We all woke up to atrocities on Sunday. In Ukraine and in Sacramento, California. Russian war crimes in Europe and another mass shooting in the U.S. On today's BradCast, we detail the atrocities in both places before turning to the fight for the only thing that still has a chance of stopping them: democracy. But we can't have democracy without voting systems the public can oversee, and that remains a huge problem, even in our own home county of Los Angeles. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

First up, some of the newly revealed, gruesome details and evidence of war crimes allegedly committed by fleeing Russian troops against Ukrainian civilians in newly liberated towns, villages and suburbs outside of Kyiv. Despite being witnessed by independent journalists and catalogued by outside watchdogs like Human Rights Watch, which describes some of the crimes as "unspeakable, deliberate cruelty and violence against Ukrainian citizens," including "rape, murder, and other violent acts," the Russian Government contends the charges are "fake" and little more than "stage-managed anti-Russian provocation." In response on Monday, President Biden reiterated his belief that Vladimir Putin is a "war criminal."

The gruesome body count in the U.S. also continued to mount over the weekend, as another mass shooting, this time in downtown Sacramento, left six dead and more than a dozen injured after "at least fifty rounds" were "fired right into the crowd" with high-powered weaponry during bustling Saturday night revelry, according to an eyewitness. That, just one day after Georgia's legislature passed a new law allowing concealed weapons to be carried pretty much anywhere without the need for a license. They are the 23rd state to do so. Our gun violence epidemic is getting worse, not better, as Republicans refuse to allow any action that might lessen America's shamefully continuing scourge.

But tyranny is not going to defeat itself. Not in Ukraine. Not in the U.S. To that end, we remain vigilant in our efforts to help the public try and oversee this year's critical mid-term elections. Unfortunately, problems with our un-overseeable and unverifiable voting systems continue into yet another election year in so-called "red" and "blue" states alike. While the GOP is actively undermining democracy with new voter suppression laws in "red" states, vulnerable electronic voting and tabulation systems remain a huge problem across the nation.

Back in 2020, Los Angeles County deployed a new, unverifiable touchscreen voting system called "Voting Solutions for All People" (or, VSAP) across the nation's most populous voting jurisdiction. Some ten years in development by the County's Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, the new touchscreen Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) failed spectacularly in that year's Super Tuesday Presidential Primary, leading to long lines and questions about the results. The VSAP system had been conditionally certified by the Secretary of State just weeks before their first county-wide use, after state testing discovered about 30 different violations of California Voting System Standards.

The County was required to correct the violations detailed in the Conditional Certification in the months following the election, though they failed to do so in many cases --- for years. Now, the County is seeking state certification of VSAP v3.0 but, according to our guests today, has still failed to correct a number of critical security issues that failed more than two years ago.

We're joined today to discuss these concerns in advance of California's June 7th mid-term primary elections by SUSAN GREENHALGH, Senior Advisor on Election Security at the non-profit Free Speech for People and by IAN PATTON of the Long Beach Reform Coalition (he is also now running for the Long Beach City Council). Both recently wrote a letter [PDF] to California Sec. of State Dr. Shirley Weber, detailing uncorrected security issues in the VSAP system and urging her to force L.A. County to fix them before issuing certification to the newly updated voting and counting system yet again.

We invited L.A. County's Registrar Dean Logan --- the VSAP system is his brainchild --- to join us as well, after his office recently described Greenhalgh's public testimony on her concerns about certification for VSAP 3.0 as "mis- and disinformation". In declining to join us today, Logan once again accused Greenhalgh and Patton of "mis-stating facts" and took a swipe at the election integrity advocates by smearing them as if they were part of Donald Trump's mob of conspiracists offering evidence-free claims of fraud since his loss in 2020. Logan charged the documented concerns detailed in Greenhalgh and Patton's memo to the Secretary "contributes to further the false narrative about elections integrity and transparency that is pervading the country."

For her part, Greenhalgh has been an expert in elections security, integrity and transparency for decades. Patton had represented the Long Beach Reform Coalition in a lawsuit against the VSAP systems long before Trump's 2020 sore loser act, when a ballot initiative in Long Beach failed by just 16 votes. After the Coalition raised tens of thousands of dollars to pay for a recount of that initiative, they were informed by Logan that the price would, in fact, be hundreds of thousands of dollars instead-- to count just a few thousand votes. The reason, as we reported at the time, is that the new VSAP system is deployed at Voting Centers across the County, which have replaced community precincts. That means that Long Beach voters may vote at any Voting Center in the County, where more than 4 million cast ballots in 2020. Logan attempted to charge the Coalition for the hours and hours it would have taken the county to cull through some 4 million ballots (computer-marked by VSAP and hand-marked by mail voters) in order to find the ones cast by Long Beach voters at any of the hundreds of Voting Centers in the County. Of course, this is just another problem with the Voting Center model, particularly in large counties like L.A. The ballot initiative that is said to have passed by 16 votes never did receive a hand recount to make sure the results were accurate.

Greenhalgh details the security vulnerabilities that remain in the VSAP system, despite state requirements that they be corrected by last year. She was also surprised to hear that Logan claimed in his email to us that "the VSAP 3.0 upgrade is over and it has been approved by the Secretary of State."

"I'm disappointed that the Secretary is not taking further action to enforce these requirements, to really require LA County to meet them," she tells us. "Also it hasn't been updated on the website, that it's already been approved. That's not public information yet." We'll just take Logan's word for it, I guess.

For his part, Patton explains the aborted recount effort in Long Beach ("I'm not a conspiracy theorist in any way," he notes. "We have never alleged a rigged election. We were just talking about the facts. The facts are this was an extremely close election, and we were just not allowed to have a hand count."); the fact that L.A.'s $300 million voting system was promised to be the nation's first open source system (but has yet to disclose any of its source code); and whether he feels confident that his election for City Council this year will be accurately tallied under the still-unverifiable and virtually unrecountable new systems.

"We can speak very factually and say that vulnerabilities don't equate to a stolen election," Greenhalgh asserts, before describing Logan's smears as "extremely disheartening." She described the comments as "a new low to hear somebody try to smear and tar real serious questions, real serious issues that need to be addressed. We still have serious security issues in our election systems that need to be fixed. We all need to pull together to fix them. And if we are having election officials refuse to address those problems by dismissing them improperly as mis- and dis-information, there's two problems with that: We're not going to actually fix the problems, but also we have a crisis of confidence in our election system right now. And when somebody in a position of power says something that is pretty easily proven to be false....they're not going to have a lot of confidence in his ability to run an election. And we can't afford that. He needs to be honest."

Logan never did cite any specific claims from Greenhalgh and Patton's concerns that he believed to be misinformation, despite my repeated query. He has a standing invitation to join us on the show any time to do so. Hiding behind false claims by rightwingers of "stolen elections" is unbecoming of a public official, particularly when the very specific concerns in question are legitimate and publicly well-documented.

There is much more discussed about all of this on today's show, and the concerns about similarly unverifiable touchscreen Ballot Marking Devices now in use across the country, along with the similarly problematic Voting Center model replacing community precincts in other counties and states.

California's primary this year is on June 7th. Cross your fingers that things work out. Good luck even being able to figure out afterward is they did or didn't...

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We've spent many years on The BradCast and at The BRAD BLOG explaining why touchscreen Ballot Marking Device (BMD) voting systems, like those used across the entire state of Georgia and in Los Angeles County, can never be known to accurately reflect the intent of any voter. We've also spent some time discussing why Voting Centers --- where voters in a county may vote at any center, rather than at their precinct --- may be convenient for voters, but are otherwise a terrible idea. As today's guest illustrates, those two terrible ideas came crashing down together at the expensive of election integrity and citizen oversight in a ballot measure election in Long Beach, California last November. And he's got the lawsuit and incredibly close election results to prove it. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

But, first up, the tragic stories from the COVID vaccine denier set, who are realizing --- only once it was too late --- that their denialism was, to say the least, ill-considered, continue to roll in. A state lawmaker in Missouri. A Trump-supporting couple in Sacramento. A rightwing radio host from Tennessee. A 34-year old anti-vaxxer in Los Angeles. Those who survived have come to regret their denialism. The families of those who didn't survive are now wishing their loved ones had taken their shots, and hope that you will do so now, if you haven't already.

The stories are tragic. But if continuing to tell them may help save a life, I'm happy to keep doing so on the air, as COVID spikes across the nation, almost entirely among the unvaccinated. That is thanks to the delta variant of the coronavirus and the 97% of the hospitalized who dreamt up all sorts of reasons to not take readily accessible and highly safe and effective vaccines. Many of their reasons for having failed to do so are based on misinformation spread by power hungry and/or ignorant politicians and personalities. The results are deadly and affect all of us, even the vaccinated.

