Republican) rule to win the day. With Rudy Giuliani now leading Team Trump's efforts, how could the plan fail?!

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On today's BradCast, we open with the breaking news about the longest serving Senator in Congress. 87-year old Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley from Iowa has tested positive for the coronavirus. We wish him well, as the COVID crisis explodes across the nation because Grassley's party and President failed to even try to combat the deadly pandemic that has, so far, killed almost a quarter of a million Americans, and may kill as many more by the time Donald Trump mercifully leaves office in January. The rest of today's show is moderately less infuriating. [Audio link to show follows below.]

We start off today with good news/bad news stories regarding both the incoming President-elect and the definitely, whether he's man enough to say it out loud, soon-to-be-former outgoing President. Unfortunately with 64 more days until he's out, by law, the increasingly unstable Trump still has his finger on the nuclear button. The bad news is, as the New York Times reports, he is attempting to launch an attack on Iran his final days. The predicate is a recent report from the the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) finding that --- thanks to Trump reneging on the hard-fought, successful 6-party deal struck under President Obama that prevented Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon --- the nation is once again rebuilding its nuclear stockpile. The good news is that there are apparently just enough not-insane top officials left in the White House and Pentagon that they were reportedly able to talk our deranged President out of sparking WWIII on his way out the door. For now.

The good news/bad news regarding President-elect Joe Biden is that, according to sources who spoke with NBC News, he is disinclined to seek accountability for the many crimes committed by Trump and his administration over the past four years. Yes, it's an echo of Obama's failed "look forward, not back" policy regarding George W. Bush Administration crimes after the Democrat took back the White House in 2008. As we've long argued, that lack of accountability paved the way for the rise of Donald Trump and other GOP miscreants. The good news (good-ish, anyway), is that Biden also says, according to advisers, that he hopes to restore the important separation between the White House and the Department of Justice upon taking office. That means that prosecutors will be free to follow the law and investigate and prosecute as they see fit. Much of this, therefore, rests upon whoever Biden names as Attorney General, though none of this will protect Trump from criminal accountability at the state level, especially in New York.

Then, it's back to Election 2020 Crazy Land, where...

• Trump must decide by Wednesday if he's gonna cough up $7.9 million dollars for an almost certainly futile "recount" in Wisconsin;

• Trump crony Sen. Lindsey Graham appears to have tried to convince Georgia's Republican Secretary of State to toss out lawfully cast ballots in the state, according to the woeful and embattled Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger. That could amount to any number of both state and federal crimes committed by the man who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, as we explain;

• Amid Raffensperger's ongoing quasi-audit, quasi-recount, quasi-recanvass in Georgia --- an otherwise wholly-meaningless and extra-legal exercise invented by Raffensperger to try to kiss up to Trump and the other Republicans who are being mean to him because Trump lost Georgia --- nearly 2,600 untallied ballots were discovered in GOP-leaning Floyd County. With those ballots added to the current totals, Trump will pick up some 778 votes on his approximately 14,000 vote deficit against Biden in the Peach State;

• In Pennsylvania, the crazy is almost too much to keep up with today. On Sunday, Team Trump revised its baseless federal lawsuit by removing a demand to toss some 680,000 ballots. That leaves only a complaint regarding Democratic-leaning counties which lawfully allowed voters who cast mail-in ballots that were deficient in some way (missing a signature or the secrecy ballot) to come in and "cure" the deficiency before Election Day. Republican-leaning counties, for unknown reasons, didn't bother. Either way, there are reportedly nowhere near enough such ballots to overcome Trump's current deficit of more than 73,000 votes.

  But the amusing part is that almost the entire legal team representing the Trump Campaign in the Keystone State withdrew from the case entirely by Monday, leaving one poor GOP schmo with a rightwing radio show representing Trump as his attorney on the case. (Just days after Election Day, the same schmo also told his listeners on air that "no bombshells are about to drop that will derail a Biden presidency," that "litigation will not work" and "will not reverse this election.")

  After a federal judge denied the schmo an extension for Tuesday's emergency hearing, so he could bone up on the case, Trump sent Rudy Giuliani to rescue him, even though Rudy hasn't appeared as an attorney in a courtroom since 1992. We had no news from today's hearing by airtime, but we have since heard it did not go well.

  But just before airtime, we did get word out of the PA Supreme Court on a separate case, in which Team Trump lost yet again. This time, on their counter-factual claims that Republican observers were not allowed to properly oversee counting in Philadelphia. The state Justices found that they were allowed, as per state law, and that the claim was false. That brings Trump's losses to date in his election related challenges to something like 25 out of 26 cases nationally. But don't worry! He's totally gonna "win" this thing any day now!

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report as Hurricane Iota slams Nicaragua (the record-smashing 30th Atlantic storm of the season, and the most powerful to date in 2020); the Trump Administration rushes to sell off drilling rights in the previously-pristine Alaska National Wildlife Refuge; and President-elect Biden meets with business and labor leaders to begin moving forward again on both the economy and climate...

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The unfortunately necessary debunkery of Donald Trump and his GOP's various embarrassingly desperate efforts to steal the election from Joe Biden continues on today's BradCast, even as the U.S. Secretary of State manages to shock with an extraordinarily offense comment and Republicans are now turning on their own in Georgia to appease the soon-to-be-former President. [Audio link to show is posted below this summary.]

Among the too-many stories covered on today's show...

• Even Fox 'News' is beginning to refuse to air the White House's "voter fraud" BS. It's not the first time Fox has refused to play along with GOP "voter fraud" lies since Election Day;

• Mitch McConnell supports Trump's right to legal challenges in the election (and so do we, as we explain);

• Sec. of State Mike Pompeo makes a wildly unfunny, dangerous and un-American "joke" from the lectern at the Dept. of State about a "smooth transition to a second Trump Administration";

• Corporate media continue to do a rather competent job of quickly debunking the endless and so-far evidence-free claims being made by duped Trump supporters and shameless Trump attorneys in court regarding "voter fraud". CNN's Donie O'Sullivan deserves special credit for one of his reports taking on Trump supporters directly at a "Stop the Steal" rally in Pennsylvania, with facts to debunk their false conspiracies regarding "Trump ballots being burned in bags" (they weren't), vote totals being inflated overnight for Joe Biden (they weren't), and much more;

• Separately, CNN also debunks Trump's latest Twitter tantrums regarding his evidence-free claims of fraud in Pennsylvania (no, GOP observers were NOT prevented from watching the ballot count), Nevada (no, 3,000 voters did NOT vote unlawfully from other states), Georgia (no, Trump did not "win on Election Night") and Wisconsin (no, Trump's campaign is not "looking very good" in the state they appear to have lost by more than 20,000 votes);

• Team Trump files yet another embarrassingly lame lawsuit in Arizona, falsely charging that 180 voters (out of 155,860) who cast Election Day ballots in Maricopa County (Phoenix) improperly had their ballots rejected as overvotes;

• Democrat Cal Cunningham concedes his U.S. Senate race in North Carolina to the very unpopular incumbent Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, in a race that Democrats should have won (and that his progressive primary opponent Erica Smith --- featured as a guest on our show earlier this year --- arguably might have);

• Short of an unlikely shocker in the still-uncalled Alaska U.S. Senate race, the last chance for Democrats to take back majority control of the U.S. Senate will now be in Georgia's two U.S. Senate runoff elections on January 5th. They will have to win both of them. And now, both of the state's Republican U.S. Senators, Kelly Loeffler (who is running against Rev. Raphael Warnock) and David Perdue (who is running against Jon Ossoff) are sucking up to their demented sore loser President by turning on GA's Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger, hilariously "citing no evidence" in calling for his resignation.

  Longtime listeners of The BradCast will recognize Raffensperger as the corrupt dope who purchased the state's new, wildly-expensive, easily-manipulated, 100% unverifiable computer touchscreen Rube Goldberg voting systems made by Dominion Voting and forced on every county in the state for first time use this year. That, instead of a cheaper, verifiable, hand-marked paper ballot system urged by cybersecurity and voting systems experts alike.

