Last December, following the passage of Prop 8 in California, Ken Starr (yes, that Ken Starr) filed a legal brief with the CA Supreme Court, on behalf of the so-called "Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund", seeking to nullify the legal marriages of 18,000 same-sex couples in the state.

Arguments will be heard beginning on March 5th, and the Courage Campaign is asking for you to send your opinion to the Supremes (deadline: Valentine's Day), in hopes that they will invalidate the civil rights abomination that is Prop 8, on Constitutional (if not moral) grounds.

When the Courage Campaign launched their "Don't Divorce..." campaign, they asked members to "send pictures with a simple message for Starr and the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund." Here's the resulting, and moving, 4-minute video...

It was nearly two years ago that the L.A. Police Department, in full riot regalia, fired rubber bullets and tear gas on an otherwise peaceful May Day immigration rally in MacArthur Park. We covered the stunning "May Day Melee" fairly extensively, as it was breaking here at the time. The story, which received a bit of national coverage at the time, also brought an ensuing spate of racist commenters over to The BRAD BLOG in response, many of whom blamed the victims in appalling screeds.

So a bit of good news on that front, today. On Wednesday, the LA City Council unanimously approved a settlement of nearly $13 million to those who were injured and mistreated by the LAPD that day. The agreement covers approximately 90% of the claims --- about 300 in total --- filed against the city and the LAPD alleging misconduct by the officers. There are still a few pending claims, two in federal court and 15 in state court, according to the LA Times, from some of the journalists and others who were also injured in the melee.

The Times reports that "Council President Eric Garcetti noted that the cost of the May Day agreement was enough to hire almost 130 police officers."

Councilman Ed Reyes, who represents the MacArthur Park area, recognized the importance of trying to set things right. "This was very, very critical," he's quoted in the Times. "Now we can say we acknowledge our mistakes; we are making every effort to address the weaknesses in our process, in our implementation as a Police Department, and more importantly recognizing that the community does matter."

Much of the shocking melee was caught on tape by both television stations and citizens at the rally. Among the most striking of the coverage from citizen journalists at the time was that of Jonathan Mann, whose terrifying video we ran at the time, and post again below as a reminder of what happened.

Below that, we also rerun his personal video response to the racist comments which came pouring in following coverage of the incident...back when fears of a massive immigrant invasion of the United States were being shamefully stoked by the GOP in hopes of political gain. Funny how the immigration "crisis" in America seems to have just disappeared at some point...

We know what the excuse is in MN, but what's the excuse in Riverside County, CA?

Seems there is none, other than County Registrar Barbara Dunmore's hope to ensure the county remains one of the absolute worst places to cast a vote in the entire nation (and there's some stiff competition there!)

Though Dunmore certified the results of last November's election on Dec. 2 as "full, true and correct" --- 28 days after the election, as per state law --- it turns out she's still counting votes, months after the election. In secret...

Recently it was revealed that the Humboldt Election Transparency Project had found that the county’s Diebold/Premier voting system had lost 197 ballots. Today Kim Zetter of WiredBlog, in one of our featured articles, revealed that the GEMS audit logs not only don’t answer questions about how the 197 ballots were lost but don’t answer many questions at all. Zetter also reveals that the state of California is investigating the lost ballots and these “Greek” audit logs. One of the featured interviews in Zetter’s article is with Doug Jones of U of Iowa. His comments are discussed in our second featured article....

-- Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG

The state canvassing board in Minnesota has now certified Al Franken (D) as the winner over incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman (R) in the race for the U.S. Senate. Barring a successful legal challenge, which has now been filed by Coleman, Franken will have won the seat by an astoundingly close 225 votes, out of some 2.9 million cast.

But there's still a chance, albeit a slim one, for Coleman to reverse his fate. A very good provision in MN's law --- not found in most other states --- may delay Franken's seating, meaning he will not be sworn in with rest of Congress at the beginning of the new session slated to start tomorrow. Ultimately, however, the provisions should ensure that whoever is eventually sworn in to serve as the state's Senator will not be forced to serve under a cloud.