In the meantime, thanks to the vaccine refuseniks, the vaccine mandates are now coming. Not a moment too soon. In New York City. In California. At the federal Dept. of Veterans Affairs.

Then, we've spent years reporting on California's election recount laws. In one sense, they are very good in that they allow any voter in the state to request a hand-count of any race, in any precinct or precincts they like, as long as they pay for it. (They are refunded if the count reverses the certified results.) But the law also allows each county Registrar of Voters to determine the price for those counts. As we've reported over and again for the past 15 years or more, the state law results in County Clerks arbitrarily and capriciously setting prices to pretty much anything they like, with a huge disparity among counties. It may cost a few cents per ballot to hand-count in Orange County, while Los Angeles is now charging well over two dollars per ballot.

The price in L.A. County, set by Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, has just sky-rocketed, thanks to Logan's new touchscreen voting systems and the ill-considered use of Vote Centers that allow voters to vote at any Center they like, rather than the old precinct model of voting. One of the many problems with Voting Centers is that they make it almost impossible for Election Integrity advocates and the public in general to oversee tallies to ensure they are accurate and ballots are not stuffed into the boxes.

Another problem became crystal clear when the City of Long Beach held a ballot referendum last November to extend a city sales tax. The initiative, Measure A, passed by just 16 votes out of some 100,000 cast. When a group of citizens who opposed the measure sought a recount (California has no automatic recount law, no matter how small the margin, and though Logan could have chosen to recount it himself, he did not), they were in for a shock.

The County Clerk's handbook published before the election suggested that the count would cost them around $50,000, which they raised to pay for the count. That was before Logan informed them, just before the hand recount was to begin, that the cost would actually be closer to the $200,000 range, putting any kind of oversight out of reach to the local activists.

Why the change in pricing? Thanks to Vote Centers, ballots cast across L.A.'s county of some 4 million voters, are not sorted by precinct, even though state law requires that recounts be done by precinct. That means the County must spend HOURS sorting through millions of ballots to find the ones that included Long Beach's Measure A. Logan, who developed both the new touchscreen systems and the Vote Center model here, is charging the recount requesters for those hours, due to his failure to create an overseeable, sorted system of ballot tracking.

We're joined today by IAN PATTON, co-founder and executive director of the Long Beach Reform Coalition, to explain what happened, why the group was forced to call off their request for a recount, and why they are now suing the County instead, to charge them the original price they had expected to pay.

"This has been really eye-opening to me. Like waking up out of a slumber to a nightmare," Patton, who used to work as a staffer in Congress tells me today. "A paper trail is useless if you can't actually count it."

As the Long Beach Press-Telegram suggests in its reporting on this, the "Future of LA County election recounts could hinge" on this suit. It will be heard next month. But the future of Vote Centers, not just in Los Angeles, but across the country, where a number of jurisdictions are moving to them or considering the model, could also be affected by what goes on in L.A., the nation's most populous county...

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Well, the good news on today's BradCast, is that he won't be California's Secretary of State anymore. [Audio link to show follows below summary.]

Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced he is appointing his long time friend, CA Sec. of State Alex Padilla, to fill the seat being vacated in the U.S. Senate by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. The ambitious Padilla has risen up through the ranks of CA politics, from the Los Angeles City Council to the State Senate to becoming a twice-elected SoS, and now to his appointment to the U.S. Senate. He will serve out the rest of Harris' term through 2022 as the state's first Latino Senator.

In his official announcement today, the Governor detailed a long list of accomplishments by Padilla during his career in the Golden State. In turn, we share a number of Padilla's disturbing failures both before and during his tenure as SoS, as we have covered at The BRAD BLOG over the years. In 2013, for example, while he was still a state Senator, we highlighted Padilla's dishonest and misleading campaign for a major election reform bill (SB 360) which ended the long-standing requirement for federal testing and approval of new voting systems in the state and transferred sole power for certification testing and approval of new systems to the SoS. As it happens, Padilla was the leading candidate for the office at the time and eventually became SoS in 2014.

In selling the measure to the public and the media --- it was eventually passed along partisan lines in the CA legislature and signed by then-Governor Jerry Brown --- Padilla claimed the bill was needed to allow counties in the state to create and own their own voting systems. "Allowing counties to develop, own and operate voting systems will increase voter confidence in the integrity of our elections," he told the public. The remarks echoed his early announcement of the bill [PDF] in which he deceptively explained that "A public voting system will be more transparent, instill public trust and be more accountable than our current systems."

At the time, Los Angeles County had been developing a new, 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting system. It was finally implemented (disastrously) for the first time this year. What Padilla failed to make clear in his deceptive sale of SB 360 was that L.A. County had already owned its current voting system at the time, and didn't need the radical new measure to do so. While Padilla's office had initially asked for our input on SB 360, they stopped communicating with us entirely once we asked about his dishonest sales pitches.

Moreover, after 10 years in development, when L.A.'s new, $300+ million voting system was found to be in violation of more than 40 California Voting System Standards late last year, Padilla certified it for use anyway, rather than simply mandating verifiable hand-marked paper ballots for every voter in the nation's most-populous County. The first roll-out of L.A.'s Padilla-approved "Voting Solutions for all People" (VSAP) system was a disaster during this year's March 3rd Super Tuesday primaries. Problems cited by testers (but ignored by Padilla) contributed to long lines for voters that stretched, in some cases, until after midnight. The same failed systems were again re-certified for use in the general election, though they fared better overall with much less use after the Governor mandated absentee ballots to be sent to all registered voters in the state during the pandemic.

Those are just some of the concerns that Election Integrity advocates in the state have had about Padilla. But the good news is that he'll likely be a reliable Democratic place-holder vote in the U.S. Senate while, perhaps, a more competent Sec. of State can be named to replace him in the Golden State. We'll see.

Also today, Rita Hart, Iowa's Democratic former state Senator and 2020 U.S. House candidate in the state's 2nd Congressional District, filed an election challenge in the House under the Federal Contested Elections Act. Iowa certified Hart's Republican opponent, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, as the winner of the open seat by just 6 votes out of nearly 400,000 cast in the November election. Hart's contest, however, notes that at least 22 legally cast votes for her were wrongly excluded from the final tally, including many which state election officials agree were lawfully cast but excluded from the count because they were discovered after the initial canvass. State law bars the inclusion of such ballots in the final tallies. She also argues that the state recount which narrowed the margin from 47 votes to 6 --- and included a number of major counting errors along the way --- was unconstitutionally conducted, as the 24 counties of the District used disparate counting methods. Some used machines, others hand-counted, others used a combination of both. She is seeking a full, uniform hand-count by the Government Accountability Office and hopes to eventually be seated by the Democratic-majority U.S. House Administration Committee under the Act. The investigation is likely to take months.

In other elections-related news today, rightwing propaganda outlet Newsmax joined fellow rightwing propaganda outlet Fox "News" on Monday by attempting to walk back their false assertions regarding the private elections vendors Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems. The two competing vendors have been targeted with baseless, evidence-free claims by Team Trump attorneys and others from the MAGA Mob --- which have been shared and parroted by both outlets, as well as One America News (OAN). Last week, Smartmatic sent a legal threat, demanding retraction for the outlets' claims that Smartmatic was involved with Dominion in a worldwide conspiracy --- with Venezuela and its dead President Hugo Chavez, China, Cuba, the Clinton Foundation and George Soros, among others --- to flip the results of the election and steal it from Donald Trump in several swing-states. As we explained recently, the baseless allegations are taken, in part, from my own accurate investigative exclusives about the ownership of Dominion and Smartmatic from more than a decade ago.

In response to the possibility of facing a defamation lawsuit, over the weekend Fox "News" ran a bizarre, three-minute segment on shows hosted by rightwing conspiracists Lou Dobbs, Janine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo, featuring a disembodied voice asking questions of Eddie Perez of the Open Source Election Technology foundation. Perez, who has recently been a guest on our show, is seen denying largely all of the claims that the wingnut outlets have been making to advance Trump's false claims that he won the election.

On Monday, Newsmax joined Fox by running its own version of an attempted retraction, to "clarify" that, in fact, they have absolutely no evidence to support myriad claims the stations has aired regarding Smartmatic and Dominion during the weeks since Election Day. The "clarification" will supposedly run across all Newsmax shows, according to its CEO and longtime Trump supporter, Chris Ruddy. Given that Smartmatic has hired one of the nation's top defamation attorneys --- who won a case for $177 million in 2017 --- its little wonder that both outlets are now running very scared. We'll see if OAN buckles soon as well, in the face of someone attempting to hold them accountable for countless lies meant to undermine our democratic system in support of Trump's attempt to steal the election from Joe Biden and the American people.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our last Green News Report of 2020! As Biden-Harris round out their historic climate team nominations; long-overdue climate legislation is included along with Congress' long-overdue COVID emergency relief package; and as the Trump Administration triumphantly ends the tyranny of efficient showerheads....