  Republicans have been falsely accusing Dominion in recent days of being controlled by Democrats and responsible for "stealing" the election from Trump in Michigan and Georgia. While there is no evidence to support their claim, I have invited those Republicans worried about Dominion to join me in my call for getting the company out of Georgia's critical U.S. Senate runoffs altogether by turning to all hand-marked paper ballots to be publicly hand-counted in both races. The statewide election will feature just two races, with only two candidates in each, so hand-counting them on Election Night would be very simple and completely transparent.

  While my invitation to Republicans has become quite popular on Twitter, so far they have failed to join the effort to prevent the "Software from hell!" that folks like Eric Trump are pretending to be the cause for his father's humiliating re-election loss. Sad!

  While Raffensperger says he will not resign, a comment from former Republican Sec. of State turned illegitimate Governor Brian Kemp, along with an article from the far-right Federalist, suggests that state Republicans may try and move to ban mail-in voting altogether for the runoffs, despite the spiking deadly pandemic and the requisite reliance on unverifiable Dominion voting systems at the polling place, in hopes of returning to their years-long glory days of GOP voter suppression in the Peach State;

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report filled with (almost all) actually good news for a change, in the wake of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' apparent election victory last week...

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On today's BradCast: SLAP-SLAP! Wake up, people! Joe Biden is the next President of the United States! [Audio link to today's show follows below.]

But first, in not wholly unrelated news: Ya know that widespread systemic election fraud that Donald Trump has been lying about by falsely accusing Democrats of stealing the election from him by "casting votes after Election Day"? They aren't. But, as it turns out, we now have hard evidence that the Trump Campaign and Republican Party actually are doing exactly that! Or, at least trying to do so in Pennsylvania. We've got both the audio and email evidence to prove it today, via the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Beyond that: Hey, Media! Hey, Democrats! Wake up! Yes, Joe Biden should have already been declared the winner of Tuesday election!!! By the standards the corporate media usually apply to such things, the state of Pennsylvania should already have been called by the media, as of Friday morning, for Biden (if not sooner), based on the unofficial vote counts there, where the former Veep has now surpassed Trump and continues to increase his totals over the soon-to-be-former President at this point. Biden continues to do so today at a similar rate to that which we've seen in the Keystone State since the day after Election Day.

With Pennsylvania's 20 electors, that means --- very conservatively speaking, even without the other currently uncalled states where Biden is also leading, including Nevada, Arizona and Georgia (where Biden also overtook Trump in the vote count on Friday morning) --- the former Vice President now has 273 electoral college votes under his belt. Only 270 are needed to win the Presidency.

In any other Presidential election in any other year, all of the media would already have banner graphics up describing Joe Biden as the "PRESIDENT-ELECT" and characterizing him as the 46th President of the United States! We know why Fox "News" is not doing so (thanks to CNN's Brian Stelter), and while there may be (weak, pathetic) reasons for the media to pull their punches (because they are cowards who kowtow to fear of Republicans), what is the Democratic Party's excuse at the point?!

Hell, Donald Trump and the Minority Leader of the U.S. House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, have already declared that Trump "won", even though he absolutely hasn't! Meanwhile, all available evidence shows beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Biden actually has won. Dems should be dancing in the streets at this point, but they aren't. Lord knows, had the tables been turned, they would have conceded as of Friday morning.

(Note: As an election integrity advocate, I have historically objected to the media or any candidate declaring victory --- or even conceding a loss --- before all votes are counted and, where possible, votes counts are verified as accurate. But, the cowardly double-standard being displayed by the media in this case and the political malpractice being exercised by Dems right now is a separate matter.)

So, what's actually going on here and why? Well, for answers on that we turn first to a few words of wisdom from Josh Marshall at TPM and, for many more such words, to our guest today, HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Digby's Hullabaloo, who --- at least since the day Trump descended that escalator at Trump Tower to call Mexicans rapists and announce his candidacy for President --- we have been checking in with at landmark moments during his Presidency. Today, as Trump should be declared a loser by everyone, is certainly such a moment.

Is it still PTSD from 2016 that is keeping Democrats in their stupor today? Is it because Trump has some completely unknown, but super-genius scheme to overturn the Electoral College somehow? Or is it because, no matter the results of the Presidential race, Dems appear to have under-performed expectations when it comes to both U.S. Senate and House races this year?

Beyond all of that, we also discuss with Digby what all Democrats should be spending their time working on and discussing right now, including how Dems and Joe Biden will have to figure out how to govern even if they are unable to win a still-possible longshot bid to pick up enough Senate seats to win back a majority there. And how best to begin processing whatever lessons, so far, can be gleaned from what happened on Tuesday and from the last four years of the Trump Era.

Lots to talk about today! But, hey people! You WON! Start acting like it! Cause you know Republicans certainly would be in the exact same scenario and, in fact, they LOST, but are still acting like they won anyway! Snap out of it, people!!!

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On today's BradCast: it's all over but the desperate Donald Trump tantrums. Though don't try and tell our own Desi Doyen that today! [Audio link to show is posted below.]

As the stock market numbers rally on increasingly certain news that Joe Biden will become the next President (despite Trump's lies that the market would crash if the former Veep won), the U.S. coronavirus numbers also continue to skyrocket to all time records (thanks to Trump's disastrous denial and lies there as well.) For today, though, it's the vote count numbers we're again focused on, as Biden will almost certainly be called the unofficial winner in several remaining uncalled states --- including Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada --- very soon.

If he takes Pennsylvania alone it's over for Trump. But, as we went to air today, with Biden so far, according to media calls, having won a conservative 253 electoral votes of the 270 he ultimately needs to be declared the President-elect (that 253 total doesn't include Arizona's electors, which both AP and Fox "News" have already called for him), it's now likely that Biden will end up with at least 306 electoral college votes when all is said and done.

At the same time, Trump is filing every unsupported, nonsensical legal lawsuit in every state that his two-bit lawyers can figure out how to spell in hopes that something, anything, will actually help --- or even just turn out to be vaguely true. While the President's supporters in Michigan chant "STOP THE COUNT! STOP THE COUNT!", his equally gullible cult followers in Arizona are busy shouting "COUNT THOSE VOTES! COUNT THOSE VOTES!" That should give you an idea of the ingenously coordinated strategy of Trump and the Republican Party's election law geniuses at this point.

We're joined today by an actual legal professional, University of Kentucky College of Law's election and Constiutional law professor JOSHUA A. DOUGLAS, author of Vote for US: How to Take Back Our Elections and Change the Future of Voting to find out what we must be missing in reviewing Trump's woefully pathetic legal strategy to try and win this election or unring its bell.

"There's not really a coherent legal strategy to speak of. He's throwing as much spaghetti at the wall as he can and seeing what sticks," Douglas confirms. "The real problem I have is we're reporting on these lawsuits as if they have any merit whatsoever. And they don't. I don't think we should even be giving them airtime. Because in my view, the real goal here is to undermine people's faith in the integrity of the election."

"They are making wild allegations of voter fraud, but without having any evidence that it actually occurred. And then they're spreading misinformation on social media about anecdotes that, when you look into them, turn out to be" anything but what they are alleging, he explains.

Nonetheless, we press the good professor for how he would make the case for Trump, were he unfortunate enough to be representing him in this matter, and we discuss the actual looming legal danger awaiting decades of election law precedent at the now packed and stolen U.S. Supreme Court. Will Trump's newest stolen Justice Amy Coney Barrett actually deliver for her President if and when any actionable case on the 2020 election somehow makes its way to SCOTUS? Or will it only be later that she and four other compliant rightwing Justices will decide to undermine the affirmative Right to Vote found in almost every state Constitution?

We discuss all of that and more today, even if none of it seems to help our own Desi Doyen rest any easier about the Presidential election results just yet. (She has very good reason, in the meantime, to be concerned indeed about the results at the Senate and House level.) Nonetheless, we close today with her latest Green News Report with an eye on Hurricane Eta, now aiming for Florida, and what we should expect when it comes to U.S. climate action after the dust settles on the 2020 election...

