With the bipartisan January 6 Committee having postponed today's hearing, we take the opportunity on today's BradCast to spend some time rebutting the disgraced former President's supposed rebuttal to the two damning hearings held to date. But, of course, we've got much more as well, including election results from Tuesday and evidence of both voting system problems and bad faith elected MAGA officials already trying to disenfranchise 2022 voters. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

Among the stories covered on today's program...

• An error caused by paper jams during ballot scanning on Election Day at the precincts on the state's computer tabulators in Iowa during their June 7 primaries has reportedly resulted in a whole bunch of recounts across the state. Cedar Rapid's KCRG cites an email from the Sec. of State's office which has lead to those recounts, in hopes of reconciling the number of ballots misreported by the scanners as cast with the number of voters who actually signed in to vote.

• Noteworthy election results from four states which held primaries on Tuesday (Maine, Nevada, North Dakota and South Carolina) and one (Texas) which purposely held a low-turnout U.S. Special Election yesterday, instead of at the same time as their regular primaries in March or primary runoffs in May. While we cover a lot of Tuesday's races, and why they matter (or don't), the most disturbing one is likely the Secretary of State's race in Nevada, where a 2020 election denialist by the name of Jim Marchant has apparently won a 38% plurality to become the GOP's nominee to become the critical swing-state's chief election official in advance of the 2024 election.

• The dangers of an election denier like Marchant, who served as one of the state GOP's fake electors in 2020, and who has said he wouldn't have certified Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump that year had he been SoS at the time, is a stark warning of what lies ahead. But we're already seeing the dangers of brain-poisoned MAGA Mobsters in positions of elected authority. The three-person County Commission in a very right-leaning rural county in New Mexico, is refusing to certify results from their June 7 primary. Even though votes are cast on hand-marked paper ballots across the state, the County Commission unanimously voted against certification of primary results, citing distrust of the County's digital ballot scanners made by Dominion Voting. They have no evidence of fraud, which might otherwise allow a court to order the hand-count they are seeking. They just don't trust the results in the County where Trump won 62% of the vote in 2020. The Republican County Clerk is furious and the Democratic Sec. of State is now suing the County Commission ahead of this Friday's deadline for County certification. Expect much more of this in the months and years ahead. We've long warned about exactly this type of fallout from our irresponsible rush to the use secret vote casting and counting systems made by private vendors and the avenues it opens for opportunists to claim fraud without any evidence of same.

• On Monday night, after the bipartisan U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol and other efforts by Trump to steal the 2020 election, our corrupt former President issued a 12-page rebuttal [PDF] to the Committee's first two hearings. We rebut his dumb rebuttal today. It leans heavily on tired, long-ago debunked nonsense, such as his lead in some swing-states on Election Night "inexplicably" disappearing (after heavily-Republican polling place ballots were quickly tallied before the arduous task of opening and verifying and counting heavily-Democratic vote-by-mail ballots one-by-one) and how thousands attended his rallies, while Biden chose not to hold super-spreader events during the worst pandemic in 100 years. Much of Trump's (ghost-writer's) claims were already debunked during the Committee hearings to date, which he seems to presume that his supporters didn't watch or are too dumb to understand.

  Trump's ghost-writer spends most of the rebuttal ink citing what is laughably described as "indisputable proof" of "Ballot Trafficking" presented in the repeatedly debunked 2000 Mules movie. That's a pretend documentary film created by a long-discredited GOP "election integrity" group named True the Vote and a rightwing activist named Dinesh D'Souza who actually pleaded guilty himself to several federal election fraud crimes before he was later pardoned by Trump.

  As noted, the film has been repeatedly debunked, including by us, several times by now. Months before it was even released, the Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI) and FBI concluded the group's claims about cell phone data purporting to reveal evidence of "ballot harvesting" by "mules" of tens or hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots cast in drop-boxes, in fact, reveals no crimes at all. A GA state Board of Elections investigation after the movie's release found that supposed "ballot mules" in Atlanta, shown via security camera footage in the film, were just regular voters legally casting their own ballot and those of direct family members. None of the "mules" are ever seen in the film visiting a drop-box or multiple boxes more than once.