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On today's BradCast: We make short work (for now) of several breaking news stories from over the weekend and into today. Then its straight on to our main story today, which you will hear nowhere else in the media. [Audio link to today's full show is posted below summary.]

In January, we broke the news here on The BRAD BLOG and The BradCast that Los Angeles County's brand-new, unverifiable, $300 million, 10-years-in-development touchscreen polling place voting system had failed to meet more than 40 different California Voting System Standards, according to independent certification testers hired by CA's Secretary of State Alex Padilla. Despite critical security issues that alarmed voting system and cybersecurity experts, the machines were nonetheless "conditionally certified" by Padilla just prior to the March 3rd Super Tuesday primary in the state. The new machines (known as Ballot Marking Devices or BMDs) and the electronic pollbooks that are required to work with them, both failed spectacularly. Voters were disenfranchised by the "Voting Solutions for All People" or VSAP system, as many across the nation's most populous voting jurisdiction were either turned away or forced to wait for hours in line to vote.

It was well after midnight before all of those still in line finally cast their votes on Super Tuesday. It was, of course, impossible to know if any of those votes were tallied as per any voter's intent, because BMD systems print out a computer-marked paper ballot which may or may not reflect the actual intent of any voter. It's impossible to know if results are accurate in any election that uses BMDs for the majority of voters. Recent studies [PDF] find that more than 90% of voters do not notice when a BMD has misprinted one or more of their votes on the paper printout.

After the March 3rd disaster in L.A. (which we had warned about long in advance, to little interest from media or public officials, even from the L.A. County Supervisors, much less Sec. Padilla) the system's brainchild, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, was allowed a mulligan. He promised to fix what didn't work before the November election and told us all to simply trust him. Next time would be better. Many in the media then lost whatever interest they had as it was just weeks after Super Tuesday that COVID pandemic struck hard.

Well, now Padilla has recently posted the new certification testing results from Logan's mulligan, VSAP 2.1. The results do not inspire confidence, as many of the same problems with the system originally --- such as paper jams and misprinted QR Codes {PDF] --- still exist, according to testers. Now Padilla must decide in the next two weeks whether or not to certify them again. In truth, he has little choice as Early Voting is now just weeks away. While the state's decision to send every active voter a Vote-by-Mail ballot may help to ease many of the potential log jams at the county's new Voting Centers, ballots cast on the new systems --- as opposed to verifiable hand-marked paper absentee ballots --- are still vulnerable to manipulation and can never been known to reflect voter intent after the polls close.

However, there are some things that Padilla could require to be done to mitigate some of the worst dangers of the system if it is to be used for this year's critical November election. Several dozen election integrity and activist groups, along with a number of esteemed cybersecurity and voting systems experts, recently signed on to an excellent public letter led by the California Clean Money Campaign, demanding Padilla implement a number of the mitigations before certifying the updated voting systems.

We're joined today by LULU FRIESDAT, co-founder of SmartElections.us and ROBIN GIBSON, longtime Los Angeles Election Integrity advocate, to discuss those potential mitigations and the one-and-only public comments hearing held today online before Padilla's pending decision to certify. They report that Padilla did not bother to attend, though Logan, apparently, came by near the end of the session to claim that everything is now working fine. "Our registrar got on the call and dismissed two hours of worried voters, and said he had tests that said it was fine," Gibson explained. "It was like 'I win, nah, nah, nah.'"

As Friesdat and Gibson explain, the citizen advocates and experts are asking in their letter for the ballot boxes attached to each touchscreen tablet system to be removed, so that the computer-printed ballots don't have to pass back through the same printer heads after they've been (theoretically) verified by each voter. Experts warn [PDF] that sending the ballot back through the same printer path after verification is a major security risk, allowing the system to change voters votes, without their knowledge, after they have supposedly already approved their printed ballot. Instead, the group is urging that the attached ballot boxes be removed, and that ballots be deposited manually by voters into a separate ballot box at the polling place, for tabulation later.

The group is also asking Padilla to do away with the unverifiable QR Codes that are printed on each ballot. It is that code --- which can't be verified as accurate by any voter --- that is actually read by the optical-scan computer tabulators to tallly each ballot, rather than the human-readable text print out that voters may or may not have verified! "It is not secure to have the vote encoded in a QR code," Friesdat joins cybsersecurity experts in warning.

Moreover, the groups are calling for real, hand-marked paper ballots to be made available to any and all voters at Voting Centers for voters smart enough to want to cast a verifiable vote. "This is basic," Friesdat insists. "Hand-marked paper ballots are the gold standard that security experts recommend. It's not hard to provide them, and voters should be encouraged to use hand-marked paper ballots if they're able to mark by hand."

They also uge Padilla and Logan to finally release the source code to this supposedly County-owned and developed system. The money appropriated by tax-payers was done on the basis, advanced by both Padilla and Logan, that it would be a fully "open source" system, 100% publicly owned. All of that is also important because elections officials in other states and counties across the country have expressed interest in adopting this exact system if it ever actually works in L.A.

Friesdat and Gibson detail many of their own concerns, as well as others who offered public comment today before we open up the phone lines to listener questions about this terrible new system, just 64 days before Election Day and mere weeks before early voting is set to begin in Los Angeles County...

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We kick off today's BradCast on a somber, if hopefully inspiring note, on the passing of civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis who died on Friday after a battle with cancer. His decades-long fight for voting rights --- and the call to cause "good trouble, necessary trouble" --- has been an inspiration to this show and our work at BradBlog.com for many years. The best tribute we can offer to Rep. Lewis, of course, is to continue his fight as best we can. And so we do once again today. [Audio link to full show follows below.]

More than 100k absentee/Vote-by-Mail (VBM) ballots were rejected by election officials in the state of California after its March 3rd Super Tuesday primary, according to a new AP analysis. Many of the rejections were due to voter error, though not all. Some were also due perceived mismatched or missing signatures and a to a too-short statutory deadline (3 days) for VBM ballots to arrive after Election Day. The state has now increased that time to 17 days for ballots postmarked by Election Day to be included in the final tally.

But, of course, various problems with VBM is why in-person polling places remain very necessary in CA and all states this year, even with expanded mail-in voting during the COVID crisis. That is true even in the Golden State, which will be sending VBM ballots directly to all active registered voters this year because of the pandemic. Here in Los Angeles County, however --- the nation's most populous voting jurisdiction --- the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan has said that, for in-person voting, he will stick with the County's new, horribly failed $300 million unverifiable touchscreen voting and electronic pollbook system this November, despite the disasters that resulted in 3, 4, and 5 hour lines to vote and an untold number of disenfranchised voters during the system's first county-wide use on March 3rd.

I discussed the decision by Logan to use L.A. voters, once again, as guinea pig beta testers this November, during the most critical election of our lifetimes, in a segment late last month on CBS2-LA News with investigative reporter David Goldstein. Incredibly, CA's Democratic Sec. of State Alex Padilla and the L.A. County Board of Supervisors have all apparently agreed to allow the failed system --- called "Voting Solutions For All People" or VSAP --- another try on November 3rd. What could possibly go wrong?

An L.A. County Civil Grand Jury --- which has also been investigating the VSAP failure --- thinks a lot could go wrong. The group's report on the VSAP failures [PDF] by both Logan and Padilla, entitled "Maybe I Voted?", demands answers from Registrar Logan as well as the state. Goldstein, who has been closely following the VSAP mess since a few weeks before the March 3rd election, followed up by covering the "scathing" L.A. Grand Jury report and called me once again to appear in that follow-up report on CBS2-LA as well.

Meanwhile, a group of Election Integrity advocates in the state sent an open letter [PDF] late last week to Gov. Gavin Newsom (and Sec. of State Padilla), seeking an Executive Order for important improvements to the state's 1% post-election audit process. We're joined today by RAY LUTZ, longtime Election Integrity advocate and the founder and Executive Director of CitizensOversight.org. His organization won a ruling in a lawsuit several years ago that would have required all Vote-by-Mail ballots to be included as part of the pool from which the random sample of ballots are drawn when determining which of them will be hand-counted after an election to assure the accuracy of the state's computerized optical-scan ballot tabulators.