The voters of MN deserve that much, no matter how long it takes, and thankfully, like its hand-count laws, the state's provision requiring the completion of legal challenges before final certification is sent to Congress by the Sec. of State, is a model for the nation.

Would that all of the other states in the union had such a provision...

Following the discovery of hundreds of ballots deleted by Diebold's paper ballot op-scan system in Humboldt County, CA, the county's election chief Carolyn Crnich has finally decided to dump Diebold all together. That's the good news.

The bad news, as longtime local election integrity advocate Dave Berman detailed this week, is that Crnich has decided to jump out of the frying pan, and into the fire with a different op-scan system, made by a different private vendor, using similarly secret software, with many of the same problems found in the crappy Diebold system she's finally tossing over the side.

A spokesman for Hart InterCivic, the private Austin, TX company which makes the paper ballot op-scan system Crnich is hoping to use, defended the county's planned move, though he had to make some erroneous claims to The BRAD BLOG in order to do so...

Hillsborough Co Florida outgoing election chief, Buddy Johnson, wanted $2.3M from the county to cover election cost overruns from the Nov. election. Stupidly Johnson did not bother showing up to appear before the county supervisors so they could ask him questions. The supervisors took his no-show as an insult and they have deferred any decision until they can review the election office’s records.

Meanwhile the Maryland Board of Public Works has approved a contract between the state and Premier/Diebold for $974,000 for six months to cover municipal elections within the state. That contract could add up to $1.4M if two three month options are exercised. All of this even though the state is scrapping their paperless DREs at the end of next year in place of a paper based system.

And, after the reports of Diebold accuracy failures in Humboldt Co., California, the county has decided to scrap their present system and replace it with machines provided by Hart Intercivic. The selection of Hart is a bit strange in light of the fact that Hart has removed themselves from all EAC certification testing. They will not, in the future, have a voting system that has been tested to the voting system standards and certified by the EAC....

Following up on the latest monumental failure by Diebold/Premier --- whose voting system was recently found by a citizens' transparency project to have lost hundreds of ballots in a single precinct in Humboldt County, CA --- Wired's Kim Zetter covered the issue earlier this week.

Her article touched on a number of technical issues involved in the failure of the Diebold GEMS central tabulator which, though we hadn't noted them in our own coverage, are nonetheless important, even if somewhat down in the weeds, and perhaps most of note to technical election integrity geeks only.

As quoted below in some detail from Zetter's report, she advances the story by noting:

• The problem, which Diebold admits has been in its system for years, likely wouldn't have been noticed at all were it not for the unique, experimental, citizen-led "Humboldt Transparency Project." Even CA's required 1% random post-election "audit" wouldn't have uncovered the problem, since absentee ballots are not included in that audit.
• The chances of the problem occurring, which resulted in ballots being deleted without notice by the Diebold GEMS tabulator, are rather high, even if chances of discovery of the error by election officials are very low.
• Diebold's explanation for the failure may or may not be legitimate.
• The GEMS internal "audit logs" (the GEMS system was used in 34 states around the nation last November) aren't actually audit logs at all, and may not actually note the complete set of events which occurred on the voting system, even if anyone is allowed to review those logs in the first place.

Let's take a look at the details...

The most cogent broadcast media discussion about Same Sex Marriage issues that we recall seeing. As usual, it comes from The Daily Show. Also, as usual, the opponent here --- in this case Mike Huckabee --- ultimately can come up with absolutely no legitimate reason to oppose full rights for all Americans, other than concerns about having to rewrite a few editions of Merriam-Webster's. Bravo, Jon...

Even if he's out of his mind in regard to things like evolution and equal rights for Americans, Huckabee's a decent fellow who, we suspect, will some day have a "revelation" and reverse his opinion on both of those things once he no longer perceives he needs them to win public office (for example, after he no longer plans to run for anything). That cynicism, of course, runs contrary to my belief that he's "a decent fellow". But hey, nobody's perfect, right?

Admittedly, events of the last decade or two have greatly lowered our bar for "decent fellows" when it comes to Republicans, unfortunately.

By John Gideon and Brad Friedman

"Some people have called those who have long decried our nation's move toward voting machines nuts or just sore losers," reads the editorial from yesterday's Eureka Times-Standard.