  But, perhaps the most stinging rebuttal came from Trump's own Attorney General, Bill Barr this week. During sworn testimony to the J6 Committee, shared by the panel on Monday, Barr laughed out loud at even the mention of the name of the film, before going on to explain how he found it to be "singularly unimpressive," "indefensible," and that it failed to "establish widespread illegal harvesting." That, of course, is a long way from the "indisputable proof" Trump's dumb rebuttal claimed it to be.

• Finally, speaking of the House J6 Committee, Republican Vice Chair Liz Cheney released a video teaser on Tuesday for its next upcoming hearing scheduled for Thursday. This one will focus on the pressure Trump placed on Vice President Mike Pence to help him steal the 2020 election by tossing out valid Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021. Cheney's teaser video includes testimony from one of Trump's top White House attorneys who says he warned outside lawyer John Eastman, who developed the scheme for Pence to toss out the votes, to "get a great f'ing criminal defense lawyer," adding "you're gonna need it."

Special Coverage of tomorrow's J6 Hearing, of course, on tomorrow's BradCast!...

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For years, as I told my guest on today's BradCast, I've wondered if we were being too alarmist during his many appearances on the show. But now I'm starting to wonder if we haven't been alarmist enough. "I would say that you and I have been the exact right amount of alarmist," he tells me in response. "Time and time again, the Court has proved that it is going rogue, that it is lawless, that it is really corrupted by partisan politics." If the nation hasn't noticed by now, it is likely about to. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

Before we get to that cheery conversation, a couple of quick news items today, as voters in Maine, Nevada, North Dakota and South Carolina headed to polls on Tuesday for critical mid-term elections. (Also in Texas, where there is a special election to fill a vacated Democratic U.S. House seat.) Results of note on tomorrow's program.

Wednesday's scheduled hearing in the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection and related Donald Trump crimes has been postponed until, presumably, next week. The Wednesday hearing had been set to focus on Trump's failed effort to decapitate the Dept. of Justice in order to install a low-level flunky with a scheme to help him steal the 2020 election by lying to state legislatures that the DoJ had found massive fraud in swing-states. Committee members claim the delayed hearing is only due to a need to give time to their over-worked understaffed video crew. Meanwhile, Thursday's scheduled hearing, focused on the pressure Trump placed on Vice President Pence to help steal the election for him on January 6, is still said to be on track.

In Congress today, the House passed a bill previously adopted by the U.S. Senate to extend security protections to family members of Supreme Court Justices. It's remarkable how quickly Republicans can act to pass laws to protect certain people that they give a damn about from gun violence. Every other family in America is on their own apparently. Best of luck.

And, speaking of SCOTUS, as their term comes to a close over the next two weeks, we catch up with the great MARK JOSEPH STERN, legal journalist and Supreme Court expert at Slate.com, on a whole passel of recent and coming-soon opinions that are currently shaking and set to shake the American legal and judicial system to its core

The outlook, as suggested by my opening graf above, is not encouraging. "I don't know what to tell you except that madness is coming," warns Stern. Tune in for real facts and hard truths about what is coming. But, by way of preview of some of the cases and issues discussed today...

• The tragic case of Terence Andrus, soon to be put to death, and what could represent the end of the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of competent legal representation, particularly in death penalty cases. Perhaps even more astounding, the Court's ruling on Monday directly contradicts their own ruling on the very same case in 2020 when, just two years ago, they sent the matter back down to the Texas State Court, which has since apparently decided that they needn't follow SCOTUS orders. And now, incredibly, with the loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the addition of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, SCOTUS agrees! "There can be no 'settled law' when SCOTUS lets rogue judges flout its own rulings and get away with it," Stern wrote in his coverage on Monday. Today he warns that with the Supreme Court failing to enforce its own precedents, "it really does send this message, a kind of wink and a nod, to lower courts that they can start defying these disfavored precedents, start nullifying these disfavored Constitutional rights, and get away with it. And that is a scary new phase."