When Lutz filed suit in San Diego after the 2016 election, that County's Registrar, Michael Vu, was drawing only from votes cast at the precinct or absentee ballots that were counted early for inclusion in the 1% post-election spot check. As the groups notes in their press release [PDF] announcing the letter to Newsom, that resulted in some 285,000 ballots that were automatically excluded from the mandatory "audit" in 2016. Lutz' win in the courts, however, was short-lived after Padilla (with support from L.A. County's Logan) lobbied the CA state legislator to specifically allow Registrar's to ignore late mail-in ballots all together during post-election audits. Leaving those ballots out of the audit, Lutz argues, means that nefarious actors "can just move ballots --- ten thousand, twenty thousand at a time --- from one candidate to another and no one would be the wiser because they wouldn't have that check." That, he says, is a virtual roadmap for election theft.

His group's letter asks the Governor to declare that all ballots should be included in the potential audit sample pool in this November's elections, particularly now that some 90% of votes are likely to be cast as mail-in ballots for the first time this year, due to the Governor's previous Executive Order to send VBM ballots to all this year.

Moreover, Lutz echoes frequent BradCast guest Marilyn Marks of the Coalition for Good Governance (which is suing Georgia to force hand-marked paper ballots for all) in her important tweeted concerns last night observing that both major political parties are utterly failing to ensure proper public oversight of absentee ballot handling and tabulation. Marks complained that Elections officials across the country (and definitely in Georgia!) are "working overtime to block transparency, block access, block observation, work[ing] behind closed doors, etc. This, of course, plays into Trump's hands in that if he wants to claim 'rigging,' the Dems will have little evidence documented to rebut the claim."

Lutz agrees with her thinking. California is "not a battleground state," he says, "but remember, the popular vote is always a big issue in the Presidential election. And as you remember last time, Trump made a big deal about 'illegal voter fraud' and all these 'million illegals are voting'. So we have to have our act together for this election to defend against those claims. If we do what we're doing now, we're going to have up to six million ballots that are completely unaudited and can be flipped. Six million votes is a lot. So we need to have this change."

The issue, he goes on to explain, is not only important in California. "Any state that expands their vote-by-mail or absentee voting right now probably is not auditing those ballots." Lutz points listeners to the letter to Newsom, suggesting others push for similar improvements to post-election audits in other states as well, given that, as bad as CA's processes are, they are still better than many states where no computer-tallied votes are ever examined by any human beings at all before election results are certified. "We can't rely upon the election officials, or really anyone, to do this job for us," he argues. "The public has to do its own oversight of its elections. No one can be trusted. We have to do it ourselves. This is where we really call on the citizenry to stand up and really take a look at this. Because the most important thing we can do is to make sure these elections are sound."

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On today's BradCast: We're gonna need a bigger front page in this country, given all the huge news that only served to cancel out all of the other huge news this weekend. All of which, we suspect, is just the way Donald Trump likes it. But don't worry. The most important news of the weekend --- the first failed attempt and second successful attempt by corrupt U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr to fire the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (likely unlawfully) is the eventual focus of today's show, with our guest, a former Deputy Asst. Attorney General herself. [Audio link to show is posted at end of summary.]

But first, some of that other news that only served to crowd out all that other other news over the weekend. After a few quick words and warnings about tomorrow's primary elections in New York and Kentucky (expect very long lines) and some new news on Los Angeles County's new and already failed touchscreen voting and electronic pollbook system (which we'll have to offer in detail on another day), we take a look at the still burgeoning COVID-19 crisis. Despite Trump's attempts to pretend it away, infection rates are still increasing in at least 23 states, holding steady in 10, and only decreasing in 17 --- if, in fact, it's actually even decreasing in those states. All of this after many states reopened for business far earlier than health experts advised would be safe.

Then its on to Donald Trump's embarrassingly fizzled return to the campaign trail on Saturday, when his campaign's promise of more than 1,000,000 tickets registered for his "Great American Comeback Celebration" rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, turned into just over 6,000 supporters at the indoor venue/coronavirus super-spreader event. The arena was barely half full, if that. Trump was reportedly furious, according to much of the brutal news coverage of his rambling, nearly two-hour remarks on Saturday, during which he admitted that he told his "people, 'Slow the testing down, please!'" Yes, the President of the United States, during a global pandemic, actually ordered his staff to try and test fewer people for the deadly disease in hopes that it might make him look like less of a failure. It has done just the opposite.

It also did not help the 6 members of his own campaign advance team in Tulsa who tested positive for COVID just before the event, or the two that have tested positive since. We should have expected as much from the guy who told reporters last week that "over one million people" were planning to attend and that "we expect to have like a record setting crowd. We've never had an empty seat and we certainly won't in Oklahoma." Even as he boarded the helicopter on the way to the Tulsa event Saturday, he lied to reporters that the "crowds are unbelievable" in Oklahoma. "They haven't seen anything like it." The operative word there is "unbelievable."

All of that, however, helped to obscure the remarkably corrupt and seemingly unprecedented events that took place very late Friday night when AG Barr falsely announced that Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, had resigned. Turned out he hadn't, and he said as much in a stunning statement minutes later, declaring that he'd only learned of his own "resignation" via Barr's press release.

Berman, a 2016 Trump Campaign donor and member of his Transition team, said he refused to step down until he was replaced by a Senate-confirmed nominee. Since he was not appointed by the President, but by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (the Senate would have had trouble approving him), he cannot be removed by firing without cause. According to law, a USA appointed by the courts can only be replaced by a Senate-confirmed nominee. Berman's U.S. Attorney's office at SDNY is known for its independence from Main Justice. It has prosecuted allies of Trump and was believed to be investigating more of them, including Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the Trump Organization itself. After Berman's brief overnight stand against Barr, he agreed to stand down on Saturday morning, after he said Barr agreed to allow Berman's Deputy to replace him as Acting USA (as is the normal practice), rather than install the U.S. Attorney from New Jersey (as Barr had announced in his false statement on Friday), which is decidedly not normal practice.

Yes, the Barr/Trump authoritarian strongman move is all at least as corrupt and unprecedented as it sounds. Thus, we are joined today by a guest with no small amount of insight into just how wildly corrupt and unprecedented all of this is. LISA GRAVES is a former Deputy Asst. AG at the U.S. Justice Dept., a former Chief Counsel for nominations in the U.S. Senate. She is also a former Deputy Chief for the US Court system. She is now Founder of True North Research, a good government watchdog group "researching the forces distorting our democracy."

Graves describes the Barr/Trump/Berman mess as "a debacle in terms of rule law." Ironic, she notes, coming from a man claming to be running for re-election as the "Law and Order President".

"This all smells. It reeks," she tells me. "It's really a terrible crisis for the Department of Justice, for the US Attorney's office in New York, and for the very rule of law. You cannot have a President who fires people who are investigating him or who are investigating his associates. You have to have a President who is as far away as possible from even appearing to interfere in that sort of investigation or any investigation that might touch on him."

As to what can be done about it and whether or not Barr actually broke the law himself with his initial attempt to remove Berman --- and whether Trump actually fired him on Saturday morning, as Barr contends (only to be contradicted by Trump himself) --- and who would prosecute Barr if, in fact, he did violate the law...well, you'll have to tune in to find out what Graves says about all of that and whether we will ever be able to restore justice to the Department of Justice after Donald Trump is eventually gone...

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On March 3rd's Super Tuesday primary elections, Los Angeles County's new, $300 million, 100% unverifiable touchscreen Ballot Marking Device (BMD) voting systems and electronic pollbooks failed catastrophically. The disaster resulted in hours-long lines to vote at new Voting Centers in the nation's most populous voting jurisdiction leaving untold thousands unable to cast a vote at all.

It was all completely predictable. In fact, I had been predicting --- and warning --- about such a disaster like that with this system, dubbed Voting Solutions for All People (or VSAP) by the County, for pretty much the entirety of the 10 years it had been in development.

Few seemed to care until just before the March election, after we reported that the system had failed certification testing by the state on more than 40 points.

Following the March 3rd disaster, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, pretending to be furious about it, ordered L.A. County's Registrar-Record/County Clerk Dean Logan (the system's brainchild, who stopped coming on The BradCast or even answering any of my questions about the new system in the months before Election Day), to investigate himself and create a report on what when wrong and what needs to be done about it.

Logan's 135-page report is posted here [PDF].

In short, it says: "Here's what we think went wrong and here's how we're gonna fix it for next time. We'll take care of it by November 3rd. Trust us! Just like you did last time!"

What it should say, is: "We're sorry. We screwed up. We wasted $300 million in tax-payer dollars, so we're gonna trash the incredibly complicated, flawed, and wholly unverifiable voting system and vulnerable electronic pollbooks that disenfranchised thousands of L.A. voters on March 3rd, restore the thousands of precincts we foolishly shut down in favor of 'Voting Centers', and move back to a simple, inexpensive, verifiable hand-marked paper ballot system at all community-accessible polling places for this year's critical general election."

Why the L.A. County Board of Supervisors isn't now demanding that, I couldn't tell you. Why California Sec. of State Alex Padilla isn't demanding the same, I couldn't tell you either. Except that all of them had been all-in for years with Logan on the new VSAP system. Nobody, apparently, is accountable for anything.