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On the day after what was a harrowing and very very late Election Night for many Democrats, it is now fairly clear, as of today's BradCast, that --- barring some sort of tabulation surprise or failure (they do happen) --- Joe Biden is set to win at least 270 electoral college votes to become the nation's next President. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

This will likely happen even if Biden doesn't end up winning Pennsylvania (or even Georgia or North Carolina) with the many still-untabulated, largely Democratic votes left to count in the state. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, election officials were barred by gerrymandered, GOP-controlled state legislatures from counting any mail-in ballots until Election Day, so unofficial results on Election Night were much slower coming in. (In Pennsylvania, as we explained with a PA election official last week, it is even worse, because officials in the state are barred from even pre-processing mail-in ballots by opening, verifying them, etc., before Election Day.)

Nonetheless, faced with his likely crushing defeat at the ballot box, Donald Trump did what he does, and precisely what we warned you, very specifically in recent weeks, that he would do. He attempted to gaslight the American people via his Twitter account and a 2:30am "news conference" with supporters at the White House, where he tried to super-spread the lie that counting legally cast ballots after Election Day was somehow "a fraud on our nation" and a "sad" attempt by Democrats to "STEAL the election" from him. After falsely declaring victory, he vowed that "we are going to the Supreme Court" to, presumably, try to stop the counting of votes, though it remains unclear whether he has any cause of action whatsoever to try and do that.

Trump's late-night lie and threat fest did not go over well. Even Republicans of all stripes condemned the remarks --- from Chris Wallace of Fox "News" to Trump's debate prep ally Chris Christie to the RNC's top election attorney Ben Ginsberg --- all of whom declared Trump's announced plans to stop the counting of lawfully cast votes to be shameful, anti-democratic and counter-productive to his case, not to mention an embarrassment to the nation. We share a number of those responses on today's show.

In short, Trump's desperate scheme is unlikely to work, barring evidence of some sort of actual fraud or mistabulation. Before media outlets called both Wisconsin and Michigan for Biden today, Team Trump vowed to seek a "recount" in Wisconsin, and announced plans to file suit in those states and Pennsylvania in hopes of stopping perfectly legal on-going vote tallies. In an effort to recreate the magic of 2000's infamous "Brooks Brothers Riot" in Florida, Trump supporters in Detroit on Wednesday attempted, unsuccessfully, to storm the counting room.

That is by way of contrast with Biden's own late-night statement to supporters on Tuesday night, noting that "it's not my place or Donald Trump's place to declare the winner of this election. It's the voters' place," and that "every vote must be counted." He vowed that "nobody is going to take our democracy away from us, not now, not ever."

We shall see. But it is looking very good for Democrats today, at least on the Presidential level as of air time today. As to their hopes of winning back a much-needed majority in the U.S. Senate, that hope appears dim at this hour, if still a long-shot possibility. Combined with the reported loss, so far, of five Democratic seats in the U.S. House and the results on several ballot initiatives across the nation, it was certainly a confusing verdict from the American people --- presuming the reported, unverified and unofficial results to date prove to be accurate.

What to make of all of this? We are joined today by our old friend and Wisconsin favorite son, progressive journalist JOHN NICHOLS of The Nation and Madison's Capitol Times. As usual, Nichols has helpful insight into all of this, both for progressives and establishment Democrats, as well as a unique perspective from a state which barely went to Donald Trump in 2016 for the first time in decades, and which now appears to have flipped back to Democrats by a similarly small margin. His body of knowledge also comes from a longtime progressive state that took a very similar right turn over the past couple of decades as the nation now appears to have taken, with the rise (and fall) of former Gov. Scott Walker.

"I like the fact that the people [Trump] attacked the most, the people he threatened to send federal forces in to squash their protests and minimize their outcry --- they pushed back against him," Nichols says, noting his optimism after last night. "I see something very positive in that. I would even dare say there was something delicious, or at least appealing in the poetic justice of it." On the other hand, he tells me, noting the "blunt reality" of the situation, "Democrats shouldn't be overly enthusiastic about a situation where, it appears, the prospect they have taken the Presidency without a Senate. Because, I've argued throughout this year, that if Joe Biden is elected President with Mitch McConnell still in charge of the Senate, Joe Biden begins his Presidency as a lame-duck."

Finally, we share an audio clip of our nominee today for the hands-down most optimistic take on whatever the hell happened yesterday, from a noted Presidential historian...

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On today's BradCast: Election 2020 is coming down to the wire, with the deadline for voting just days away and no small amount of chaos unleashed on the entire process by federal courts over the past several days. While the U.S. Supreme Court has invoked their so-called "Purcell Principle" in recent years, to prevent last-minute changes to even bad, suppressive election laws in order to avoid chaos, both SCOTUS and lower federal courts have been busy this week invoking invoking election chaos in several key battleground states. [Audio link to full show posted at bottom of summary.]

On Thursday night, two Republican federal appellate court judges reversed a rule enacted with a Minnesota state court's approval in July, in a radical ruling that follows on the heels of another decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in a Pennsylvania case that has resulted in elections officials in both states now being forced to segregate late arriving mail-in ballots that are postmarked on or before Election Day, but that don't arrive until the days following it. We explain the reason for the extraordinary disruption and the potential invalidation of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of lawfully cast ballots in both states --- and maybe others --- based on a radical interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's Elections Clause that has never been blessed by a majority on the Supreme Court, but which could be very soon, depending on the vote of Donald Trump's newest appointment to the GOP's stolen Court, Amy Coney Barrett.

We try to make sense of the chaos that has now been unleashed by...

• that late Thursday night ruling by two Republican judges on the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals --- just five days before Election Day --- finding it unconstitutional for MN to count late arriving ballots lawfully cast and postmarked on time, despite a months-old state court-blessed settlement between MN's Sec. of State, voting advocates and even agreed to by the Trump Campaign;
• the SCOTUS decision to wait until after Election Day to decide if similar ballots in PA will be discarded as well;
• and a seemingly counter-intuitive SCOTUS decision to allow late-arriving ballots in North Carolina to be counted following a state court blessed settlement nearly identical to the one just struck down on Thursday night by the appeals court judges for MN.

As noted, chaos now reigns in several of the most important battleground states in the most critical election in U.S. history.

Meanwhile, in the new battleground state of Texas, where early voting numbers have now surpassed the total turnout for all of the 2016 election, officials in Tarrant County (Fort Worth) are dealing with chaos caused by what they describe as a printing error by their absentee ballot contractor. Roughly one-third of mail-in ballots cast in the County are being seen as unreadable by their computer optical-scan tabulation system. Rather than count those hand-marked paper ballots publicly by hand, state law calls for the potentially tens of thousands of unscannable ballots to be "remade" by elections officials by hand onto new, scannable ballot pages.

All of this should serve as a reminder of the necessity of citizen-based public oversight of our elections, which are not owned by unelected judges or elections officials or private vendors or contractors, but by we the people. If you've already voted and are now looking for a way to help between now and Election Day (and, as importantly, beyond), there are many opportunities! Check out some of them at Scrutineers.org, ProtectOurVotes.com, SmartElections.us and ValidateTheVoteUSA.org.

Our guest today is, herself, a longtime champion of public oversight of elections. MARYBETH KUZNIK is the founder of the election integrity group, VotePA.us and, as of September, also the Election Director in Armstrong County, PA, a somewhat rural, Republican-leaning county just north of Pittsburgh. She is kind enough to offer us some time amid the mayhem of her new job today, where she concedes "it's pretty crazy here."

Among the many topics we discuss...

• the new order to segregate late-arriving absentee ballots in PA so they can, potentially, be nullified by the U.S. Supreme Court after the election;
• the fact that the state legislature does not allow pre-processing, much less tabulation, of mail-in ballots until Election Day;
• How many days it is likely to take her county and the state as a whole to tabulate them ("We are in unchartered water here...But, we're not going to know Election Night, that's for sure." She is still looking for volunteers to help! Though they must be from Armstrong!);
• the type of voting systems in use in Armstrong (Optically-scanned hand-marked paper ballots. "I wouldn't be working here --- I would not be administering unverifiable touchscreen ballot-marking devices. You know that, Brad!");
• her concerns about voting in Philadelphia this year amid both civil unrest and the strongly Dem-leaning County's foolish decision to use new, unverifiable, computer touchscreen Ballot Marking Devices which failed spectacularly during their first use last year. ("Philly worries me," she says, adding that she has "zero confidence" in the systems which she describes as "the most expensive and the most wasteful voting system ever developed. Every voter does not need a $9,000 touchscreen to cast a ballot.";
• and some of the lessons she's learned in her transition from longtime Election Integrity advocate to Election Director...

