I'd love to say that 2021 couldn't be any worse than 2020. But I'm fairly certain that 2020 (and 2019 and 2018 and 2017, etc.) has sort of proven such optimism to be naïve. Nonetheless, hope springs eternal and better days will certainly come…even if they don't happen seconds after midnight or even seconds after Noon on January 20th.

So, rather than offer overly optimistic predictions for the days ahead, I will thank you --- our readers, our listeners --- for days past. 2020 was pretty miserable for everyone and damn near impossible for many. Your generosity and support --- by kind words, sharing of our work, and, yes, financial donations --- made each day a bit better, a bit more tolerable, than it certainly would have otherwise been.

From Desi, Ernie, PDiddie, Nicole, myself, and anyone else who helps keep The BRAD BLOG and The BradCast and Green News Report continue to hum and produce important content and rake the muck and help make you (and me) smarter or just help you find a laugh each and every day, we thank you.

The BRAD BLOG will be an unthinkable 17 years old in a few weeks. One more year and we'll be eligible to be purged from the voting rolls! None of it could be done each day without the kindness of strangers…and friends, which I consider each of you to be.

Thank you for your support in helping us get this far. And we'll see you on the other side in 2021…no matter what it may bring. We'll get through it together as we have, impossibly, for so many years. Please stay safe, warm and HEALTHY until then and accept my hopes for a Happier New Year for all! --- Brad (et al)

We're still in Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street mode on today's BradCast, with a reminder that there are still 33 long days before Inauguration Day. And even though Freddy Kruger (in Nightmare) and Jason (in Friday, which I manage to get mixed up on today's show, but you'll get the idea!) get killed in every movie, they always find a way to reappear once you think they are absolutely, positively dead. We've made it this far, let's not let our guard down until the credits have finished fully rolling! [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

To that end, and beyond, we've got a number of stories worth your attention on today's show, including...

• The Democrats' majority in the new House of Representatives will be perilously thin --- just four votes --- when the new Congress is sworn in on January 3rd, warns Norm Ornstein at WaPo. That could very much come in to play when Biden's Electoral College victory is scheduled to be affirmed by Congress on January 6th, if all members are unable to be sworn in, in person, due to COVID. We discuss that short term concern as well as longer term ones for Dems in the House, where every single Dem vote will now likely be needed to pass absolutely anything --- especially once three members now tapped to serve in the Biden Administration vacate their seats and Dems are left with a slim one vote majority for a time. We discuss both those long and short ramifications today, as you need to know about both.

• But, before we even get to January 6th --- much less Inauguration Day on January 20th --- why did the Pentagon's Acting Defense Secretary, who was just appointed by Trump, call off all transition briefings with the Biden Transition Team last night? AXIOS reports Defense Department officials are "shocked" and the Biden team is very concerned. (Does Freddy still live?)

• We've got a bit of good news today, at least out of Georgia, where some rightwingers attempted to challenge the eligibility of some 50,000 registered voters who they claim have moved out of the formerly right-leaning Cobb County. They had hoped to keep them all from voting in the two, ongoing U.S. Senate runoff elections that will determine partisan control of the U.S. Senate on January 5th. The lame duck 3 to 1 GOP majority county Board of Elections heard the challenges today. Happily, the the Republicans members, who were all voted out and replaced by a Democratic majority on November 3rd, did the right thing. We explain.

• Meanwhile, a couple of days ago on the show, I was in the uncomfortable position of having to defend voting machine company Smartmatic, as part of a pretty epic rant, thanks to Team Trump and the MAGA Mob's bastardized use of some of my decade-old investigative reports at BRAD BLOG that were twisted and used to falsely attack the company for somehow working with Venezuela and its dead President Hugo Chavez to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump. The private voting system vendor is now threatening to sue rightwing propaganda outlets Fox "News", Newsmax and OANN for defamation if they do not retract what the company describes as defamatory claims about the company that had absolutely nothing to do with the 2020 election in ANY swing-state.

  But now, yet another voting machine company, Dominion Voting Systems --- which actually DOES have contracts in a number of swing-states and has also been falsely targeted by the MAGA Mob for allegedly flipping votes from Trump to Biden --- is threatening to sue Team Trump attorney Sidney Powell for her false, outrageous, and arguably defamatory claims.

• Yet maybe --- just maybe --- something good can ultimately come from all of these nightmares. For that, ironically enough, we turn today to the rightwing propaganda outlet called The Epoch Times for evidence. A new article in the paper which is widely read, cited and shared by wingnuts, including the President of the United States, highlights a far-right attorney who has been involved in a number of the failed legal attempts to overthrow Biden's victory. He is now calling for a return to hand-marked and even hand-counted paper ballots!

  Decrying "the vulnerability of our digital footprint in elections," he argues: "We can keep the paper, and we can audit the paper, and we can do so with efficiency. But the primary aim should not be efficiency behind closed doors. It should be transparency and accuracy. Paper gives it to you." The article makes clear (if you read it, you can skip the middle section with a bunch of grievance nonsense regarding Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg --- told you it was a propaganda rag!) that he is calling for HAND-MARKED and HAND-COUNTED paper ballots!