Instead, L.A. County voters will once again serve as guinea pig beta testers for Logan's obscenely expensive, already-failed new computer voting system during another LIVE election again this year, which just happens to arguably be the most critical in the nation's history. What could possibly go wrong?

One saving grace may be that the Governor has ordered all active registered voters to be mailed absentee ballots before this November's election due to the COVID-19 crisis.

In the week's prior to the March 3rd election, I was interviewed by CBS2-LA's David Goldstein about the new system. When he asked me how much confidence voters should have in it, I answered bluntly: "None." Logan was also interviewed in the same report and was asked the same question. His answer: "Voters can have a great deal of confidence."

You can decide who called that one correctly. Goldstein called me up again on Thursday afternoon to ask me to join him for a quick follow-up interview via FaceTime regarding Logan's postmortem report on what went wrong. CBS2 ran their follow-up report on Thursday night. Their story is now here. Goldstein's follow-up video report from last night's 6:00 news is posted below. (He called me just before airtime for my radio show, so please pardon the lack of shaving and really bad iPhone sound on my end!)...

On today's BradCast: Tuesday's horrific election meltdown in Georgia didn't have to happen. We have been reporting and warning about exactly the disaster that occurred during the state's primary elections for well over a year on this program. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

Our guest today, MARILYN MARKS of the non-partisan, non-profit Coalition for Good Governance, has been filing both state and federal litigation for years in hopes of blocking the use of the new, unverifiable, touchscreen voting system implemented by GA's Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger for this year's critical Presidential election. For years, she has been joining us on the show --- as she does again today --- to warn about the now-failed systems, month after month, as the Secretary moved forward with his Big Government mandate to force all counties in the state to switch to the new, dangerous, computerized voting systems.

One county (Athens-Clarke), whose County Board of Elections voted in March to use hand-marked paper ballots instead of Raffensperger's $104 million touchscreens, was threatened with fines and legal action by the Secretary if they refused to use his new systems made by Dominion Voting, a Canadian company whose lobbyist in Georgia was the Chief of Staff for the former Sec. of State, now Governor Brian Kemp. Raffensperger's strong-arming did the trick. The County used the disease-vector touchscreens on Tuesday along with all of the others.

The multiple failures of the electronic pollbook computers and computerized touchscreen Ballot Marking Devices and optical-scan computers used at every polling place in the state resulted in hours-long lines for voters throughout the day. Precincts in 20 counties were ordered by courts to remain open for hours past their scheduled closing time, with the last voter reportedly casting a vote at 12:37am on Wednesday.

The shameful story in Georgia is very similar to the disaster that occurred here in Los Angeles County during the March 3rd Super Tuesday election this year, after County officials failed to heed our warnings about their new $300 million touchscreen voting and electronic pollbook system that similarly crashed and burned on Election Day and resulted in the disenfranchisement of untold numbers of voters.

"Maybe it is the nature of the beast," Marks laments today. "It seems like in all matters of civil rights, things have to get to such an extreme that disaster has to happen, maybe multiple times, before society can pay attention." While there has been quite a bit of media coverage of Georgia's disaster today, where were they when their coverage might have made a difference before voters lost their right to vote?

As to who is to blame, Raffensperger still refuses to take any responsibility whatsoever. He blames county poll workers for being poorly trained to operate his needlessly complex systems. Like Donald Trump, Raffensperger takes no responsibility for what went wrong, despite being responsible for forcing all counties to use the new system. In fact, he told Georgia Public Radio yesterday, as voters were lined up for blocks and blocks (and blocks) in the blazing Georgia heat and humidity and thunderstorms to try and cast their vote, that it was "a good day for Georgia". He actually described the primary as "a great success."

Marks sees it differently, as does most of the world. "Ninety percent of this problem was caused by Raffensperger and the State Election Board, because they insisted that the state and the counties use the very complex, Rube Goldberg systems that nobody had been trained on, that hadn't been properly tested, shoving them in during pandemic conditions when they could have simply used the scanner and hand-marked paper ballots, and a paper pollbook, and had a simple election during pandemic conditions," she says. "The Secretary of State insisted on this roll-out. And gave the counties almost no choice. They could have defied him, and he would likely have fined them. He set them up for failure."

Marks, whose earlier lawsuit resulted in Georgia's previous touchscreen voting system being found unconstitutional in federal court, with the judge ordering that they could never be used against in the Peach State, has a continuing federal complaint against the new system. She tells me she expects to be back in court soon. "Before, the State was claiming that all of our claims were just speculative. Well, you know what? They're not speculative anymore. We have fabulous evidence --- horrendous evidence --- that this system does not create an accountable election."

A registered Republican, Marks says it is not too late for Georgia to change course before November, though the court may have to force them to do so. She also cautions about similar unnecessarily complex and already-failed new computer voting systems being used in other states --- including battleground states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina --- instead of verifiable hand-marked paper ballots for this year's critical Presidential election. Since the corporate media are unlikely to make the necessarily noise before the next election disaster --- when it might be preventable --- Marks suggests voters can take action on their own to demand hand-marked paper ballots and paper pollbooks (as backup to the e-pollbooks).

"Write a letter to your Secretary of State and State Election Board, and demand it," she advises. "Something that is likely to be more effective, even though it's harder --- it's going to take some effort for voters to actually protect their elections --- is call every member of your county's bipartisan election board. You can find them because they're local citizens. Say 'You've got authority, County Election Board! We want an auditable election! We want it done with hand-marked paper ballots, and we want audits afterward. Don't wait for the state to tell you that you have to audit. Don't wait for a judge to tell you that you have to have accountable ballots. Do it on your own. Do it now, while you have time to do it!'" She argues "these counties need the pressure from the citizens, and the citizens need to put pressure on the county boards as well as the local Democratic Party and local Republican Party."

As we've said many times, this democracy ain't gonna save itself!

Next --- speaking of things that take years of disaster before they are ever reformed --- Philonise Floyd, the younger brother of George Floyd, the unarmed African-American killed by cops in Minneapolis two weeks ago, testified to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee today. We share his emotional opening statement calling on Congress to help "stop the pain" at a hearing meant to discuss a Democratic initiative in Congress for sweeping change to the nation's policing policies. As you might imagine, they are meeting Republican resistance in both chambers of Congress.

Finally today, more change in the wake of Floyd's killing: NASCAR announced today that it will ban the Confederate Flag from its events, and Donald Trump ends up firmly on the wrong side of history --- again --- as he declared he would "not even consider" renaming U.S. military bases, such as Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, which are named for Confederate Army officers. That, despite their namesake's support of slavery and their treason in launching a war against the United States, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead Americans. While Pentagon officials, including Trump's own Defense Secretary, have said they are open to the idea, and a host of retired generals --- including the commanders of some of the 10 bases named for Confederate traitors --- favor renaming the military posts, Trump insisted on Twitter today, without any apparent irony, that the bases are a part of "a history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom."

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I might have headlined this show "See? I told ya so!", except Rush Limbaugh ruined that phrase for all of us years ago. On today's BradCast: The Administration's persistent lies about coronavirus and Trump's pressure to "open" the country long before we should (since he's failed to marshal any national plan whatsoever for broad testing and contact tracing) will result in tens of thousands of more deaths than necessary. But we told you so long ago. Meanwhile, more evidence is in to prove Los Angeles County's new, $300,000,000 touchscreen voting systems was a disaster for voters (but we told you so there as well, long ago) even though Bernie Sanders was finally, officially, announced the winner of the California Presidential Primary --- two months after it was held on Super Tuesday. [Audio link to full show is posted at end of summary.]

As we have been warning, there is currently no good reason to throw open the doors for business amid the coronavirus pandemic, other than Donald Trump really thinks that doing so will improve the economy and his chances of winning re-election. But Trump's Fantasy World beliefs that it is safe to do so are belied by more and more evidence in both this country and around the world --- and even from his own Administration's unreleased figures. The New York Times today reports on private projections by FEMA and the CDC that the daily death rate in the U.S. could reach as high as 3,000 deaths by June 1, particularly with the loosening of restrictions around the country by mostly Republican Governors. Perhaps that's one reason Trump, on Sunday, conceded that the death rate could reach 100,000 in the coming weeks after telling us just two weeks ago that he excepted about half that many deaths, around 50,000.

But, as health and science experts have been at pains to try and tell us, nothing has actually changed to make opening up any safer now that it was back in March, when the epidemic caught fire in the U.S. In fact, infection rates have been spiking in many areas, particularly in rural regions of the country. The newly unearthed FEMA/CDC docs forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of this month in the U.S., as compared to the current rate of about 25,000 confirmed new infections per day.