"They were loud, and they were strident in proclaiming that they didn't trust election technologies as much as they trust the ability of actual human beings to count votes," the paper continues in response to the citizen's "Transparency Project" in Humboldt County, CA which, as The BRAD BLOG reported last week, discovered some 200 ballots that the county's Diebold optical-scan system had deleted from the initially certified count. Humboldt registrar Carolyn Crnich --- who deserves much credit for working with local election integrity advocates to allow them to create a more transparent, open-source optical-scan system as a check on the buggy Diebold hardware and software --- was forced to to re-certify the November 4th election with new results after the findings.

"The recent discovery, thanks to the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, of a discrepancy in election results due to flawed software reveals that these activists were right to make noise, and right to complain about a company that has been less than responsible in dealing with the problem."

Thanks for noticing, Times-Standard. Now will the rest of the country notice? Specifically, will the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, responsible for testing and certifying these machines at the federal level, and the U.S. Dept. of Justice, responsible for enforcing federal laws --- which again seem to have been violated by Diebold (whose election division now calls themselves Premier) --- notice and take action?

Interviews with and responses from CA officials from Crnich to Sec. of State Debra Bowen's office indicate a serious problem, yet again, with Diebold's handling of the software failure which the company has known about for four years, even as they allowed election officials to continue using the same system in several states.

The BRAD BLOG has obtained a copy of Diebold's original terse, emailed notice of the software failure, sent to Crnich's predecessor in 2004, but never sent to CA's new Sec. of State, despite her "Top-to-Bottom Review" of all e-voting systems in the state which she undertook after taking office in 2007. (The Diebold email notice is posted below, in full.)

At the same time, local software programmer Mitch Trachtenberg, who developed the simple, transparent, open-source optical-scan software, using off-the-shelf hardware for the citizen's project --- including the ability to post all scanned ballots onto the web for citizen review --- may have inadvertently revealed the scam perpetuated by the nation's electronic voting machine vendor's who were allocated some $3.9 billion federal tax dollars for their efforts at creating proprietary systems, which don't even work as promised...or as required by federal law...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

First I think congratulations are in order for Humboldt County California Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich. Crnich worked with local voters and began the "Humboldt Election Transparency Project". The Eureka Times-Standard describes the program like this:

Crnich also deserves a big thank you, along with Trachtenberg, from the voters of Eureka Precinct 1E-45 because if not for the project and Trachtenberg's software their votes in the recent general election would not have been counted. The Times-Standard explains:

And this "glitch" in the Diebold/Premier GEMS central tabulator software has been known to the company since 2004, or so Crnich learned after exchanging several calls with the vendor...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Complete cast list follows...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

It's interesting that voter turnout in California last month topped both of former Gov. Ronald Reagan's presidential elections, as well as all other elections going back to 1972 when Richard Nixon, another Californian, trounced George McGovern:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

In their outreach to blacks, Latino, Asians and other minority voters, the conservative operatives behind Proposition 8 neglected to mention a key aspect of the initiative that could contribute to rolling back minority rights for years to come.

Prop 8 not only rendered quaint the California Constitution's equal protection clause --- a foundational precept that instructs the state to protect the rights of all citizens equally --- it also rescinded the right to marry for California gays. This sets it apart from other states' anti-gay marriage amendments because it establishes a precedent for conservative efforts to curb minority rights using ballot initiatives and by other means:

Guest blogged by Emily Levy of VelvetRevolution.us

Following reports of concerns from voters, election monitors, observers, and election integrity advocates about the voting equipment and procedures used during the November 4th election in which Prop 8 --- a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality for all Californians --- is said to have passed, Velvet Revolution is requesting that official complaints from citizens be filed with the CA Sec. of State, by Monday if possible. Any voters who may have witnessed unusual activity, or problems with voting equipment that may have affected the casting or counting of votes on Proposition 8, are asked to contact SoS Debra Bowen's office as soon as possible. More details are posted here...

Additionally, VR is posting a $100,000 reward for information leading to arrest and conviction for election fraud related to Prop 8. See this post for details...

[Disclosure: The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder of Velvet Revolution.]