  I have long argued that we'd likely never get rid of these god-forsaken computer voting and tabulation systems and restore public oversight to our elections until a high-profile Republican got thoroughly screwed by those systems or even feared that they got screwed by them. That's because it has largely been Republicans who have been defending their use for so many years. I guess I should have also noted that a Republican who pretended he was screwed by one of those systems might do the trick as well. Well, at this point, we'll take what we can get.

  Once the dust settles on 2020, let's hope there are enough Republicans who still have serious concerns about computer voting and tabulation that they are willing to work with other Election Integrity advocates, many of them from the Left, to end the obscene --- and often impossible to oversee --- computerized corporate control that has been allowed to takeover our public elections in the United States.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as Biden focuses on jobs and climate in several recently reported key nominations to his Administration; Trump continues trashing the planet on his way out the door; and Washington state's Governor unveils an ambitious new clean energy jobs plan...

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So, yeah, I'm a bit grumpy on today's BradCast. When you listen, you'll get an idea why. [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

For one, I'm actually forced to defend a voting machine company. That could be a first in my nearly two decades of investigative reporting on Election Integrity and the woeful private voting system vendors who have been allowed to take over our public elections with their crappy, over-priced, often-unverifiable, easily-manipulated hardware and software. In this case, however, the claims made against one such company --- based on a twisted, bastardized re-imagining of my otherwise accurate and independently verifiable deep-dive reporting from more than a decade ago --- by sore-loser Donald Trump's dishonest attorneys and media stooges, need to be pushed back against, lest they further Trump's goal of undermining the United States' Constitutional republican democracy entirely.

Lawsuits may be coming in this case, warns Smartmatic's CEO, after the firm has been falsely blamed for stealing the election for Joe Biden in states where they do not even do business. (Their only contract in the U.S. is here in Los Angeles County. But that hasn't stopped Team Trump and the MAGA Mob from conflating them with a completely separate company, a competitor named Dominion Voting Systems, which has also been falsely blamed for stealing the election in jurisdictions where they do no business either.)

The bullshit, evidence-free claims of fraud continue from the deranged President and his pathetic team of desperate sycophants nonetheless. The latest nonsense comes via a so-called "forensic audit" by a so-called "military intelligence" outfit named Allied Security Operations Groups (or ASOG) which clearly knows nothing about voting systems or even election law. At least if you believe actual independent voting system and cybersecurity experts who examined their absurd, evidence-free allegations of "ELECTION FRAUD!"

Republicans in Congress clearly do not believe such experts, as GOP Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin held a ridiculous hearing on phony 2020 election fraud conspiracy claims in the U.S. Senate Government Affairs Committee today, no matter the lack of evidence for any such fraud. That, as more than 300,000 Americans --- more than the number of those killed during combat in all of World War II --- have now died from COVID-19 over the past nine months. Johnson and the rest of his caucus continue to largely ignore the deadly scourge while Americans are out of work by the tens of millions and about to be tossed from their homes amid the worst pandemic in a century. Both myself --- and Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) --- have a word or two about all of that shamefulness as well today.

Meanwhile, actual voter fraud criminal Donald Trump, is coming under legal scrutiny again for the fact that he is unlawfully registered to vote in Florida at a non-legal voting domicile (Mar-a-Lago, a commercial club, as Trump agreed back in 1993 when the town of Palm Beach allowed him to convert the once-private residence into a business). He went on to unlawfully vote twice this past year --- one by mail and one in-person --- using that non-legal "residence" as his voting address. All three acts are felonies by the President of the United States under state law in Florida, though its corrupt Governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump sycophant himself, doesn't appear to give a damn. Laws --- including election laws --- apparently do not apply to Republicans, especially if they happen to be sore-loser Presidents offering bullshit claims about election fraud in hopes of bringing down American democracy. But, as the neighbors to Mar-a-Lago are now warning, Trump will not be welcome to take residence, lawfully or otherwise, after his Presidency mercifully ends in historic failure next month.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report with the U.S. on the verge of breaking another record for billion-dollar climate-related disasters in a single year; insurance companies cancelling homeowner policies in California amid record wildfires; and as the U.N. warns yet again that the world must pick up the pace in order to slow the very worst effects of deadly global warming.

Other than that, everything is fantastic today!

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It's been a weekend and more of The Crazy since we last spoke. On today's BradCast we get you all up to date on the last several days of The Crazy as Donald Trump's attempted coup to steal back the Presidency continues to fall apart with each passing hour, and as the Republican Party decides to distance themselves from Trump's loony conspiracy attorney Sidney Powell while she turns the MAGA crowd against her own party before the critical January U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia to determine control of the upper chamber of Congress. [Audio link to full show follows summary.]

The biggest news today broke mid-show, as Trump finally relented in allowing the General Services Administration to officially begin the transition to a Joe Biden Administration, even as he vowed he would "prevail" in his fight to overturn the will of the American voters and says his "case STRONGLY continues."

Well, about that case. It may be continuing, but it has never been anywhere close to strong. Among the related stories covered on today's show that prove it, before we turn to the phone for listener calls on all of this...

• First, a follow-up to Friday's show in which we debunked the insane case that Powell, Giuliani and now all of MAGA are making regarding an international conspiracy --- somehow led by the Dominion Voting System company, along with the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela --- to steal the election for Biden. The conspiracy originates with the bastardization of an exclusive investigative report I published at The BRAD BLOG in 2010. Powell et al aren't even close in their twisted version of the story that now includes all sorts of false charges about voting machine companies and more. The bottom line, as we noted on Friday, but which warrants underscoring again today, because I've been trying to make the case for so long and now we're seeing what I warned about finally come to pass...