New statistics coming in from countries around the world which have begun opening up their economies again, show the number of infections and deaths beginning to spike there again. And today, the model at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) has been revised. Their previous projections of an estimated 70,000 U.S. deaths by August has now been doubled to nearly twice number that at 135,000, due, they announced, to relaxed social distancing and increased mobility. The IHME model has long been used by the White House and others, and we have long told you that it was extremely conservative in its projections. (So, again, yeah, told ya so.) Even a Republican Governor, Mississippi's Tate Reeves, wisely decided late Friday to hold back for the moment on the further loosening of restrictions in his state. The announcement cane during a press conference where he had originally planned to do so. That, due to a spike in the state's infection and death rate after he lifted some restrictions prematurely on April 24.

All told, that's a helluva lotta dead Americans piling up all so that Trump and Republicans can try to stay in power.

In related news, we have a quick follow-up today on a new poll we covered last week that found Joe Biden leading Donald Trump in Texas(!) by 1 point, essentially a tie. As we mentioned last week, that poll from Public Policy Polling could simply be an outlier. But, over the weekend a second poll, this one from the Dallas Morning News/University of Texas, also finds Biden and Trump deadlocked in the Lone Star state with 43% a piece among registered voters. Maybe those polls are not outliers and Texas could finally be a battleground state that could flip "blue" this year for the first time since 1976. November is a thousand years away of course, but, once again, it all underscores that every vote in every state will count this year. Thus, the fight now playing out over how people will be able to vote in both upcoming primary elections around the country and in this November's critical Presidential election.

We've been reporting in recent weeks on a spate of lawsuits around the country and both good and bad news --- depending on the state and county --- regarding moving away from dangerous, disease vector touchscreen voting systems and towards much safer absentee ballots. Another new lawsuit toward that end was filed in Tennessee over the weekend by the National Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, challenging what they describe as "some of the most restrictive absentee voting rules in the nation".

But here in Los Angeles, the County's Board of Supervisors voted unanimously last week to require that a Vote-by-Mail ballot be automatically sent to every registered voter in the nation's largest voting jurisdiction this November. That is encouraging news, given that the County's Registrar Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan has been clinging to his new, failed $300,000,000 touchscreen voting system that crashed and burned so spectacularly during the March 3 Super Tuesday Primary in the state.

On that score, we have the "breaking" news late Friday from CA Sec. of State Alex Padilla, certifying that Bernie Sanders defeated Joe Biden by 8 points (36 to 28%) on March 3rd, after the Golden State's already 30-day long counting and certification period was extended to two months due to the COVID crisis. In Los Angeles County, Sanders enjoyed an 11 point win over the former Vice President and now presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee. So, no, despite what some in the media had irresponsibly told you, California was not stealing the election from Bernie (nor does any evidence persuasively show that they did so in 2016 either.)

We do, however, have more information today on the boondoggle "VSAP" (or Voting Solutions for All People) voting system that Logan forced on L.A. voters for the first time --- and, hopefully, the last --- on March 3rd. We're joined today by DOUG ECKS, a private attorney who, with Katherine McNenny, filed a public records request with Logan's office after the election to learn the number of new touchscreen voting systems that failed and the number of new electronic pollbooks that did the same, leading to hours-long voting lines in Los Angeles. They also sought copies of problem report records from poll workers.

While the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk's office failed to respond with any hard numbers on system failures (Ecks says he may sue to get that information), they did provide hundreds of page of problem reports from poll workers that Ecks and McNenny recently wrote about at Medium. Ecks joins us to detail some of those findings today and to discuss the importance of public oversight of our elections.

Among the news from their records request: the systems failed all across the county, often spectacularly. One problem report he notes, for example, found that 11 of 30 voting machines failed at a single voting location. That's an extraordinary failure rate for the brand-new tablet-style systems, developed over 10 years at extraordinary expense to tax-payers by Logan. When I asked Ecks today if, based on his findings, he thought the systems should be used again in the future, he answered with his own question: "If you bought 30 gallons of milk and 11 were spoiled, would you go back to that store?"

We finish up today with a few quick thoughts from callers...

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On today's BradCast: Staying laser focused on the things that actually matter if we ever want to restore this nation and the world with it! [Audio link to show is posted below.]

The stock market cratered (again) on Monday, over fears about the quickly spreading coronavirus and plummeting oil prices. That, as the President of the United States tried to tweet away the problem while spending the weekend playing golf and throwing parties for his son's girlfriend at his Palm Beach resort before finding time on Monday to attend two fundraisers in Orlando as the Dow dropped more than 2,000 points, its largest one-day point drop ever and the worst crash seen on the markets since the 2008 global financial meltdown.

With the abysmal failure of this Administration to competently handle either ongoing crisis (and, in fact, make them both worse), we continue to focus on the only foreseeable way out of this disastrous mess: The November 2020 election. On that front, we've got both good news and bad, as usual, with 6 more states --- Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and Washington --- set to vote tomorrow, even as mop-up from voting system failures and counting of votes continues from last week's Super Tuesday in 14 states.

Among the many stories covered on today's program before opening lines to callers with still more tales of horror from voting out here in Los Angeles County last week on our failed new touchscreen voting systems and electronic pollbooks...

• Bernie Sanders supporter Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said she would vote for Joe Biden if he becomes the nominee, and she recommends that you do too;

• Montana's popular Democratic Governor Steve Bullock announces that he will jump into the race for U.S. Senate to unseat Republican Sen. Steve Daines after all, giving the Democrats a fifth potential takeover to win back a Democratic majority this November;

• We share some listener email including a woeful story of failure at the polls here in Los Angeles last week, and from a regular listener in Oregon who can't understand why Los Angeles, which saw hours-long lines to vote at the County's new "Voting Centers" on Super Tuesday, doesn't go to an all Vote-by-Mail system (as used in the Beaver State now for two decades.);

• California's Sec. of State Alex Padilla, who has been a big proponent of L.A.'s County's new $300,000,000 unverifiable touchscreen voting system over the past ten years, pretends to be outraged about what happened last week and directs L.A. to move to an all VBM system for the critical November election. However, Dean Logan, L.A. County's Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, the man who spent the last ten years developing the new failed voting system, says he's not sure he thinks VBM for all would be a good idea;

• And the Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan penned a landmark column on Sunday, charging "the media is blowing its chance to head off an Election Day debacle" by obsessing over "the horse-race" while ignoring "the very core of Election Day: voting itself". She excoriates the corporate media for failing to cover the many predictable disasters we saw last week in California and Texas until "after-the-fact" while ignoring "deeper issues such as the pressures and inducements for governments to invest in untried new voting machines" when "old-fashioned hand-marked paper ballots" are "the least hackable and the most audit-able". In short, her column sounds alot like just about every rant we've ever offered at either The BRAD BLOG or on The BradCast and spurs us to keep going...whether you like it or not. Thank you, Ms. Sullivan!;

While we've got a bunch of related stories about voting failures, dirty tricks and concerns out of Georgia, Texas, Florida and elsewhere, they'll have to wait until tomorrow's BradCast, as we wanted to open the lines to still more callers with woeful stories of their voting experiences at the Super Tuesday polls here in Los Angeles last week...

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On today's BradCast: Sad news for many regarding the end of Elizabeth Warren's run for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination. But we start with what suffices for good-ish news today regarding both voting and electoral politics, and one very mysterious Super Tuesday election result out of Texas. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

• First up, the Board of Elections of Georgia's Athens-Clarke County, where early voting has already begun for the state's March 24 Primaries, has voted to ditch their new touchscreen voting systems to move to a hand-marked paper ballot system. The move is in defiance of the state's Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger, who has ordered the use of new, 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting machines across the entire state, after the County's Board determined that the huge screens on the new Dominion ImageCast systems, said to be visible from 30 or 40 feet away, violate voter's right to a secret ballot under state law. (We interviewed Marilyn Marks of the Coalition for Good Governance, the plaintiff in an emergency lawsuit to move to hand-marked paper ballots in another Georgia county for the exact same reasons, last week.);

• More good-ish news out of Montana, where the state's popular Democratic Governor Steve Bullock is reportedly considering reversing his earlier vows that he would not run for U.S. Senate this November against Republican incumbent Sen. Steve Daines. The Governor, a former 2020 Democratic President candidate, won his statewide re-election in 2016 on the same ballot on which Donald Trump is said to have won the state of Montana by 20 points. If Bullock decides to enter the race by Monday's filing deadline, it might offer Democrats a shot at winning the fifth seat they would need to flip in order to retake a clear majority in the U.S. Senate next year. Dems have targeted four other U.S. Senate seats --- in Arizona, Colorado, Maine and North Carolina --- which they believe to be winnable in November, but would need a fifth seat if Alabama's Democratic Sen. Doug Jones is unable to hold on to his this year;

• The totally predictable fallout from Los Angeles County's disastrous Super Tuesday election continues today, after the County's new $300,000,000 unverifiable touchscreen voting systems and electronic pollbooks failed so spectacularly during their first countywide use in the March 3rd elections. Washington Post's coverage last night confirms that election workers in L.A. were, indeed, ordered not to speak to media (as I originally reported on Sunday, only to be called a liar on Twitter by the brainchild of the new, failed voting system, L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan).