• The coming-soon overturning of Roe v. Wade. We haven't spoken to Stern since the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion by the GOP's corrupt, packed and stolen majority which is set to end 50 years of Constitutional freedoms and privacy rights established by the landmark 1973 opinion. He explains that the Court has since cracked down on all such leaks, but that even in a best-case scenario where the final opinion is somewhat softened, the ruling is certain to be "tragic". Moreover, he warns that overturning the privacy rights of Roe will "cast a lot of doubt on decisions protecting the right to privacy --- for gay people, for interracial couples, for people who use contraception --- and lower courts will seize upon that language and use it to start overturning those rights." That is just one reason why the Andrus ruling described above is so wildly dangerous.

• Ending local government's right to protect residents from gun violence. The Court is set to issue its opinion on a challenge to New York's more-than-100-year old requirement that those seeking to carry concealed firearms apply for a special permit to do so. As soon as next week, despite the Second Amendment's mandate that the right to bear arms should be "well-regulated," the NY law is likely to be struck down by SCOTUS. "We should expect the Supreme Court to declare that there is a Second Amendment right, in every state in the country, to carry a concealed weapon in public spaces, even if you have no particularly good reason to want one. And that right cannot be infringed without a very strong interest from the government, which the Court will then explain does not really exist. And, in doing so, will unleash, I think, a wave of violence --- in states like California and New York that have pretty strict limits on concealed carry --- that will be attributable to the Supreme Court," Stern predicts. "But of course the Court will be in its own palace, surrounded by guards and fences, and the Justices will not have to face the lethal consequences of their own ruling."

• West Virginia v. EPA The courts, long ago, placed a stay on President Obama's Clean Power Plan, which would have incentivized the transition from polluting coal-fired power plants to clean, renewable energy production. Then those regulations were replaced entirely by Trump's energy plan. And now, despite absolutely nobody required to follow the Obama EPA's regulations on this, the corrupted SCOTUS decided to take up WV's original challenge to the Obama plan. "This case is incredibly bizarre," Stern rails. "Because right now there is no rule --- I repeat, no rule --- no regulation, that is limiting carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. None. And yet, the Supreme Court is deciding whether the Biden Administration can issue a rule limiting carbon emissions. You might be asking how could it possibly be that the Supreme Court will rule on a regulation that does not yet exist, that may in fact never exist? The answer is that the usual rules about actually taking a live controversy do not seem to apply when the conservative super-majority really wants to kneecap the Biden Administration's regulatory agenda. So, even though the Court has nothing to strike down, it will almost certainly issue a decision purporting to strike down a regulation that doesn't even exist."

As to what Stern has to say about some cases that the Court is likely to pick up for its next term, particularly on something called the Independent State Legislature doctrine --- which doesn't actually exist either, but may very well soon, and will "either limit or abolish the ability of anyone other than a state legislature to set the rules for federal elections" --- well, I don't have the heart to go into the details here. But tune in if you want to be informed about what is coming next...and just in time for the 2024 Presidential election.

Stern has been warning about the opinions set to drop shortly for a very long time on this program. I leave it to you if you want to know what he warns is coming next.

"I don't know what to tell you except that madness is coming, and all we can do is try to prepare for it as best we can," he tells me. "Because this is the direction that the conservative Justices are moving in. They have telegraphed it very clearly, and they are moving us there just on schedule."

I wish I could say we close out today's show by cheering you up with our latest Green News Report, but we pride ourselves in telling listeners the truth, no matter how grim...

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As we were forced to ask several times on today's BradCast: What the hell is up with Republicans and election fraud in Michigan?! But it's not only in Michigan today, as it turns out. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

In upstate New York, in a Rensselaer County city named Troy on Wednesday, a Republican city councilwoman named Kim Ashe-McPherson pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the submission of three fraudulent absentee ballots in both her primary and general election last year. It's a somewhat remarkable and expansive story of apparently a whole bunch of Republican criming going on in Troy and Rensselaer County, with the Albany Times Union describing Ashe-McPherson as "the first person snared in a federal grand jury investigation examining widespread ballot-fraud allegations in Rensselaer County."