1. Simply because a computerized voting and tabulation system is vulnerable to fraud and manipulation does not mean that any particular election run on it has been defrauded or manipulated, and;
2. Even if an election is 100% secure and accurate, if it can't be known by the public to have been 100% secure and accurate, it is every bit as much of a threat to confidence in our democratic system as it would be if the election had actually been stolen on such a system.

• Other than that...Catching us all up from Friday....Trump loses another lawsuit in Nevada as a state judge rejects an attempt to block certification of Biden's victory, by more than 33,000 votes, in the state.

• Trump loses in Arizona as a state judge rejects a move for yet another audit of votes in Maricopa County (Phoenix), and the County's Board of Supervisors (4 Rs, 1 D) unanimously voted on Friday to certify Biden's victory in the state's largest county. Also, the final "SharpieGate" lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice in the state where Biden appears to have won by more than 10,000 votes.

• In Wisconsin, Team Trump is said to be obstructing the ongoing recounts requested by Trump in the two counties with the largest minority vote, Milwaukee and Dane, after apparently losing the state to Biden by more than 20,000 votes.

• Trump lost bigly in Michigan on Monday, where the state Board of Canvassers voted unanimously (with one abstention) to certify Biden's victory by nearly 160,000 votes. That, after Trump's attempt to twist the arms of the GOP leadership of the state's gerrymandered House and Senate on Friday appears to have gone nowhere. (But we'll soon find out for sure.)

• In Pennsylvania, Trump lost his attempt to toss out nearly seven million ballots and was excoriated by a conservative federal judge on Saturday for attempting to do so in the nation's sixth largest state where Biden appears to have prevailed by more than 80,000 votes. The brutal court loss led Republican U.S. Senator Pat Toomey to become just the second GOP Senator to concede (where Trump won't) by declaring [PDF] that "Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race" in the state. Trump's team of pathetic lawyers have since filed an emergency appeal to the 3rd Circuit, but failed to deliver their motion before the Court's deadline for doing so. This is the (likely doomed) case Trump hopes may reach SCOTUS where he believes he can win after packing the stolen GOP majority on the Court in his favor. He'd have to win a verdict there that somehow allowed legislatures in at least three states to reverse the will of their voters to appoint Trump electors instead of Biden's by December 8th.

• Down in Georgia, where Trump lost by about 13,000 votes following a statewide hand "audit" of all ballots last week, the Trumpy Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger and even Trumpier Republican Governor Brian Kemp both certified Biden's victory on Friday. Over the weekend, MAGA "Stop the Steal" rallies in the state included verbal attacks on both Kemp and Raffensperger, along with vows to destroy the GOP and promises to boycott the critical January U.S. Senate runoffs in the state. We wish them nothing but luck in their endeavor! That came as Powell was taking to far-far right wingnut Newsmax TV over the weekend to allege that Raffensperger and Kemp were paid off by Dominion to steal the election for the Democrats' Presidential candidate. She offered no evidence for her claims. After years of critically reporting on both Kemp and Raffensperger --- including his ill-advised decision to spend $100+ million on Dominion's 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting systems this year --- we are unaware of any such evidence to support her claims. But we wish her nothing but luck in her endeavor to prove it! For now, the thanks she received was being tossed under the bus by Trump late on Sunday night.

• There was a whole lot more along the way today, but you'll have tune it for it all, along with some great calls we responded to near the end of the show today, as The Crazy continues to continue...

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Join us on today's BradCast for a deep dive down into the twisted rabbit hole of Team Trump's recently manufactured claims that Canadian election vendor Dominion Voting Systems and its Venezuelan-tied competitor Smartmatic secretly joined forces as part of an enormous international conspiracy (also involving the late Hugo Chavez) to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump on behalf of Joe Biden and the Democrats. We happen to know a bit about these claims, as they are directly based on one (or more) of my own exclusive investigate reports from a decade ago. [Audio link to show is posted below summary.]

As it turns out, The BRAD BLOG is actually responsible for the original kernel of truth that has become the pretend conspiracy now being used as the basis for Trump's attempt to reverse the results of the 2020 election. These are the claims now being shared by Trump's attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, not to mention by Trump himself.

The initial story is based on a deeply reported, well-evidenced and independently verifiable 2010 investigative exclusive of mine (also republished by HuffPo) that Republicans, over the past week or so, have been citing as the basis for their so-far evidence-free claims that Democrats teamed up with Dominion, Smartmatic --- and also China and Cuba somehow --- to commit "nationwide voter fraud" via computers (computers don't commit voter fraud, voters do) to flip the results of the election. They claim this proves that Donald Trump actually won the election in a landslide --- though, as even Tucker Carlson of Fox "News" found out, they have no actual evidence to back any of it up.

We share their actual claims, the original basis for them (which they have absurdly bastardized to the point that it is barely recognizable) and how others in the party, like Arizona State GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward, have run with the ball to misrepresent facts and manufacture claims in her scary scary new video titled "DOMINION EXPOSED! This Video Should Terrify Every Single American".