Don't forget to exhale between now and Tuesday!...

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As I discuss near the top of today's BradCast, we are now in what amounts to a Cold Civil War on Democracy in this nation. The greatest direct threat we have ever faced to our Constitutional Republic since the Civil War is now playing out in our ongoing election. [Audio link to show is posted below this summary.]

As it turns out, that threat to what Joe Biden describes as "the soul of our nation", does not come from a foreign power, but from the President of the United States himself and his party of henchmen and supporters who are now attacking the very core of our Republic: the right to vote and to have that vote counted as cast. That right is now under direct assault in a way not seen since the Jim Crow era. And while the GOP has been using the guise of preventing "voter fraud" to wage similar battles in recent years, they aren't even trying to hide their direct assault on democracy anymore. They are simply using every (so far, peaceful) means possible --- legal and extra-legal --- to try and prevent legal voters from voting and lawfully cast ballots from being counted.

Unfortunately, they have packed enough stooges onto their stolen U.S. Supreme Court at this point, that they may pull it off...unless the pro-democracy forces simply overwhelm them between now and the close of polls next Tuesday night. Get busy, people. Only the fate of the Republic and...yes, human civilization, as Desi Doyen highlights yet again in our Green News Report today, are at stake.

Among the stories reported on today's show, as our trench warfare coverage continues...

• The very Trumpy Republican Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, goes to vote and finds someone has changed his address in the state's voter registration database. As Governor, he is able to order the Florida Dept. of Law Enforcement (FDLE) to take swift action to find the alleged culprit within hours. Of course, no such swift action was taken when Ann Coulter committed voter fraud in Florida years ago, nor when Donald Trump himself did the exact same thing this year;

• Good news for democracy in Minnesota! A federal judge has ordered a mercenary contractor hiring armed para-militia to stalk polling places to stand down after violating federal voter intimidation laws. The company, Atlas Aegis, must also reveal who has been funding their program. The case is a victory for plaintiffs including the Minnesota chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and League of Women Voters, as well as the group Free Speech for People (FSFP) whose lawyers brought the case. We spoke with FSFP attorney Ron Fein last week on the show, the day after the voter intimidation suit was filed in federal court;

• Good news for voters in Texas! A Trump-appointed federal judge has found Gov. Greg Abbott's exemption for voters and pollworkers to his statewide mask mandate to be in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Masks must be worn inside of all polling places across the Lone Star state of today's ruling. The victory comes not a moment too soon, after several polling officials have already become sickened, poll sites were closed due to sick workers, and maskless poll watchers were said to have been using their presence to intimidate minority voters. That, in a state where the Republicans who have long controlled it went all the way to the Supreme Court to deny almost all voters under the age of 65 the right to request an absentee ballot due to fear of the spiking coronavirus pandemic. It's also another victory --- and a reversal of fortunes --- for the good folks at FSFP, including Senior Counsel Courtney Hostetler, who spoke with us on the show about their case in September, when its outlook then appeared grim;

• More good news for democracy in Texas! A $31 million effort to improve access to the polls in the nation's third-largest voting jurisdiction, Harris County, which includes Houston, appears to have paid off big time. NBC News reports that more voters have now cast ballots there during early voting than were cast in the entire 2016 election. The increased turnout is thanks to expanded and innovative voting options, such as Early Voting sites that stay open later, some that stay open for 24 hours, and drive-thru polling places. The County's stunning turnaround in a state with notoriously low voter turnout comes after Dems won every countywide office in 2018, increased the elections budget from $4 million under GOP control to $31 million now, and with the hiring of innovative, 33-year old County Clerk Chris Hollins in late summer. Naturally, state Republicans have been challenging virtually every innovation to make it easier for voters to vote in the state's largest county. And while Gov. Greg Abbott has succeeded in limiting ballot drop-off locations to just one per county (from a dozen previously planned for sprawling Harris County, which is larger than Rhode Island), GOP attempts to block drive-thru voting have been denied by the state's all-Republican Supreme Court. Another new case was filed by Republicans this week, however, seeking to actually invalidate the votes of more than 100,000 voters who lawfully cast drive-thru votes during Early Voting.

• On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court's issued an appalling ruling that blocks tens of thousands of lawfully cast mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day from being counted in Wisconsin if they arrive after Election Day due to, for example, slowdowns in U.S. Postal Service delivery by Trump's new Postmaster General. Criticism from legal experts and voting rights advocates of the embarrassingly error-riddled concurring opinion filed by GOP operative turned GOP activist Justice Brett Kavanaugh was swift. We discussed that factually deficient and laughable concurrence with Slate legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern in detail on yesterday's show. Among the egregious errors in the opinion was Kavanaugh's citing of Vermont's election laws. The Sec. of State of Vermont has now written a letter to the Court in response, demanding that the opinion be corrected to include actual facts about the state's voting laws, instead of the phony claims Kavanaugh made as he works toward using his lifetime appointment on the Court to steal this year's election on behalf of the man who appointed him to it;

• Finally, as mentioned, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as a record fifth hurricane in a single season slams storm-weary Louisiana today; Trump opens the nation's last protected tropical rain forest to commercial logging; China and Japan vault ahead of the U.S. in their pledges to reach net-zero carbon emissions; and the case is made for Joe Biden to expand the Supreme Court if we are to have any chance of combating our swiftly worsening climate crisis.

• P.S. The charming animated video of the Lincoln Project "Fairy Tale" we played at the top of today's show is here.

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On today's BradCast: It was a very very bad day for Donald J. Trump and for his odds of winning re-election. At least on paper. Don't get too excited just yet. (But please do vote, ASAP, if you have not done so already! And if you're voting by mail-in ballot, do not mail it in! Deliver it in person, at this point!) [Audio link to full show is posted beneath summary.]

Among the very bad news for our failed President on Wednesday...

• 'Anonymous' was revealed to have been the Chief of Staff of his own Dept. of Homeland Security, who has now endorsed Joe Biden;
• The stock market --- the only thing that Trump has left to crow about --- plummeted on concerns about the startling third-peak surge in the U.S. COVID pandemic, thanks to Trump's bungled response, with the Dow falling more than 950 points;
• Hackers defaced the Trump Campaign website;
• The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released an embarrassing document detailing the Trump Administration's "accomplishments", leading off with "Ending the COVID-19 pandemic"! If you have any doubts about that, they quote noticed science and technologist Ivanka Trump as supporting evidence;
• 20 former Republican U.S. Attorneys, serving in Presidential administrations from Eisenhower to George W. Bush came out with their "strongest endorsement" for...Joe Biden. (So much for Trump as the self-proclaimed "law and order President");
• Hundreds of Trump supporters were left stranded by the Trump Campaign in frigid temps on an airstrip in Omaha, Nebraska on Tuesday night, after Trump's latest super-spreader rally. Seven supporters were hospitalized "with a variety of medical conditions" as they waited in the dark until after midnight for buses to arrive to drive them back three miles to their cars;
• And, all the while, the polling both nationally and in battleground states continues to appear bleak for Trump, including one (frankly, hard-to-believe) new poll from ABC News/Washington Post finding Biden up by 17 points in Wisconsin.

As noted, it was a very bad day for Donald Trump's reelection effort. At least in theory. But he still has a few Trump Cards that he believes --- with good reason --- he may be able to play at his stolen and corrupt U.S. Supreme Court. That effort will involve preventing timely cast ballots from being tabulated at all following Election Day.

If the concurrence filed in a Wisconsin case on Monday night by former GOP operative turned GOP activist Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, however, is any indication of how this scheme will work, you should plan to either laugh or cry yourself to death in the coming days.

We're joined today once again by Slate's brilliant legal reporter MARK JOSEPH STERN to explain which of those two options is more likely at this point. Or, as he says today, "be the 'Angel of Doom' on your show, here to deliver some bad news from the heavens and generally terrify you about what's coming from our Supreme Court in the coming weeks and months."