Another separate probe by State Police appears to be examining fraud in Troy's Mayoral race, while the GOP Mayor and a whole bunch of GOP County officials have been subpoenaed and/or had their phones seized by law enforcement in recent months. Ashe-McPherson's absentee ballot fraud was apparently carried out with the help of an unnamed insider official at the Rensselaer County Board of Elections. "Earlier this year," the paper notes, "Jason Schofield, the Republican commissioner for the county's Board of Elections, was subpoenaed in connection with the federal investigation." But there's a whole lot of other GOPers who also seem tied into this, and may end up in handcuffs in the days ahead.

Is it any wonder that Republicans accuse Democrats of voter fraud all the time, given that Republicans seem to be constantly committing it themselves?

But things are even more insane in the great state of Michigan. You'll recall that recently, 5 of 10 Republican Gubernatorial candidates vying for the GOP nod to take on Michigan's Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer this November were disqualified from the ballot, after the state Bureau of Elections discovered they had submitted some 68,000 fraudulent petition signatures between them in an attempt to qualify for the ballot. Well, the trouble continues for at least one of the remaining candidates who did manage to qualify without cheating.

All of the GOP gubernatorial hopefuls in MI are 2020 election deniers (despite Joe Biden having defeated Donald Trump in the state by about 150,000 votes, as confirmed by a months long investigation by the GOP-controlled state Senate). But one of the most ardent of the deniers --- and a leading candidate now that the others have been disqualified --- 40-year old Ryan Kelley, was arrested and charged by federal officials on Thursday for his role in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Kelley stands accused, according to the criminal complaint, of disruptive conduct, injuring public property and entering restricted space without permission. Documents filed in court allege he is seen on video that day waving crowds into the Capitol after police lines were defeated. He faces up to a year in prison and a fine as high as $100,000. Perhaps this will actually help his bid for the GOP nomination on August 2nd!

But that's not all we have to report out of MI today, particularly when it comes to GIO election fraud.

Last week, the organizer of a GOP petition effort to qualify a ballot initiative known as "Secure MI Vote", announced they missed the deadline to submit the number of signatures needed. Why did the effort behind this scheme to supposedly curb election fraud with severe new restrictions on voting fail? Election fraud, of course! The organizers discovered some 20,000 signatures they had gathered were fraudulent! (Hey, at least they checked them before turning them in, unlike those 5 GOP Gubernatorial candidates!)

The scheme, however, is even slimier than it sounds. Most of the provisions in the so-far-failed initiative had already been passed by the GOP state legislature, but vetoed by Democratic Gov. Whitmer. But, thanks to a loophole in MI state law, once a ballot initiative qualifies for the ballot, the Legislature is then welcome to pass it into law on a simple, veto-proof majority vote. That was the plan that seems to have failed here.

We're joined today to discuss the entire fine mess by NANCY WANG, Executive Director of the non-partisan, pro-democracy group Voters Not Politicians which, in 2018, enlisted volunteers (rather than corrupt paid contractors) to collect more than 400,000 signatures to place an initiative on MI's ballot for an Independent Redistricting Commission. The measure was successfully adopted by state voters.

"There are so many things wrong right now with the GOP and what they're trying to do with voting rights in Michigan," Wang explains. "What's really caught them is this mixture of incompetence and hypocrisy. They're selling themselves to the voters as the party that's going to 'protect' us from fraud. The only fraud they can demonstrate in our election is what they have inside their own camp. It's ironic, at the very least, that they have been the victim of their own fraud, when they've tried to victimize voters with all of these shenanigans."