We explain what all of these folks got right (almost nothing) and wrong (pretty much all of it...though Chavez is tied in to the story --- or was before he died seven years ago), and what the top two real takeaways should be for both parties and all American voters now that the GOP has finally decided to become concerned --- or, at least, pretend to be --- about the dangers of electronic voting and tabulation systems:

1. Simply because a computerized voting and tabulation system is vulnerable to fraud and manipulation does not mean that any particular election run on it has been defrauded or manipulated, and;
2. Even if an election is 100% secure and accurate, if it can't be known by the public to have been 100% secure and accurate, it is every bit as much of a threat to confidence in our democratic system as it would be if the election had actually been stolen on such a system.

The past few days should give you plenty of evidence for that, at least!

There are too many details beyond that to include in a summary, so I hope you'll just buckle up and tune in for the full rollicking story today on this one!

But, one other point worth noting here. While we've been reporting on all of these facts --- with independently verifiable evidence --- for nearly two decades now, it is for the above reasons that we have been inviting Republicans of late to put their money where there mouths are. If they are actually concerned about easily manipulated elections by Dominion (or any other computer vote system vendor), then join us in demanding the use of only hand-marked paper ballots for Georgia's upcoming critical U.S. Senate runoffs in January (which will determine partisan control of the U.S. Senate). Those ballots should then be publicly hand-counted on Election Night. It's just two races with two candidates each, so it's very easy to count publicly in a single night, and it would result in Dominion being tossed out of elections entirely in the state of Georgia! How about it Repubs? You in? I'll even drive out to Phoenix to make a new video about it with Kelli Ward if she joins the call. Why wouldn't she?

Then, we're joined today by George Washington University Law School professor and Washington Post contributor RANDALL D. ELIASON, for his explanation as to why he believes it is appropriate to bring public pressure against high-profile law firms representing Trump in his evidence-free "voter fraud" cases, but not against attorneys and firms who choose to represent other despicable individuals like terrorists, child molesters and the KKK. That, after top national law firms recently withdrew from Trump's fraudulent "fraud" cases following public opprobrium encouraged by the anti-Trump Republicans of the Lincoln Project. (Also, here's that recent piece I mentioned from Eliason on Trump's upcoming PardonPalooza!)

Also today: The latest news from Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan in Trump's attempted coup; the one Republican Senator who is finally calling it out; and the news that Florida's Republican Senator Rick Scott and Donald Trump Jr., have now both tested positive for the coronavirus...

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On today's BradCast: Even though creepy liars like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz "guaranteed" we'd no longer be talking about "COVID! COVID! COVID!" after Election Day, it turns out they were wrong. Who could have predicted it? And what else are we still talking about after the election? The election! Because Trump is continuing his desperate efforts to try and steal it from the voters and Joe Biden, the candidate they elected. But it would be a mistake to ignore what Trump is trying to do. We think. [Audio link to show is posted below summary.]

Among the many stories covered on today's show, we begin with the pandemic...

• U.S. hits a grim official milestone, with quarter of a million now dead from COVID-19, most of them unnecessarily so, thanks to our deranged President, experts now predict we may see 400,000 fatalities by February. The President of the United States remains in his bunker and has offered no comment;

• The CDC implores Americans to limit travel and gatherings over next week's Thanksgiving holiday;

• As the pandemic surges out of control in all 50 states, those with denialist leaders who failed to implement serious restrictions are now the ones with the highest per-capita infection, hospitalization and death rates. So, yeah, the highest rates are, by far, in "red" states by and large, while "blue" states, like California and New York have among the lowest rates. (Note to Republicans: Election Day is over. You don't have to lie about COVID anymore to try and help Trump get re-elected. You can now start protecting the lives of your fucking constituents like you should have done months ago.)

Then it's on to the, yes, still-uncertified election...

• While the bulk of the GOP remains in as much denial about the Presidential election as they are about the coronavirus, and the pathetic Trump Administration continues to delay important transition work to a Biden Administration, a few cracks in the wall are beginning to form, even visible from the wingnut couch on Fox & Friends crew and even by Mitch McConnell;

• But the two Wayne County, Michigan wingnuts --- who held out for three hours with phony claims about "voter fraud" in Detroit before agreeing to certify the County's results --- are also having trouble letting go. They want yet another do-over vote to rescind the certification following a call from Trump. The state says that won't happen. But state certification is still to come next Monday and the state Board of Canvassers is constructed the same way the Wayne County Board is: a four-person Board with two Ds and two Rs. So anything could happen by the time they are set to vote to certify results in the state next week, where, by all available evidence, Biden trounced Trump by nearly 160,000 votes;

• Michigan is not the only state where some GOP dead-enders are hoping to somehow block certification of the November 3rd election. Similar (if likely similarly futile) efforts are afoot in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Nevada;

• Failure, however is not a roadblock for Trump, a man for whom the idea of simply doing the right thing has never occurred. On Thursday, he invited the Republican legislative leaders of the gerrymandered Michigan state House and Senate to the White House for a meeting on Friday, where it's expected he will try to convince them to convene a vote of the state legislature to override the popular democratic will of the voters and award the state's elector to The Loser instead;

• And for those who say The Loser's scheme could never EVER actually happen, I tend to agree with you (Desi may not). But I would also urge you, by all means, to NOT read this article today by Democratic strategist Chris Marshall headlined: "Are you sure Trump's plan to steal the election has failed? You shouldn't be".