On Monday night, the Supremes issued an order that blocked a lower federal court's ruling allowing the counting of mail-in ballots postmarked in the Badger State by Election Day that arrive up to six days after November 3rd. The opinion was a party-line 5 to 3 vote, with Kavanaugh issuing an extraordinary 18-page concurrence [PDF] with his majority vote to nullify potentially hundreds of thousands of legitimate ballots. The concurrence, however, was full of demonstrable, laughable, egregious errors of fact, including the claim that states like to declare winners on Election Night (zero of them actually do, as Stern correctly notes) and that counting ballots after Election Day might "potentially flip the results of an election."

Since elections are never certified by states on Election Night --- only the media declare "winners", in that sense --- official state results cannot be "flipped" with the counting of ballots after Election Day. It takes anywhere from days to weeks to tally ballots and certify winners even when we're not in the middle of an horrific pandemic that has resulted in an all-time record use of vote-by-mail options across the country.

That said, as insane as Kavanaugh's opinion was, both he and Trump's first stolen Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, offered a "totally deranged attempt", as Stern described it, to hew to a rejected opinion from the Bush v. Gore case in 2000 that handed the Presidency to George W. Bush. Though it came from a minority of Justices at the time --- in an opinion that specifically said it could never be used as a precedent in any other case --- it does now seem to be one of the Trump Cards that could be played to try and steal this year's election.

As Stern explains today, the portion of Bush v. Gore cited by Kavanaugh (inaccurately claiming it was from a unanimous majority opinion when it was neither unanimous nor in the majority!) was so radical at the time that even Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy refused to concur with it. Nonetheless, incredibly enough, there are now three Republican Party attorneys who worked on that Florida case in 2000 on behalf of Bush --- John Roberts, Kavanaugh and now Amy Coney Barrett --- actually sitting on the Court as Justices. That means anything could now happen, depending on how things work out as of next Tuesday night. So buckle up, as Stern details why all of this could come into play week and in the future, "because if this comes down to a few thousand or a few hundred ballots --- hoo boy --- it's going to make Bush v. Gore look like a warmup act for what's coming next."

We also get some reaction from Stern on Biden's recently stated position to call for a bi-partisan panel of Constitutional scholars to make recommendations for Court reform and/or expansion (presuming Biden wins and Dems take back the Senate), and a federal court's rejection this week of the DoJ's absurd attempt to dismiss a defamation lawsuit against Trump, filed in NY state court by columnist E. Jean Carroll who alleges he raped her in the 1990's.

Finally, we use a few minutes to name the "winner" of our recent bumper music trivia "contest" from Monday, when our guest was Ion Sancho (the legendary former Florida election official who oversaw the aborted 2000 "recount") and then, just in case you needed any more inspiration today to help ensure a landslide next week, we close with a parody song performed by Lauren Myers with lyrics written by our friend and regular guest-host Nicole Sandler!

Oh, and P.S., if you want to share that absolutely bone chilling Lincoln Project ad we opened today's show with, it's right here.

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Not long after we got off air from yesterday's BradCast, Senate Republicans kept their promise of breaking their previous promise that they would never ever ever --- because it would just be plain wrong and an insult to the voters! --- seat a new Supreme Court Justice during a Presidential election year. Their original promise held for exactly one Presidential election in a row, when it was Obama's nominee to the high court that they blocked for more than a year in 2016. [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

Donald Trump's third appointment to the high court, Amy Coney Barrett, now has the dubious distinction of being the first Justice in U.S. history to have been confirmed without a single vote from the minority party in the U.S. Senate. (Even rightwingers like Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy were both unanimously confirmed.) She will also be notorious for having been seated closer to an Election Day (just one week before it) than any other Justice in history, leading Democrats to correctly describe the entire affair as an "illegitimate" "power grab".

But, even before Barrett was officially sworn in as the newest Justice on the GOP's already-stolen Court on Tuesday morning, the five Republican Justices on Monday night --- (with five of six of them now seated by GOP U.S. Senate majorities elected by a vast minority of American voters) --- had already ordered the state of Wisconsin to reject what is likely to be well over 100,000 timely cast and postmarked mail-in ballots simply because they are delivered by the USPS after polls close on Election Day in the Badger State. The anti-democratic order overturns a lower court judge who allowed the counting of ballots postmarked by Election Day, even if they arrive up to six days afterward --- just as Republicans agreed to during the state's primaries earlier this year. But now that they're competing with Democrats, apparently vote suppression is necessary. More on that particular outrage hopefully tomorrow, because the ruling was even worse than it sounds.

But, for today, the outrageous hypocrisy, perfidy and appalling dishonesty of the Senate Republicans' latest court-packing stunt with the illegitimate now-Justice Barrett --- after well over 60 million American have already voted in an election that may very well cost the Republican Party control of both the Senate and White House --- needs to be highlighted today. For that, we're joined by AARON BELKIN, Director of Take Back the Court, the nation's oldest organization formed specifically to call for expansion and reform of both SCOTUS and lower federal courts following the GOP's original theft of the high court in 2016.

While the need to save democracy itself by unrigging the Republicans' packed federal courts is quite clear, the question remains as to whether Senate Democrats understand that, and whether they will have the courage to do so --- presuming they are able to win back control of the chamber amid years of new voter suppression laws enacted by states and activist GOP jurists.

Belkin details the existential stakes and necessity of doing so, and offers his thoughts on whether Democrats will muster the strength to end the Senate filibuster as required to accomplish it next year.

"It's not just about the theft of the court from Barack Obama, but it's also that we are facing planetary emergencies like climate change, with effectively no time left on the clock," Belkin argues. "And we're also facing what you could call 'democracy emergencies,' where the Court itself has worked hard to keep black and brown voters from the polls. This Court, even the Court as it was configured in 2017, was highly unlikely to allow the next President to deal with those emergencies."

"To have robust judicial reform, you need to expand lower federal courts commensurate with the number of seats that Mitch McConnell prevented President Obama from filling during the last two years of his presidency," he tells me. "Then you need to expand the Supreme Court just by enough Justices to get the job done, to deliver a Court that will allow the next administration to address the emergencies we face." His group also calls for term limits "to try to minimize some of these problems moving forward" and "a code of ethical conduct" for Justices who, unlike lower federal court judges, have no such requirements for recusing from cases in which they have conflicts of interest, or even "situations where, for example, Justice Thomas' wife is lobbying President Trump and the White House the same week that President Trump is a party to a lawsuit in front of Justice Thomas."

Belkin also offers his reaction to Joe Biden's recent vow to create a bi-partisan panel of legal scholars to make recommendations for such reforms after six months of study, and what Americans must do to help make sure any of this happens, in the event that Democrats win both the Senate and White House. He also responds with a very compelling argument to those who charge that these reforms would simply be escalated the next time Republicans take control of both houses of Congress and the White House.

Finally, speaking of just some of the stakes, we're joined by Desi Doyen with our latest Green News Report on yet another record hurricane now barreling toward the Gulf Coast, yet more hurricane-winds and record wildfires in Colorado and California, and then Trump's lies and Biden's truth about action on our climate crisis at last week's final Presidential Debate of 2020...

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On today's BradCast: We've got good news for voters from a bunch of courts today --- including in both battleground and "red" states --- when it comes to the absentee mail-in voting that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are working so hard to block. But we've also got some very disturbing news out of the state of Georgia in a story that nobody other than us seems to be covering for reasons we can't quite explain. Especially since it now involves installing all brand-new, untested, and uncertified software --- at the very last minute, just days before Early Voting is to start --- on every touchscreen voting system used across the state. [Audio link to full show follows below summary]

But first, the good court rulings coming out of several states so far this week...