Wang walks us through those "shenanigans" and various "loopholes" in state law that allow, for example, petition gathers to be paid by the signature and to lie to voters about the initiative they are asking them to sign on to. In this case, while the GOP group was clear that this measure would never actually be on the ballot, signature gatherers reportedly told prospective signers that the plan was simply to put these issues --- like instituting extreme Photo ID restrictions and restricting absentee voting --- before voters.

"This group is headed by the GOP, funded by the GOP, and they're using the citizens' petition process, lying to voters to sign this thing so that they can do an end-run around the voters," charges Wang. "They're never going to put these provisions on the ballot, they were very clear about that. They were just going to ride this loophole to the legislature to get these voter suppression measures passed." Not that that's what their signature gatherers told people on the ground, however.

"It's about dishonesty. It's about misleading voters. It's about trying to game the system of citizens' petitions. I don't think you could put anything in place that would stop people who don't have any limits whatsoever, any standards that they'll abide by, to further their agenda," Wang tells me.

Next, a story we ran out of time for on our previous BradCast, covering results and other fallout from Tuesday's midterm primaries in seven states. You may recall our coverage of a voting system disaster in Clackamas County, Oregon a couple of weeks ago, where a problem with smeared barcodes printed on vote-by-mail ballots resulted in them being rejected by the computer tabulators. The local County Clerk, in that case, ordered tens of thousands of those otherwise perfectly valid ballots to be duplicated by hand, one-by-one, so they could be run through the tabulators, rather than simply counting them in public by hand.

Well, guess what? It appears the very same thing happened in San Joaquin County, California this week, with 25 to 30% of the County's mail ballots being rejected by the computer scanners. And, once again, rather than hand-counting them, the County is duplicating each and every one of them by hand, this time with the help of about 13 employees from the printing company who screwed up in the first place.

I don't know about you, but I don't want my ballot "remade" behind closed doors by either a County election official OR some schmoe from a commercial printing outfit. But maybe that's just me. In any event, San Joaquin voters may have to wait a bit longer than usual this year for final results in their critical midterm primaries.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with great news for war profiteering Big Oil companies (if terrible news for the rest of us); lousy news about snow disappearing from the previously snow-covered Alps; but some better news regarding the Biden Administration's move to create a new marine sanctuary and end the use of single-use plastic in our national parks...

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We've got yet another jam-packed BradCast for ya today, with results of note --- as we have them so far --- from the 7 states which held primaries on Tuesday. Then, we're joined by our guest with some helpful insight on what Democrats and progressives should learn from this year's elections to date and some of his critical concerns about the upcoming hearings by the bipartisan U.S. House Select Committee investigating January 6, 2021 insurrection. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

First, we fly through an extremely curated selection of results from several key races on Tuesday. Among them...