Finally, for some less terrifying news, ironically enough...

• Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as the UK accelerates its phase out of gas cars to 2030; Major U.S. automakers are revealed to have known about the dangers of global warming 50 years ago and lied about it; Trump's Interior Dept. reverses a conservation project that Trump bragged about on the campaign trail; and a major city moves to phase out all fossil fuels in all new buildings...

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On today's BradCast: A long-awaited ruling in the federal case challenging Georgia's new, unverifiable, already-failed $100+ million touchscreen vote systems --- which failed again on day one of early voting today in the Peach State. Also, my escape from "Twitter Jail" and the California GOP deploys fraudulent mail-in drop-boxes across the state. [Audio link to show follows below.]

We start today by avoiding, for now, the first day of the illegitimate confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. Instead, we offer some exclusive news that is not being reported elsewhere on two fronts, both related to Georgia's disastrous new voting system. First up, an explanation --- or, a conclusion for now --- to the saga that resulted in my 4 days suspension on Twitter beginning late last week, for the crime of posting a completely accurate tweet about two weeks ago, reporting that GA's Secretary of State informed elections officials in all 159 counties to immediately halt pre-election testing of their new touchscreen voting systems, due to an error that prevented candidates in one of Georgia's two U.S. Senate elections this year from appearing on screen for voters. The error, as I noted in my infamous (and accurate) tweet, would eventually require all new software for the November elections. In fact, as the federal ruling we discuss today reveals, the state installed all new, uncertified software on all 34,000 of the new voting machines just days ago, in violation of state law. You can read the full saga, with links to the federal court filings proving the accuracy of the tweet, and why I eventually relented and deleted it right here.

As Georgia began its first day of early voting on Monday, sure enough, the vote system I was warning about in that tweet failed, leading to six-hour lines to vote in some places. But the long-running federal court case whose emergency filings revealed the serious problem I was tweeting, finally came to a conclusion --- of sorts, at least for now --- late on Sunday night. That is when U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg finally released her long-awaited ruling in the case which challenged the security, accuracy and constitutionality of the state's use of new, unverifiable touchscreen voting systems made by Dominion Voting Systems. The Plaintiffs called for them to be replaced by a cheaper, verifiable hand-marked paper ballots system.

Last year, Totenberg found the state's previous, 20-year old Diebold touchscreen systems to be unsecure, unverifiable and, thus, unconstitutional, ordering them banned for all future elections in the state. On Sunday night, in her long-awaited 147-page ruling [PDF] that begins by citing the plot to the movie Groundhog Day, Totenberg once again finds the state's new touchscreen Ballot Marking Device (BMD) "presents serious system security vulnerability and operational issues that may place Plaintiffs and other voters at risk of deprivation of their fundamental right to cast an effective vote that is accurately counted." The judge warned "these risks are neither hypothetical nor remote" and slams "the insularity" of the "stance" by the GA Sec. of State and the state's private vendor, Canadian-based Dominion Voting Systems, "in evaluation and management of the security and vulnerability of the BMD system [which] does not benefit the public or citizen's confident exercise of the franchise."

After detailing lies, inaccuracies and a lack of knowledge in the testimony of the state's "experts" in the case (no actual cybersecurity experts were presented by them, only employees of the vendors who admitted they had no actual cybsersecurity experience, nor did any penetration tests of the systems before certifying them for use in GA elections!), Judge Totenberg concludes: "The Plaintiffs’ national cybersecurity experts convincingly present evidence that this is not a question of 'might this actually ever happen?' – but 'when it will happen,' especially if further protective measures are not taken. Given the masking nature of malware and the current systems described here, if the State and Dominion simply stand by and say, 'we have never seen it,' the future does not bode well."

For now, that future includes the use of the systems that Totenberg clearly finds so dangerous because, as she explains, it might cause chaos for elections officials if she ordered the use of hand-marked paper ballots at the polling places this close to Election Day.

We're joined once again to discuss the case today by MARILYN MARKS of case plaintiff Coalition for Good Governance, which has been leading this long and important federal court battle now for several years. She has been joining us to discuss it at critical junctures, even while most of the broadcast media has studiously avoided covering it all. Marks offers her reaction to the judge's long-awaited ruling, describes her disappointment in the ultimate order from the judge (for now), while expressing confidence that these systems --- just like the state's previous ones --- will eventually be barred by this judge for use for the very same reasons that she ordered the state's old ones to finally be trashed.

"What we see here is these systems are put together in a slipshod fashion, without security being an important priority at all to these companies," Marks tells me. "These voting system vendors will say anything, and unfortunately many of our election officials who are purchasing these systems will repeat and parrot whatever those words are. You begin to wonder what is it that drives these elections officials, like Secretary [of State Brad] Raffensberger in Georgia, to buy the most expensive and least-auditable equipment."

Noting that unverifiable BMD systems similar to the ones now being forced on voters for the first time at the polls in other critical battlegrounds --- such as Philadelphia, the most Democratic-leaning county in North Carolina, all of South Carolina, as well as key counties in Texas and Ohio, not to mention the nation's most populous voting jurisdiction, Los Angeles County --- Marks decries the damage to democracy being done in all of those locations, while still being hopeful for the future.