  But the biggest breaking news in the embarrassing meltdown that resulted in hours-long lines and disenfranchised voters on Tuesday is that CA's Democratic Sec. of State Alex Padilla --- who certified the new systems for use in January despite warnings from cybsersecurity and voting systems experts, and despite the system's more than 40 violations of California Voting Systems Standards --- has now directed L.A. to send hand-marked Vote-by-Mail ballots to every voter in the County for this November's critical Presidential election;

• And, in Houston --- which also saw hours long lines for voters during its primaries on Super Tuesday --- a mysterious, completely unknown candidate on the Democratic ballot has has helped force a run-off for one of the longest serving members of the Texas state House. Despite Natasha Ruiz receiving more than 20% of the vote on Harris County's 100% unverifiable voting systems, the other three candidates in the race say they have never seen Ruiz or found any evidence that she actually had a campaign. She placed third in the four person race, resulting in just 45% of the vote (less than the 50% required to avoid a run-off) for long-serving State Rep. Harold Dutton, who is now investigating whether Ruiz even exists;

• Finally, we're joined by the former Editor in Chief of Rewire.news, JODI JACOBSON, a devoted Elizabeth Warren supporter, who is mourning today's announced end of the crusading progressive Massachusetts Senator's once-very promising Presidential bid. We discuss what Warren did right and where her candidacy appears to have gone wrong, why Americans appear to have been afraid to vote for her, and whether Warren might be tapped with a Vice-Presidential nod on either a Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders ticket...

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Voting ground to a near halt on Super Tuesday in a number of states, most notably in major jurisdictions in Texas and California relying on electronic pollbooks and unverifiable computer touchscreen Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs). Who could have predicted it? Oh, yeah. We did. Over and over again on The BradCast. Not that many in the corporate media heeded our warnings. We know elections officials certainly didn't. [Audio link to show follows below.]

In Texas, the main problems seem to revolve around a lack of poll workers due to coronavirus fears and, most notably, a lack of voting machines for Democratic voters in many areas, since the Republican Party was unwilling to share their state-mandated even number of voting machines with voters from the other party. Obscene wait times as long as 6 or 7 hours to vote were reported in some locations in the Lone Star State.

In California, many counties did away with precinct based voting for the first time this year in favor of a Voting Center model. That meant that voters could cast their ballot at any of a smaller number of voting centers which took the place of community-based precincts. In Los Angeles County, for example, there were about 1,000 voting centers, compared with 5,000 precinct polling places in previous years. In order to accomplish this new paradigm, and allow voters same-day registration and party switching, computerized electronic pollbooks were used to check in voters. The systems check records against the state voter registration database in order to sign in voters before they can vote. But those computers had trouble in more than a dozen counties syncing up with the state database for some (still-unexplained) reason. That resulted in hours-long lines and voters forced to cast provisional ballots in many locations.

But the worst situation was undoubtedly in L.A. County, where a brand-new, 100% unverifiable, $300,000,000 touchscreen voting system manufactured by a company named Smartmatic was also deployed countywide for the first time. It did not go well. Voters across the nation's largest voting jurisdiction were stuck in two to four hour lines in many cases at voting centers where the e-pollbooks slowed down to a crawl and/or where BMDs failed to work, reportedly flipped votes, or had their paper ballot summaries become jammed in the new computer systems. A County spokesperson estimated on Tuesday that 20% of the new "Voting Solutions for All People" (VSAP) BMDs had failed. (By the way, that link to the main VSAP website at vsap.LAVote.net, singing its praises and listing its many partners who signed on to it, now appears to be down, even as the regular LAVote.net site seems to be working fine. A telling omen?)

As one Twitter listener quipped on Tuesday night: "#ShouldaListenedToBrad". (Anyone feel like making t-shirts for a fund raiser?)

We're joined today by two longtime L.A. County election workers, LARRY DILG and "DOUG", after their impossibly long days of service over this past week. We discuss what went wrong (and right) at their respective voting centers using L.A. County's new voting system --- ten years in development by Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, and warned against for most of those years by yours truly, for many of the reasons which revealed themselves to all on Tuesday.

"I think we faced into the problems pretty well," Dilg tells me. "We had 25 machines in our room. The machines would sometimes stop working, or get quirky --- paper jams and stuff like that. I thought it went pretty well, actually, considering. The big thing I experienced was there were many more voters than we've ever seen in our center before."

"I think we had one or two machines that just were down for the count," he continued. "Other than that, it was almost like they got overloaded for awhile and needed a rest. We'd give them a rest, then reboot them, and they were back up and running." He pegged the failure rate at closer to 10% for the BMDs at his voting center.

"Doug" reports: "I had eight BMDs, and two of them broke, ultimately with paper jams, and I had to take them out of action. Smartmatic people came and fixed those two." For the record, while the VSAP systems were designed and supposedly owned by the County, they were manufactured by Smartmatic, a voting machine company with a dubious history. I was surprised to hear that their employees were here and allowed to directly service the machines mid-election, much less at all.

As to the e-pollbooks, "Doug" reports: "They seemed to get worse and worse, over time. The problem with them is that they have to re-sync periodically with headquarters in Norwalk, to update themselves so that they know who has voted and who hasn't voted. According to my worker, the machine was updating about every 15 minutes, so every 15 minutes, it was down for two or three minutes ... So the problem was this updating was taking quite a bit of a long time and it seemed to get worse and worse as more people voted. We only had two pollbooks at my location, and sometimes they were both updating at the same time, which meant that anybody you tried to process during that period had to vote with a provisional ballot."

While Doug is "concerned about the tally of the votes", Dilg, a self-identified "idealist" believes "it's a really good system", even with all of the problems revealed on Super Tuesday. "I have to say yesterday was a very positive experience because there were people doing good things, all around the room, and feeling good about being citizens in a democracy. That kind of civic experience is very different from a rally, and it's a beautiful experience." Both say they will work again as pollworkers, and urge others to do the same.

And, oh, yeah. We also discuss the reported results across the country from Super Tuesday, where Joe Biden stunned the pundits with many unexpected victories in 10 states, including in Texas and Elizabeth Warren's home state of Massachusetts (where she placed third according to computer-tallied results!) and where Bernie Sanders won four states, including the day's richest prize of California (presuming the many weeks of counting ahead in the Golden State don't result in a change to the current standings in its partial tallies).

Also, NYC's billionaire former Republican mayor Mike Bloomberg dropped out of the Democratic Presidential race and endorsed Joe Biden, after dumping half a billion dollars to win zero states. And Elizabeth Warren, the only other remaining candidate in the race to have won delegates, is reportedly assessing the outlook on how and if she will move forward in what now appears to be a two-man race for the Democratic nomination...

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Okay, I gotta make today's BradCast summary really quick, as polls are closing around the country and people are still fighting like hell to cast their votes out here in California. [Audio link to show follows below.]

With 14 states voting in today's critical Super Tuesday elections, voters were once again prevented or absurdly delayed in their attempts to take part. Of all the states holding elections today (Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia) only one --- maybe two --- had a good excuse for the failures.

Tennessee was hit with early morning tornadoes, which resulted in at least 25 dead in or near Nashville, with some 15 polling places knocked out by the storms. Voting continued nonetheless in the Volunteer State, as well as in Alabama, which also saw several twisters just as polls opened Tuesday morning.

But what are the excuses for forcing voters to wait in line for hours in places like Austin and Houston, Texas and up and down the great state of California, where almost 700 delegates in total will be awarded towards the 1,991 needed to win a majority for the Democratic Presidential nomination?

In the dozens and dozens of cases emerging throughout the day --- in L.A. County and at least 15 other California counties, not to mention all over Texas --- as covered on today's program (at least as many of them as we could fit in to a single hour!), it was the failure of computer touchscreen voting systems and electronic pollbook check-in computers. All of which was completely predictable. And we should know, because we've been predicting it for months and much longer, as long time listeners and readers likely know.

We cover a tsunami of such problems across the country today, particularly in California, where Bloomberg News is reporting tonight that L.A. County is admitting some 20% of the the new voting machines deployed for the first time countywide in this election failed to work today. Yes, these are the brand-new, 100% unverifiable, $300,000,000 touchscreen voting systems (which we've very specifically been a lonely voice in warning about for YEARS --- yes, as long ago as 2010, when I was invited to the first development meeting and gave the very same warnings many others are finally offering today. See my 2013 interview with their brainchild, L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, from back before he decided to no longer answer my questions or appear on the program.)