• IOWA: Retired Navy Admiral Mike Franken upset former U.S. Rep. Abby Finkenauer in the state's Democratic U.S. Senate primary. He will face off against 88-year old, six-term U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley. Also noteworthy in the Hawkeye State: progressive Democratic criminal justice reformer Kimberly Graham won the Democratic primary for prosecutor in Polk County (Des Moines), where she is likely to win this November.
• MISSISSIPPI: Two-term Republican Rep. Michael Guest was forced into a runoff by GOP voters as punishment for having voted in favor of a bipartisan, outside Commission to investigative the January 6th insurrection.
• MONTANA: Donald Trump's disgraced, scandal-plagued, forced-to-resign Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is locked in a tight race to win his old job back as a U.S. Congressman. The final results of the close race with state Sen. Al Olszewski, which Zinke leads by about 1,000 votes as of airtime, will be held up by a day or two due to a ballot printing error that will require, under state law, that all ballots now be hand-counted.
• NEW JERSEY: While there may have been races of note there, we didn't have time for ANY of them today! Sorry about that, NJ! (I know. Always the bridesmaid...)
• NEW MEXICO: Seasoned TV weather guy Mark Ronchetti won the GOP primary for Governor after promising to increase the state's already record oil production, deriding new standards in state schools for increased instruction on race (in a state that is half Hispanic and has 23 federally recognized Native American tribes and nations), and by slamming his November opponent, Democratic Gov. Michelle Luhan Grisham, for closing in-person schooling during the worst pandemic in 100 years. Also: Progressive Democrat Gabriel Vasquez was victorious in the 2nd Congressional District race to take on GOP Rep. Yvette Herrell in what is seen by Dems as a possible House pickup this November.
• SOUTH DAKOTA: The state's only House Member, Republican Dusty Johnson, easily won his primary despite voting to certify the 2020 election results and in favor of the January 6 Commission. Shamefully, there is no Democrat running for the state's single At Large Congressional seat. Of greater note, a ballot proposition that would have raised the threshold for passage of certain future ballot propositions to 60% was soundly rejected by voters. That proposition was meant to make it harder to pass a ballot proposition this November that would expand Medicaid under ObamaCare to state residents. Similar expansions measures have been adopted by voter initiatives in about 7 other states. GOP lawmakers in SD must really hate their own constituents.
• CALIFORNIA: All statewide office holders are Dems, so there isn't much drama there. But two local contests have received quite a bit of national notice. The Los Angeles Mayoral race will go to a runoff, after Trumpy Republican real estate billionaire turned "Democrat" Rick Caruso failed to clear the 50% bar, despite dropping some $40 million of his own money into the race. He'll face progressive Rep. Karen Bass, previously seen as the favorite to win until Caruso and his money showed up, in the November runoff. But, interestingly, receiving as much or more notice from national corporate news outlets than almost any other race on Tuesday, voters recalled progressive criminal justice reformer, Chesa Boudin, after two and half years as San Francisco's District Attorney. Predictably, national media is (mis)reporting this as a story of "failed progressive policies" that resulted in rampant crime in the city, despite the fact that overall crime decreased during Boudin's tenure.

We're then joined by longtime progressive champion, journalist, and author JOHN NICHOLS of The Nation for analysis of Tuesday's contests --- and those from week's past --- along with his concerns and warnings about the upcoming January 6 hearings in the House.

As to the primaries so far this season, Nichols observes, among other things that while "Republican turnout is very spiked" and Dems "not so spiked", that is "not necessarily a complete disaster" for Democrats. He also notes that "progressives are winning a lot of Democratic primaries" and "in some unexpected and really interesting places".

"Despite what a lot of the pundits will tell you," he argues, means that "the grassroots Democratic voters seem to be sending a very clear signal that they want to go up against these Trump Republicans in this very tough year with clearly defined progressive candidates."

While he offers thoughts on the recall defeat of progressive District Attorney Boudin in San Francisco, Nichols also observes that criminal justice reformers are actually still winning elections in many other places around California and elsewhere. (See, for example, a progressive criminal justice reformer victories in neighboring counties to San Francisco and Kim Reynolds in Des Moines, IA, as mentioned above, as just two such examples.)

Then, it's on to the upcoming January 6 hearings, where Nichols has both advice and concerns, particularly about what the Committee will ultimately offer in their critical recommendations. His greatest concerns seem to center on what Democrats are willing to compromise on in order to find unanimity with the Committee's anti-Trump, but still hard-right Republican Vice Chair Liz Cheney.

Among Nichols' top hopes for the Committee: Recommendations that Congress adopt a resolution that bars insurrectionists like Donald Trump from office, as per Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment; and (in what will clearly be a much heavier lift for the Committee's Republicans like Cheney), a call to abolish the Electoral College.

But will the hearings ultimately make any difference to a divided nation, with so many already having hardened their positions on Trump and his attempt to steal the 2020 election? We've got a whole lot to discuss with Nichols today, so I hope you'll tune in!...

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Like it or not, we're back on today's BradCast! But we've got plenty of trouble-making and muckraking for you today, and even some contentious listener calls for your listening pleasure! [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

First up, some long overdue good news. Though we've been warning, in great detail, over the years (nearly 20 of them, at this point) about the risks of voting on 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting systems, we now have some good(ish) company. Last Friday, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) issued a public security advisory regarding nine serious vulnerabilities discovered in touchscreen Ballot Marking Devices (BMD) made by Dominion.