"If there's good news in the judge's denial of relief for November, she did write a very solid yet scathing opinion, and explained in detail why these systems are not secure," she explains. "I'm hopeful that her opinion can spread across --- certainly Los Angeles, and all the counties that are using these systems in Pennsylvania and South Carolina, and even my home county of Mecklenberg, North Carolina --- and shake up some of these election officials. But maybe, most importantly, some of these candidates. That is such a shame that we don't have the parties and we don't have the candidates demanding a fair system."

Marks adds: "We're confident we'll win the case. We've proven our point. We've proven that they're unconstitutional. We've proven that they're insecure. We've proven that people shouldn't be permitted to vote on them. The only piece that's missing is, how long does it take? How long does it take for jurisdictions to be prepared to do something simple, like hand out hand-marked paper ballots? Given how important this election is, it is a real shame that we have to put up with these machines in November."

Finally, we close with the news that Republicans in California --- after Trump and his GOP have been suing to do away with mail-in drop-boxes all over the country --- are actually deploying fake ones up and down the Golden State, in apparent violation of the law, according to California's Secretary of State...

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Before we get to our otherwise previously-scheduled Special Coverage of Wednesday night's Vice Presidential debate, we open today's BradCast with the news that Twitter has suspended TheBradBlog's account for posting a 100% accurate tweet regarding Georgia's new touchscreen voting systems. [Audio link to full show is posted below summary.]

I laid out the entire, maddening story regarding the tweet in question in a BRAD BLOG item today, since I can't post at all right now on Twitter, while they review my "appeal" to their finding that a two week old, demonstrably accurate tweet is in violation of the service's "rules against posting misleading information about voting." As you can imagine, my tweet is well supported, as its based on email from the GA Sec. of State's office sent to all 159 counties regarding an error discovered in the state's new touchscreen voting systems used by every voter at every polling place in the state. The email I cite is from the SoS and was published in a federal court filing (also linked with the tweet!) as part of a long-running lawsuit challenging the use of those machines, which we've reported on here for years now. The lawsuit seeks hand-marked paper ballots for voters at the polling place instead. The full story of what happened with Twitter, including screenshots and links to the federal filing and SoS email is posted here.

Then its on to last night's refreshingly dull and normal(ish) Vice Presidential Debate from Salt Lake City, Utah between Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic Veep nominee Sen. Kamala Harris. We're joined today for analysis and commentary by award-winning opinion journalist HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Digby's Hullabaloo, along with author and political scientist DAVID FARIS of Roosevelt University and The Week.

While the debate may have been dull --- save for the fly --- there was much revealed (and much evaded) and much to discuss about it in today's very lively show, including, near the end, whether there will be any more debates at all this year.

I'd say more about today's fun (and, at times, funny) show, but I've got to get back to fighting with Twitter now, apparently. Since I'm not allowed to post there for the time being --- unless I delete a completely accurate and newsworthy tweet --- please feel free to share today's show over there yourself! Thanks!

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[Ed Note 10/11/2020: After waiting more than 72 hours for a reply to my second "appeal" from Twitter, I've had no choice but to delete the accurate tweet in question, because, after a long weekend without access, simply need to get back on it. Much of my work happens via that social media service right now, unfortunately. See the final UPDATE at bottom of story for a full explanation of why I finally had to relent, and a few thoughts about what it portends moving forward. - BF]

Well, I woke up this morning to find that Twitter had restricted/suspended my account due to what they describe as my having violated the service's "rules against posting misleading information about voting" with a 100% accurate tweet from two weeks ago, which reported on a federal court filing...

Here's a screenshot of the (apparently-still-available?) tweet in question, which they claim to be in violation of their rules, along with the evidence from the federal court filing proving that it's completely accurate...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We're back on today's BradCast, after surviving a long hot holiday weekend here in California (with huge thanks to Nicole Sandler for covering for us for a few days!) [Audio link to today's show is posted below summary.]

Amid record heat in Southern California --- with one city in L.A. County city topping out at a record 121 degrees on Sunday! --- fires raged and continue to do so, up and down the state. Nearly 300 people stranded by smoke and fires in various parts of the Golden State needed to be rescued by helicopters over the past four days as climate change-fueled blazes have, so far, chewed through a record 2 million acres in the state, destroying more than 3,300 structures in 900 different fires since mid-August. The scariest part: the worst months for California's ever-lengthening fire season are usually September and October. So, even after the worst fire season now on record, the worst may still be yet to come this year, as our climate crisis continues to intensify and a climate change denier is once again heading up the Republican Party's Presidential ticket.

It would be nice if we weren't one of the few media outlets connecting those particular dots. Absentee ballots have now begun to ship out to voters in states like North Carolina which has, itself, been ravaged in recent years by various climate related crises, from hurricanes to toxic coal ash spills to ever-rising sea levels. As voting for the general election finally begins there and in other battleground states, the corporate media would help us all if they focused (or even mentioned!) so many of the very real issues that are at stake in this year's critical Presidential election, including the devastation of climate change!

Speaking of which, a new story today gives me reason once again to cite one of my worst fears for this November's elections, as the Hartford Public School District in Connecticut was forced to cancel its first day of classes today. The cancellation was not due to the continuing COVID crisis, but caused by a ransomware attack that crippled the District's computer networks. That attack echoes a series of attacks against the Miami-Dade County Public School system in Florida last week, and could foreshadow trouble to come on November 3rd. Because so many voting jurisdictions now foolishly rely on computer networks and the Internet to cast, count and even check people in to vote on electronic pollbooks, a ransomware attack before or on Election Day would be devastating.