• A federal appeals court has upheld a lower court judge's six-day extension beyond Election Day for the receipt of incoming absentee ballots postmarked by November 3rd in the critical battleground state of WISCONSIN. The unanimous ruling comes from a panel of three Republican-appointed judges, including one nominated by Trump, in a state which he is said to have barely flipped to "red" in 2016, for the first time in decades, by just over 20,000 votes out of millions cast. Republicans could appeal to the GOP's stolen U.S. Supreme Court. That's just one of the reasons they are trying to pack the Court with Trump's nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, in record time before the election;

• Similarly good news out of Mike Pence's home state of INDIANA, where a federal judge rejected a deadline of noon of Election Day for absentee ballots to be received. The ruling will allow ballots postmarked by November 3rd to be counted if they arrive by November 13. The judge says the extra days do not benefit any particular party or candidate and "should in fact help assuage" concerns about the legitimacy of election results in the Hoosier State;

• In the state of MONTANA, a federal judge blocked an effort by the Trump Campaign and other GOP groups to prevent counties from automatically sending absentee ballots to all active registered voters as they did during this year's June primary elections. That, after the plaintiffs were unable to "point to a single instance of voter fraud in Montana in any election during the last 20 years," according to the judge who described concerns about widespread fraud as "a fiction". While the state went to Trump by some 20 points in 2016, its Democratic Governor Steve Bullock won re-election on the same statewide ballot that year, and is now running for the U.S. Senate to unseat incumbent Republican Steve Daines;

• In ALABAMA, a federal judge ruled that the state may not block counties from offering curbside voting and that witness signature requirements and Photo ID requirements for absentee voters during the COVID-19 pandemic are unconstitutional for certain voters. Their Republican wingnut Sec. of State John Merrill says he will appeal all the way to the stolen Supreme Court if necessary;

• And in the closely divided battleground of NORTH CAROLINA, a proposed settlement between the state and plaintiffs will allow for absentee ballots to be "cured" by voters if they lack proper signatures; voters will be able to use secured drop-boxes for mail-in votes; and for ballots postmarked by Election Day may be received until November 12. But this week, a letter has been sent by the Trump Campaign to Republican officials on County Boards of Elections instructing them to ignore guidance from the State Board of Elections! The NC SBE has had to send a letter in response to those same officials, warning them that they are required to follow state guidance and that guidance from "a political party or other source should not be considered or followed." The extraordinary situation has led one international expert on election security from Duke University to (accurately) opine: "It comes down to the fact that this President is not actually trying to win this election – this President is trying to not have to concede this election. That’s what going on." That expert is right on the money.

Then, to the extraordinarily disturbing story out of GEORGIA, which our guest today, MARILYN MARKS of the Coalition of Good Governance, describes as "scandalous". As we reported during Monday's show, last Friday, the Secretary of State's office quietly sent a notice to elections officials in all 159 counties telling them to immediately stop their pre-election "Logic and Accuracy" testing of the new, unverifiable touchscreen voting systems that all voters are currently forced to use at the polling place. The reason, as the office explained, was due to "an error in the November database which will require every county to get a new database for the November 3, 2020 election."

That startling news late on Friday night resulted in an emergency filing by the Coalition with U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg, who has been overseeing their long-running lawsuit to block the use of unverifiable touchscreen voting systems in favor of verifiable hand-marked paper ballots at the polls. On Monday, Totenberg called an emergency hearing for all parties to the suit, during which the Secretary of State's office and the state's new private vote system vendor and ballot programmer, Dominion Voting, claimed that new databases (which contain the programming for all contests in each county) were not actually needed to correct an error that prevented some U.S. Senate candidates from appearing on the touchscreen in certain cases. In fact, what they planned to do instead was to change the code used on the voting machine software itself, and install new software onto all 34,000 touchscreens in the state. All of this, just days before Early Voting is to begin, and now just over one month before Election Day.

As Marks notes, the new software to be installed on every voting machine in Georgia has not been certified for use --- or even tested --- by the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) as required by state law. But this story is even more scandalous in several ways that we discuss on today's program, after another emergency hearing was called by the judge today, following another emergency filing from the Coalition on Wednesday night regarding an apparent change of plans by the Secretary of State.

"It's outrageous. They're wiping all of the software," Marks tells me, and installing "new software that's just been written, has not been tested, and has not been certified by the Elections Assistance Commission. As far as we know, it has not even been submitted for approval. This is federal certification, and Georgia, like most states, is not supposed to be using systems not certified by the federal government."

"They've written this over a weekend, and have not thoroughly tested it. There's been no user testing. The number of things that can go wrong will take up more time than your show permits," she says. "They might as well have gone out and said, 'we're going to buy the Lucy and Ethel software, and put it in.'"

While that is troubling enough, Marks also notes that the programming is not even being done by public state officials, but by private contractors at the Canadian-based firm from whom GA purchased the systems for more than $100 million for first time use this year. "This election has been completely outsourced to Dominion Voting Systems. They are a third party profit-making corporation and, essentially, Georgia has just said, 'Take it and do with it as you will, Dominion!'"

Marks says it is all "outrageous and preposterous," telling me, "Like you, I am shocked that the national media has not picked up on this more, because we're talking about the votes of 7 million voters here."

"I thought that I was beyond having anything that could shock me anymore," she continues. "But I have to say, my jaw is still on the floor from this week. And the fact that the media is not covering it, I don't understand. I can only surmise that they are still in disbelief. Maybe the facts just aren't fully out yet. That's the only thing I can come up with. This is scandalous. "

Please tune in for the full story --- there is much more to it. But, suffice to say for now, it IS a scandal that WE have been covering this story and this lawsuit for at least three years, while the mainstream corporate media seems to be ignoring it almost entirely, even with the possibility that the Peach State could flip from red to blue this year in the Presidential race for the first time in decades, and that there is not one, but two U.S. Senate seats on the ballot there this November, both of which are currently held by Republicans and believed to be endangered by Democratic challengers.

Finally, we close today with our latest Green News Report, with special coverage of the surprise --- and surprisingly substantive --- discussion of climate change in this week's otherwise off-the-rails Presidential Debate in Cleveland, OH...

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On Thursday, by way of a 13-page Order [PDF] issued in State of Washington v. Trump, U.S. District Court Judge Stanley A. Bastian not only enjoined the United States Postal Service (USPS) from continuing to implement the "transformative" nationwide changes to its mail delivery capacities effectuated since July under the direction of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, but also ordered USPS to "replace, reassemble or reconnect" all of the high-speed sorting and labeling machines that had previously been decommissioned.

In his decision, Judge Bastian found that the 14 State Plaintiffs --- Attorneys General in WA, CO, CT, IL, MD, MI, MN, NV, NM, OR, RI, VT, VA, WI --- "established a likelihood that they will prevail on their claims that the [USPS] and Postmaster General violated 39 U.S.C. §3661". He characterized DeJoy's mandates as an "attack on the Postal Service [that] is likely to irreparably harm the states’ ability to administer the 2020 general election."

As we explained last month when covering the States' complaint, under Section 3661(b), DeJoy had a "non-discretionary duty" to request and obtain an advisory opinion from the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) before instituting "a change in the nature of postal services which will generally affect service on a nationwide or a substantially nationwide basis." Under that statute, the PRC cannot issue that advisory opinion "until an opportunity for a hearing on the record...has been afforded to...users of the mail." At that hearing, "an officer of the [PRC]...shall be required to represent the public interest."

DeJoy's failure to comply with those statutory requirements, Judge Bastion noted, "suggests" the USPS "acted ultra vires" --- beyond its power --- when it effectuated DeJoy's "transformative" changes.

The court also found that the Plaintiffs established a likelihood that the USPS "actions have infringed" upon the "States' constitutional right to appoint presidential electors and set the time, place, and manner of elections; that the current changes are the result of an effort by the current Administration to use the [USPS] as a tool in partisan politics, which violates the spirit and purpose of the Postal Reorganization Act and the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act."

In his written ruling, Judge Bastian blasted the USPS actions, charging they would result in "voter disenfranchisement"...

On today's BradCast: The endless court battles continue as Donald Trump and the Republican Party continue their fight to make voting harder and more dangerous during the worst pandemic in a century. But we've got mostly good news today on those fronts. The news on the climate front today, however, is not nearly as encouraging. [Audio link to full show is posted below summary.]

Among the many election and/or climate-related stories covered on today's show...