We also open the phones to callers ringing in with their own various nightmarish experience on L.A. County's new systems and we get an update from the polls in Southern California via KPFK News Director ERNESTO ARCE along with much more infuriating madness on today's program. (Including a smear on Twitter from Logan who called me a liar there last night after I had reported on Sunday that a poll worker at the Hollywood Bowl voting center said he was not allowed to speak to the media and that I had to call a special number to ask questions like "Was it busy today?" "Why was this voting center shutdown for hours yesterday?" "Have many voters been seeing their ballots jammed in the new printers, like that woman?" But, of course, I shared the "receipts" to show who was actually lying.)

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, on billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer quitting the Democratic Primary race, the coronavirus' deadly clearing of China's air, and a sad sign of climate change at Yosemite National Park...

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Before we can even get to the central story line on today's BradCast --- Biden's weekend win in South Carolina and voting system problems leading in to Super Tuesday, particularly in Los Angeles --- or crack open the phone lines to a bunch of calls with questions about voting on Super Tuesday, we quickly round up just some of the weekend news stories which, in a normal world, would each have merited their own entire program! [Audio link to show is posted below.]

The news began breaking left and right after we got off air Friday and hasn't stopped through airtime today. Among the stories quickly covered at the top of today's show...

• A three-judge panel on a federal court of appeals tossed out the House of Representatives' lawsuit to force Donald Trump's former White House Counsel Don McGahn to testify under the House's lawful Congressional subpoena as a witness to Trump's attempt to kill the Robert Mueller Special Counsel probe. If the panel's 2 to 1 ruling led by two George W. Bush judges holds, it'll be the end of all Congressional oversight of the Executive Branch as we know it;

• A federal appeals court blocked Trump's "Remain in Mexico" policy for immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S., and then unblocked it moments later;

• Trump loyalist Rep. John Ratcliff (R-TX) was nominated for a second time to become Director of National Intelligence despite no intelligence experience to lead the nation's 17 intelligence agencies and after having been rejected by Senate Republicans when he was nominated the first time last year for the same role;

• The U.S. signed a peace deal with the Taliban to remove all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in America's longest war, but Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) the only member of Congress to have voted against the 2001 Authorization of Military Force, says Trump's "so-called 'peace deal' is anything but" and will leave thousands of troops in place. As of Monday, the Friday deal is already falling apart;

• 6 deaths from the coronavirus in the U.S. have now been reported over the weekend and into Monday, with a cluster of cases in the Seattle area, and new infections announced in New York, Chicago, Florida, Arizona and elsewhere;

• And, on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the GOP/Trump Administration challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) which, if successful, would completely strike down the landmark health care insurance law, leaving millions without coverage and insurance companies free to deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions again.

All of that before we are able to even get to Joe Biden's huge reported victory at the South Carolina primary on Saturday, besting his nearest competitor (Bernie Sanders) in the Palmetto State with more than twice as many votes. In the wake of Biden's revival after his dismal performance in the first three states (Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada), several candidates dropped out of the race, including billionaire Tom Steyer, former South Bend, IN Mayor Pete Buttigieg and MN Senator Amy Klobuchar. The last of those two announced their endorsements of Biden on Monday as centrist Democrats band together to challenge Sanders.

But what of those voters in California, Texas and a dozen other Super Tuesday states who made the mistake of voting early (despite our weeks and months of warning folks otherwise) for a candidate no longer in the race as of tomorrow's primaries in all of those states? And what of those voting centers where Los Angeles County's new, $300,000,000 unverifiable touchscreen voting systems have been failing to work at all? And why have pollworkers in L.A. been told not to talk to media, as I learned this weekend.

We open the phones to callers today (as we will again tomorrow) to hear about their early voting experiences, problems and concerns, and for questions about the new, frequently unverifiable voting systems now in use across the country (in places like South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere in addition to L.A. County, the largest voting jurisdiction in the nation)? A number of callers were alarmed to learn about the flaws and failures of touchscreen computer Ballot Marking Device, including one caller who noted that, no, she didn't bother to verify her computer-marked paper ballot before casting it, believing that her work was done after verifying her choices on the touchscreen! So, a very busy hopefully interesting and informative (and, sorry, maddening) show today on 'The BradCast'!...

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On today's BradCast: A former insurance exec says Medicare for All is better than even the best union healthcare plans, more problems with L.A. County's new, unverifiable touchscreen voting systems ahead of next Tuesday's Super Tuesday, and Desi Doyen "celebrates" another birthday...

First up, financial markets continued to plummet on Tuesday after a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) --- which Donald Trump has been gutting and/or attempting to gut since taking office --- announced Americans should prepare for the spread of the Coronavirus, declaring "It's not so much a question of if this will happen any more, but ... when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness."

At the same time, with that cheery news, the Democratic Presidential primary campaign moves forward after Bernie Sanders' landslide win at the Nevada Caucuses on Saturday, with many members of the Party establishment concerned about the likelihood of his nomination. One of their concerns is Sanders' decades-long campaign to establish healthcare as a right, not a privilege, in the U.S., as illustrated by his Medicare for All (M4A) proposal. That plan, and its end to private health insurance in the U.S., was the source of concern by leadership of NV's powerful Culinary Union before the caucuses last week. Its members, however, according to Entrance Polling, were strong supporters of Sanders, a longtime champion for the labor movement, on caucus day nonetheless.

At issue with Sanders' (and Elizabeth Warren's) M4A proposal is the fear of the loss of top-flight, hard-earned health care benefits for the Culinary Union workers. The union has negotiated one of the nation's best health care programs, with leadership worried about losing those benefits under M4A. It's a fear shared by many Americans who are nervous about the prospect of losing their existing private health care coverage, while being misinformed about how the program would actually work.

RICHARD "RJ" ESKOW, however, a former insurance executive turned political columnist, policy analyst and host of The Zero Hour, argues this week in an detailed analysis at The Intercept that, while the Culinary Union's plan is top notch, Medicare For All would actually be even better for them in many ways. He joins us today to explain why he finds that not only those union members would be better off under Sanders' plan if passed as currently proposed, but so would all Americans.

Eskow details his analysis of that union's very good health plan --- which, he tells me, "makes it a perfect test case, in a sense, for comparing Medicare For All to the best plans --- and how M4A would still be better. "My hat's off to the Culinary Union and to the workers, who went on strike and fought for years to get this plan, in the current environment we have now. It's just about as good a plan as you're going to see," Eskow says. "It's well ahead of most other plans, private insurance plans, private employer plans, whether they are union or otherwise. It's really one of the best." Nonetheless, he argues, after detailing all of the excellent benefits for those workers, "Medicare For All gives better benefits."

He also goes on to answer many questions that skeptics and/or critics of universal single-payer coverage --- from both the Left and the Right --- likely have.

Also today, we look forward, again, toward the crucial South Carolina Democratic Presidential Primary on Saturday and concerns about the state's new, 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting systems that all voters will be forced to use at the polls (despite myriad failed elections on similar equipment made by the same vendor, ES&S, the nation's largest.) And I've got a correction about a point I made on this topic on yesterday's show.

Then, we look again at more failures already revealing themselves here in L.A. County in advance of the March 3rd Super Tuesday Primary --- just three days after South Carolina --- in California and more than a dozen other states. Problems with L.A.'s brand-new, 100% unverifiable, $300,000,000 touchscreen voting systems surfaced over the weekend on the first day of Early Voting last Saturday, when several Voting Centers in the County were unable to open for hours, as equipment problems left workers unable to set up the new, complicated, Internet-connected computer pollbooks and voting systems.

Those problems continued on Monday, as reported by CBS2-LA's David Goldstein last night. He followed up his earlier investigative report on the new systems several weeks ago (in which I was featured) with another report on Monday night, finding Voting Centers still down in some areas, with one poll worker seen examining the system's user manual for clues and another bemoaning the idle voting systems: "They're not working because the router....we're waiting for AT&T to come," she says.

Oh, brother. 1,000 of these new Voting Centers with all new equipment, replacing 5,000 community precincts used for decades in L.A., are all supposed to be up and running by next Tuesday. Though, even if the new VSAP ("Voting Solutions for All People") systems work as designed, the results of next Tuesday's election will still be 100% unverifiable after the polls close.

Finally, Birthday Girl Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with her usual mix of bad news, very bad news, and some actually good news! It's also her birthday! So, to make up for the fact that she has to work today, all donations to BradBlog.com/Donate are going to her this week! Please consider cheering her up by pitching in!...

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