But don't worry! Your U.S. Dept. of Justice in on the job! Ya know, the one led by Donald Trump's fixer and Attorney General Bill Barr who lied to CNN's Wolf Blitzer last week about massive absentee ballot fraud, claiming a 2017 "indictment" in Texas for the theft of 1,700 mail-in ballots. After the actual state prosecutors called BS on Barr's claim's, the DoJ was forced to admit it was false. Ironically, Barr also claimed that "people have to have confidence in the results of the election and the legitimacy of the government." That would be more likely, of course, if we didn't have a U.S. Attorney General willing to casually forward two year old false claims about election fraud on major cable news networks.

Then we move to the biggest story over the holiday weekend, the report from The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg that Donald Trump regards members of the military, including those were killed or captured and tortured during their service, as "losers" and "suckers". Goldberg's reporting has now been independently confirmed by multiple other media outlets, including even Fox "News", while Trump and the White House unconvincingly describe the detailed and independently corroborated reporting as "fake news". In his attempt to distract from that story on Monday, Trump attacked his own top military brass, claiming that too much is spent on defense contractors --- even after Trump has spent years citing his own increases to defense spending as one of his Administration's top accomplishments.

We're joined today by WILL GOODWIN, U.S. Army veteran, West Point grad and now Director of Government Relations for VoteVets.org, the nation's largest progressive veterans organization, founded in 2006, and now representing more than 500,000 vets, families and supporters. In the wake of the stunning (if not surprising) reports of Trump's disparagement of military members --- from the captured and tortured Vietnam War prisoner of war John McCain, to the shot down WWII fighter pilot George H.W. Bush, to the 1,800 U.S. Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood during WWI --- as "losers" and "suckers" all, VoteVets has now released several different video ads in response.

In one, family members of those who lost loved ones in recent wars respond to the President's remarks and, in another, a 98-year old WWII veteran, captured and forced into slave labor for 42 months, encourages Americans to vote for Joe Biden and against "other politicians if they continue to support Donald Trump."

For his part, Goodwin shares his thoughts in response to the reported insults by the Commander-in-Chief --- who he regards as "a maniac in the Oval Office" --- and how they are likely to affect the votes cast by members of the nation's armed forces this year. Despite popular belief that the military tends to support the Republican candidate, Goodwin cites polling to suggest the opposite --- polling completed before last week's news from The Atlantic. He says that Goldberg's report "is nothing new from Donald Trump when it comes to his hatred toward the military, towards military families, and towards our veterans, but somehow it's a new low." Goodwin goes on to describe Trump's tenure as "four years of failed leadership as Commander-in-Chief," before detailing a seemingly endless list of ways in which Trump has failed our troops, our veterans, our Gold Star Families, as well as the nation's security and standing on the world stage.

"Our allies have turned away from us --- they do not know how to work with a maniac in the Oval Office like Donald Trump --- and our enemies and adversaries are emboldened. They're emboldened to continue attacking the very integrity of our democracy and going after our elections infrastructure. And, frankly, they have taken more direct actions, escalating military tensions. The Russian buzzing US Navy ships, intercepting our aircraft. The continued expansion of the Chinese footprint in various places around the world," Goodwin argues. "We have seen Democrats across the board, including in [Congressional] seats where Donald Trump may be popular, standing up once again and speaking the truth on how disgusting this is. And we're seeing the same failure from Republicans to speak up at all. Republicans who represent massive military and veteran populations...refusing to condemn the President."

Finally today, we close on a very sad note, with the news that Kevin Zeese, longtime progressive activist, attorney, fighter for universal healthcare, fair elections, racial and economic justice and peace, passed away suddenly on Sunday from what appears to have been a heart attack as he slept. Kevin was also a friend of both The BRAD BLOG and The BradCast, having joined on us on air on many occasions while taking on our nation's worst failures and most insidious corporate oligarchs. We share several thoughts on his passing from a number of other progressive activists today. Zeese was 64 and will be dearly missed...as his good fight for a better and more just world will, and must, continue...

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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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This will not be easy. It never is. But, this year, we are facing obstacles to voting that we have never seen before. Not only from the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis, which is already difficult enough, but from those who hope to exploit the pandemic along with their access to the levers of power to make voting --- by some --- as difficult as possible. It is now up to all of us to overcome those obstacles.

President Trump is, by no means, the first right-wing Republican to recognize that he can't win if voters turn out in large numbers.

"I don't want everybody to vote," Paul Weyrich, the GOP's notorious godfather of right-wing voter suppression infamously quipped during a 1980 address to a group of evangelical Christian ministers. "In fact, our leverage in the elections goes up as the voting populace goes down," he added, after denigrating those who seek "good government" through maximum, informed voter participation, as people who suffer from "goo goo syndrome".

(The soaring pandemic death toll and an unprecedented 32.9% annualized second quarterly plunge in the GDP, serve as testament to what happens when We the People allow those opposed to "good government" to be placed in charge of our political economy.)