• For the first time in its 175-year history, Scientific American magazine has made a Presidential endorsement. In this case, for Joe Biden. We explain why;

• That endorsement comes on the heels of another recent endorsement for Biden by the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of major labor and environmental groups. It was the first endorsement of any public candidate in the coalition's 14-year history. The group includes the United Steelworkers, the Utility Workers Union of America, the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters, and four other unions with the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters and the National Wildlife Federation;

• Despite record wildfires up and down the West Coast, two hurricanes that slammed the Gulf Coast just over two weeks ago and another one set to do the same over the next 24 hours in a record storm season, network and cable TV outlets have been woeful in their coverage of climate change, which has made all of these emergencies far worse and much more damaging. Several recent Media Matters analyses finds plenty of coverage of the fires across the networks and cable stations, but barely any mention, in the hours of coverage, of why all of this is now happening. That, just weeks out from the most critical election in our nation's history, pitting a climate change denying Republican against a Democrat who is proposing $2 trillion dollars to combat the existential crisis while putting millions back to work creating clean, renewable energy;

• Good news for election officials and voters alike in the battleground state of Wisconsin on Monday night, as one Justice on the state's rightwing-majority Supreme Court decided to join the court's liberals to put an end to absentee ballot chaos the court created last Friday. Then, a 4 to 3 decision by the court's rightwingers ordered elections officials in the state's nearly 2,000 voting jurisdictions to immediately stop sending out absentee ballots to allow the court more time to decide if the GOP-backed Green Party Presidential ticket should be added to the ballot after the Wisconsin State Election Commission declined to do so weeks earlier. On Monday, one "conservative" joined the liberals in another 4 to 3 ruling that finds the Greens ineligible this year in the Badger State after all. State election officials are greatly relieved, as some 380,000 ballots had already gone out, and there would have been no time to re-design, re-print, re-test and re-mail as many as one million absentee ballots before both state and federal statutory deadlines this week for doing so. Both the Green Party and a separate attempt to qualify for the ballot in WI by rapper Kanye West were aided by Republican lawyers and activists in a state which Trump is said to have won in 2016 by less than one percentage point;

• Meanwhile, both bad and good news for voters in battleground Ohio. Republicans in the state legislature on Monday voted down a proposal from a bipartisan group of election officials to cover the postage for absentee ballots. One state lawmaker who voted against the proposal (and, thus, in favor of a poll tax) from the comfort of his home during the Controlling Board's virtual online meeting, did so just one hour after reportedly learning he'd tested positive for the coronavirus;

• In (mostly) better news for voters from the Buckeye State, a Franklin County Court of Common Pleas judge has determined that the use of absentee ballot drop-boxes does not violate state election laws. Last month, OH's Republican Sec. of State Frank LaRose issued a directive that only one secure drop-box could be used, per county, outside of County Boards of Elections. LaRose claimed state law was unclear on the matter and that the state's GOP Attorney General hadn't responded to his request for a legal opinion. So LaRose, citing the Trump Campaign's ongoing suit to block drop-boxes in battleground Pennsylvania, decided the matter on his own. State Dems sued, the state GOP intervened to oppose, and now a judge has decreed that as many drop-boxes as counties which to use is just fine according to state law.

  However, LaRose, who in a parallel case in federal court claims he is not against the use of drop-boxes, so long as the law allows it, has said he will not allow it unless he is actually ordered by the court to do so, and his office suggests they plan to appeal the state judge's ruling. LaRose, sadly, is just another hypocritical, dishonest Republican Sec. of State in Ohio, and another reminder that nobody should simply be "trusted" in an election system from any party. American elections are supposed to be built on public oversight for checks and balances, not on "trust". That public oversight is made more difficult every day by election officials who continue to use computer voting and tabulation systems that are difficult, if not impossible, for the public to oversee;

• And in the battleground state of Nevada, where Donald Trump held another COVID super-spreader campaign event to help make more of his supporters sick --- and possibly kill them --- on Sunday, the President took to Fox and Friends today to offer a completely farcical claim about how the state's Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak is "in charge of the ballots" and using that power to rig this year's election. Among the several problems with Trump's pathetic, whiny, evidence-free charge: the state's chief election official is Republican Sec. of State Barbara Cegavske, who oversees and certifies all election results in the state.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report as climate change-fueled Hurricane Sally approaches the Gulf Coast (with several more behind her); record climate change-intensified wildfires rage out of control in the West; Biden blasts Trump as a "climate arsonist"; and Trump tells California officials that, like COVID, climate change will just go away...

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Today's BradCast in a nutshell: Elected officials lie, corporate media misinforms, people die. We try again to combat all of the above today. Wish us luck. [Audio link to today's show follow below.]

First up today, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest on the deadly, devastating, climate changed-fueled wildfire infernos wreaking havoc up and down the West Coast and on the new record hurricanes that are heading our way at the same time. With more than 3 million acres now burned, hundreds of structures destroyed in California alone, and at least 35 dead from the record blazes so far, Donald Trump went to the state on Monday and told fire officials not to worry. "It'll start getting cooler. You just watch," the President told California state Natural Resources Agency Secretary Wade Crowfoot, who was urging him to not ignore science and "recognize the changing climate and what it means to our forests." Trump's response: "Well, I don't think science knows, actually."

So, don't worry! Just as Trump repeatedly promised COVID would "just go away," (more than 190,000 Americans have been killed by it since he pulled that phony promise out of his ass), apparently the same is true for our climate crisis! Of course, our corporate media have made it much easier for Trump to misinform the nation with his lies because the corporate media have done --- and are still doing --- an horrendous job of educating the electorate about the real reasons the western fires have become so horrific and why we are now up to "V" in the named storms so far this year, with a month and half still to go in the storm season and two and a half months remaining in the wildfire season.

The media have been similarly disastrous in their education of the electorate when it comes to our woeful election system. Sadly, too many top government officials --- Democratic and Republican ones alike --- share in that blame, as we're reminded in our guest today, JENNY COHN's new short #RemoveTheModems video, warning voters about the modems that are present in voting and tabulation systems in key states --- including battlegrounds Florida, Michigan and Wisconsin --- making our entire electoral system vulnerable to hackers.

Citing the comments from officials back in 2016 falsely telling America that our voting and tabulation systems are "never connected to the Internet" (they are), so can't be hacked (they can), Cohn tells me: "I'm very worried that we're going to be gaslit again in 2020. If the electronic totals somehow favor Trump, we're going to be told to pack up and go home there's nothing to see here, he just won, 'he's a legitimate president', period."

That year, even after Democrats promised "hundreds of attorneys" on the ground to assure a legitimate election (exactly as Joe Biden's campaign did again today), the DNC and Clinton Campaign refused to demand the hand-count of ballots in the three key states (MI, WI and PA) which barely flipped to the Republican candidate for the first time in decades. That, despite the fact that had an average of just two votes been recorded for Clinton instead of Trump in each precinct in those states that year, she, not he, would have won.

"What really concerns me is the blind spot that the Democratic Party seems to have for the electronic component of potential for cheating," says Cohn. She believes, however, that at least Clinton has learned her lesson. Based on a conversation she says she had with the 2016 Democratic candidate recently, Cohen tells me: "I do believe that Hillary Clinton understands it now, and I think she understands the importance of the Democrats not boxing themselves into a corner, where they will look like hypocrites if they need to file an election challenge based on the electronic totals, or any other aspect of the election."

Whether Clinton has enough power to convince the Biden Campaign and the rest of the Party of that, Cohn suggests, is a separate question.

Cohn, an attorney, election security advocate and Twitter activist, is calling for the modems cited in her video to be removed from the systems in states which use them before the November election. As journalist Kim Zetter reported last year, many of the election officials in those states don't even realize when their private election vendor has hooked their systems up to the Internet --- some of them she reports researchers discovered, are on the net all year around!

"I have no doubt that what the Trump team wants to do is win the electronic vote on Election Day, and then try to run out the clock or do something else with the [absentee ballot] signature match, so that we don't get all of them counted," she tells Cohn argues. "Or, if it goes to a recount, it gets shut down prematurely," she says, noting correctly that Vote-by-Mail ballots are also "sent to that electronic management system too."