Trump's repeated attempts to suppress voter turnout are by no means novel --- as amply demonstrated during our two-part coverage (here and here) of the 2011 U.S. Senate hearings concerning a spike in GOP-engineered, state voter suppression laws. During those hearings nearly a decade ago, civil rights litigator Judith Browne Dianis described that spike as "the largest legislative effort to roll back voting rights since the post-Reconstruction era."

What makes our current circumstance both novel and extraordinarily dangerous is that an authoritarian-wannabe Donald Trump is the first Republican President who has been positioned to weaponize a pandemic by forcing voters to choose between exercising their fundamental right to vote and the risk of contracting a deadly virus. Instead of simply relying upon state voter suppression laws, Trump has aspired to engage in wholesale suppression on a national scale. Operating through a major GOP/Trump donor-turned-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, Trump seeks to actively sabotage the social distancing protection that Vote-by-Mail (VBM) affords by creating delays in U.S. Postal Service (USPS) deliveries.

Last Friday, during a must-listen-to segment of The BradCast, Mark Dimondstein, President of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), confirmed that mail slow-downs were "happening across the country" at a time in which the USPS was already in "crisis mode" as a result of the dangers posed by COVID-19. In his view, the Post Office is now at the "epicenter" of the 2020 battle over "voting rights", noting that "without Vote-by-Mail people aren't going to be able to vote."

Thus, in addition to fending off "dubious" Republican legal challenges to mail-in voting expansion, democracy's defenders --- which, in this case, includes We the People --- must now double our own efforts to navigate Trump's sabotage of mail delivery. This, at a time when election officials in states that have not previously engaged in near-universal VBM must upgrade their electoral infrastructure in order to accommodate and tabulate an unprecedented volume of hand-marked paper VBM ballots.

But there are proactive steps that jurisdictions --- and, yes, you! --- can take to maximize the odds that your ballot is tallied this year...

On today's BradCast (after a quick correction, thanks to @RadioDoogie on The Twitters, about a point covered on yesterday's show): Conspiracy theorists are too often disregarded. Especially with so many actual conspiracies behind so many of the disasters we're now facing in the U.S. [Audio link to show is posted below summary.]

Sure, some should be disregarded. One example is rightwing wingnut Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, who seemed to think that the coronavirus was some sort of conspiracy spun up by Democrats or the Chinese (or someone) to take down Donald Trump and the Republicans. A missive from one of his aide's suggests he berated staff members who wore masks after he demanded they show up at his office each day in the middle of our worsening pandemic to "be an example to America on how to open up safely."

COVID isn't a conspiracy. And now Gohmert is infected with it. We wish him and, most importantly, his family and staff well. He's just one of far too many who could now be facing serious consequences because he either fell for the phony conspiracy claims or knew better but didn't care. Here's just another heartbreaking example of someone else who fell for the hoax that Gohmert was helping to spread that coronavirus was a hoax.

But, there is indeed a conspiracy behind the claims that COVID is a hoax. We saw that well-funded conspiracy playing out in real time this week, as the dark money-supported "Tea Party Patriots" spun off to another phony astroturf organization calling itself "America's Frontline Doctors". They're the ones who put on that Breitbart live-streamed show in D.C. this week --- with quack "doctors" declaring hydroxychloroquine is a "cure" for COVID and that you shouldn't wear a mask --- which both Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. (and millions of others) retweeted in tandem earlier this week. The pair of Stable Geniuses were temporarily suspended (Jr.) by the social media platform for sharing what Twitter and Facebook and YouTube describe as "false information about cures and treatments for COVID-19" or saw the retweets deleted entirely (Sr.) But, yes, there is a very real --- and well-funded --- conspiracy of desperate wingnuts hoping to save the 2020 election for Trump who are behind the deadly nonsense that has hoaxed so many and killed at least 150,000 Americans to date.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, police have now identified the infamous "Umbrella Man". Remember the white man clad from head to toe in black, with a gas-mask and umbrella, using a hammer to casually smash the windows at an AutoZone store to help kick off riots and looting after two days of otherwise peaceful protests following the police killing of George Floyd?

Turns out the man, now identified by the Minneapolis Police Department as Mitchell Wesley Carlson, is allegedly a member of the Hell's Angels-affiliated Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood, a white supremacist group who "wanted to sow discord and racial unrest by breaking out the windows and writing" "free shit for everyone zone" on the doors of the store, according to the MPD. (He has also been tied to the Aryan Cowboys harassment of a Muslim woman and her four-year old child in a neighboring city of Stillwater.)

The conspiracy to spark riots blamed on "leftist anarchists" worked, and was undoubtedly part of a larger effort identified by leaked memos from federal authorities tracking "white racially motivated violent extremists" who reportedly discussed inciting riots while posing as "members" of the loosely affiliated group of anti-fascists who call themselves Antifa. So, the "conspiracy theory" pushed by Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr and other Fox "News"-fueled Republicans that Black Lives Matter, Antifa and unidentified "leftist anarchists" are somehow behind riots and looting at mostly peaceful protests around the country has little evidence to support it. But the theory that a conspiracy of white supremacist provocateurs is hoping to spark a race war --- evidence of which is conveniently ignored by Trump, Barr and all the rest --- appears to be, so far, right on the money.

Finally today, at the end of another harrowing hour, it's the great Randy Rainbow to save us all with another much-needed --- and hilarious --- musical happy ending...

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