Cohn also discusses some of her worst fears about this year's elections (and I share some of mine, several of which are similar, especially regarding electronic pollbooks which often have no paper backup) before we take a few phone calls from listeners on the topic, with Election Day now just 50 days away. "It's going to be ugly, no matter what the official result is," she says, noting: "My biggest concern --- the overarching concern that I think we both share --- is that there won't be any transparency about the results, and therefore we'll never really know."

Cohn has posted a bunch of helpful "Tips to Mitigate Threats to Our Votes and Voter Registrations Before November" that I'd urge you to check out and share as well, even though we didn't get time to discuss them. Just a good reason to have Jenny back. Please follow her on Twitter until then!...

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On today's BradCast, it was not a good day for those who believe in free, fair, honest, overseeable and safe democracy. On the other hand, it was a great day for Republicans! [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

We've got a boatload of court rulings from almost half a dozen states to try and make sense of today. A few of them are good. Most of them are not. But we've got some expert help in making sense of several of them, and she tells us the fight is nowhere near over.

We begin today with the breaking news out of Florida, where the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned a lower court ruling that had found the state's new "pay-to-vote" law constitutional. Apparently, the five new federal jurists that Donald Trump has added to the court all agreed, in a 6-4 ruling, that poll taxes are just fine by them. They approved the law enacted by the state's GOP legislature and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis last year that undermines Amendment 4 of the state constitution. That Amendment was adopted in a bipartisan, 65-35 percent landslide in 2018 to restore voting rights to as many as 1.5 million former felons in the state, including about one quarter of the state's voting age black men.

The law specifically passed to undermine Amendment 4 requires all court-imposed fines and fees to be payed before a former felon may register to vote. So, if you have enough money, you can vote. If you don't, too bad. Also, good luck to former felons even figuring out if they owe any money at all. Florida doesn't keep track. That means many newly eligible voters won't bother to register, rather than risk being sent back to jail for violating this new law. It was passed along partisan lines last year by Florida and is virtually identical to the 150-year old statute struck down just last week by a North Carolina state court. As revealed during the course of the NC suit, the law, according to its legislative champion following post-Civil War Reconstruction, was specifically adopted to "secure White Supremacy" by preventing "the honest vote of a white man" from being "off-set by the vote of some negro." Slate's legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern derides today's Florida ruling as "one of the most dishonest, misleading, and despicable voting rights opinions I have ever read" and "an affront of the very notion that Americans have a right to vote". The ACLU Voting Rights Project's attorney Julie Ebenstein argues "the gravity of this decision cannot be overstated," describing it as "counter to the foundational principle that Americans do not have to pay to vote" and "an affront to the spirit of democracy".

In another afront to democracy, Wisconsin's rightwing state Supreme Court on Thursday ordered the state's 1850 separate municipalities to immediately stop sending out absentee ballots to the, so far, about 1 million voters who have requested them. The court's 4 to 3 partisan ruling is meant to allow it's rightwing majority time to decide if the Green Party's Presidential ticket should be added to the ballot, despite the state Election Commission, in a deadlocked 3 to 3 vote, determining that the party's Presidential nominee Howie Hawkins and Vice Presidential Nominee Angela Walker did not receive enough signatures to qualify.

At issue is hundreds of petitions that listed the Milwaukee native Walker's address as a motel in South Carolina. Why the Party used two different addresses for Walker is unclear, but the result was the WI State Election Commission --- which the GOP state legislature recently created to replace the previous non-partisan commission with a partisan one built to create such deadlocks --- followed state law. That prevented the Greens from making the ballot. After a two week delay and 378,000 absentee ballots already mailed out, the Green Party decided to sue, even though election officials from across the state say their will be no time to design, print up, test and mail out out new ballots before both state and federal statutory deadlines require them to do so next week. They also have no idea how to avoid people voting twice with two separate ballots they may receive for the same election. So, chaos reigns yet again in the election in the key battleground state where Donald Trump is said to have won in 2016 by less than one single percentage point, when the Green candidate that year received more votes than Trump's margin over Hillary Clinton.

The voting news out of Texas this week is only slightly better. First, the good news: A federal judge there has ordered state election officials to notify voters within one day after a "perceived signature mismatch" is determined on absentee ballots, and to allow voters a "meaningful opportunity" to correct the issue. Previously, after officials, who are not handwriting experts, decided a signature was not a match to the voter's registration application (often years old), the ballot was simply rejected without notifying voters until 10 days after the election. In other good voting news from the Lone Star state, a state judge has determined that the Clerk in Harris County (Houston) is, in fact, allowed to send out absentee ballot applications to all registered voters in the nation's 4th largest city. The state's Republican Attorney General had sued to block the effort. I suspect he'll appeal, but we'll see.

But the war on voting in the Lone Star State doesn't stop with those two victories for democracy, unfortunately. The Mayor of Houston wants to know why more than a dozen local U.S. Post Offices have refused to allow volunteers from the non-partisan League of Women Voters to make multilingual voter registration materials available at those facilities.

And our guest today, COURTNEY HOSTETLER, Senior Counsel at the non-partisan Free Speech For People, joins us to explain the disappointing decision from a federal judge this week in response to a recent lawsuit filed by FSFP on behalf of Mi Familia Vota and the Texas NAACP seeking to address what the groups describe as "unsafe and unequal voting conditions" in the state during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The suit seeks a Preliminary Injunction in challenging the state's "insufficient number of polling places"; "its limited and inaccessible early voting locations"; a lack of social distancing requirements; Gov. Greg Abbot's statewide mask mandate which allows an exception for voters and pollworkers; and the dangerous "reliance on repeat-touch voting machines" amid the deadly pandemic, among other concerns. All of which, the complaint argues, "will result in unsafe voting conditions and increased risk of coronavirus transmission, which in turn will result in voter suppression." Moreover, as Hostetler explains today, "the health risks and adverse impact of these policies will place an undue burden on the right to vote and be borne disproportionately by voters of color, in violation of the U.S. Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law, and the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment."

Texas has some of the most restrictive absentee voting requirements in the nation, so the dangers at polling places --- in this case, unequal ones --- are no small matter. "The real crux of the Constitutional issues at stake here," Hostetler tells me, "is that people won't show up to vote because they can't risk getting COVID-19 and dying. They can't risk not being able to work for 3 weeks if they get it...This is what's at stake, and the burden is not shared equally in Texas. It's both unconstitutional and it violates the Voting Rights Act." She says the federal judge, rather than deciding the case on its merits, determined that the matter is a political one, rather than an issue to be decided by the courts. While the case is still live, the judge has denied the group's motion for a Preliminary Injunction, which likely pushes the matter back until after the election. But the groups today decided that they will file an appeal.

In Pennsylvania this week, a state court judge also ruled against a Motion for Preliminary Injunction in a similar suit filed by FSFP and the Pennsylvania NAACP "to establish safe and equal voting procedures for the upcoming general election." There too, the groups plan to appeal.

And in North Carolina, where FSFP filed a suit last April to block the use of new "insecure, unreliable, unverifiable, and unsafe" touchscreen voting machines with the NC NAACP, the groups late last week filed an appeal to the state Supreme Court after a lower court denied their original complaint.

The appeal is "alleging imminent risk to voters' right to free elections and equal protection under the laws if they are required to vote on the [ES&S] ExpressVote touch screen ballot marking device this November". The complaint, as we discussed with Hostletler last spring when it was initially filed, "alleges the new [touchscreeen] system is vulnerable to security threats and its results are unverifiable, in violation of the North Carolina Constitution’s guarantees of free and fair elections and equal protection of the law." She says that though this matter will no longer be decided before this year's election, "the case is still live, and we are ready and preparing to litigate this fully and pursue this case through trial, because it does have long term implications for the state of North Carolina, because these machines are utterly unreliable and unverifiable";

So, yeah, a rough week for those who favor voting, voting rights and free, fair and safe democracy. But, as Hostetler argues today: "Every time there's an effort to push back against free and fair elections, there are people who are saying 'No, I'm going to fight you on that." She urges voters to fight like hell to make sure that they cast their ballot this year and vote as safely as they can, while letting her group or others know when and if they run into barriers.

"Know that there are people across the country who are fighting to change these policies," she says. "Nobody is alone in this. There are a lot of people fighting, and we can always use more"...

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