The alert comes after the federal agency's review of a sealed report, which a federal court in Georgia allowed CISA to access, created by the University of Michigan's J. Alex Halderman, a longtime cybersecurity and voting systems expert who is serving as an expert witness in the Coalition for Good Governance's long-running lawsuit to block the use of those systems in the state. The Coalition, founded and headed up by frequent BradCast guest Marilyn Marks, filed suit in 2017 against Georgia's use of touchscreen systems made by Diebold. After the court found those systems to be unverifiable, insecure and, therefore, unconstitutional, the state defied expert advice to move to a hand-marked paper ballot system. Instead, GA's Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger forced all counties in the state to switch to a newer touchscreen BMD system made by Dominion, which has many if not all of the same vulnerabilities as the older systems that were banned by the court.

As part of the Coalition's lawsuit, Halderman was granted access to the Dominion systems and found vulnerabilities so alarming that his report was sealed by the federal judge and even blocked from review by the plaintiffs. Only their attorneys could view the report, until CISA asked to see it in February. U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg allowed them access and, after studying the report and notifying the 16 states where Dominion BMDs are used, CISA issued their public alert last week.

"One of the most serious vulnerabilities could allow malicious code to be spread from the election management system to machines throughout a jurisdiction," according to Kate Brumback's excellent coverage at AP. "The vulnerability could be exploited by someone with physical access or by someone who is able to remotely infect other systems that are connected to the internet if election workers then use USB sticks to bring data from an infected system into the election management system."

In the wake of Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 Presidential election being stolen (when, in fact, it was he who was attempting to do so), has led to a rash of election insiders --- the County Clerk in Mesa County, CO, the Board of Elections in Coffee County, GA, to name just two cases --- making secret copies of proprietary voting system software and releasing it to members of the public in an extraordinary security risk for future elections.

The vulnerabilities, according to CISA, could allow manipulation of results in a way that would not necessarily be discovered by most security provisions employed by most jurisdictions which use these terrible types of voting systems. Halderman told AP that he believes it is not only the systems made by Dominion that are vulnerable. Similar touchscreen systems made by ES&S, the nation's largest vendor, are used in many more states across the country, or by Smartmatic, whose touchscreen BMDs are now forced on voters at the polling place here in Los Angeles County, the nation's largest single voting jurisdiction. They all have many of the same design flaws, such as the use of barcodes/QRCodes to tally ballots printed out by the systems, ignoring the human-readable selections printed on the same ballot paper that may or may not have been correctly verified by the voter.

"There are systemic problems with the way election equipment is developed, tested and certified," Halderman told AP, "and I think it’s more likely than not that serious problems would be found in equipment from other vendors if they were subjected to the same kind of testing."

We dive into the details of this long overdue story today, along with recommendations for how voters can maximize the odds are their votes being tallied as per their intent in this year's critical midterm elections. (One key suggestion: Vote on a hand-marked paper ballot if possible! Even if it means using an absentee ballot. Deliver it in person to a dropbox or polling place, if you can!)

Next up, we try to open the phones to callers regarding their hopes for the the upcoming U.S. House select Committee's public hearings, beginning this Thursday, on Donald Trump's January 6, 2021 insurrection and his attempt to steal the 2020 Presidential election. As it turns out, however, some callers want to discuss election concerns. And, among them, at least one of whom is a terribly disinformed rightwinger who actually believes the 2020 election was stolen. Much fun ensues thereafter! Enjoy!...

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It's another three-hour show packed into about 57 minutes on today's BradCast, as we catch up with a lot of primary election coverage that we previously postponed due to all the mass shootings, and a bunch of late updates on several critical stories we've been closely following of late. [Audio link to full show follows after this summary.]

First, before our always-lively guest today, those updates...

• SB 1480, the Internet and Fax voting bill shamefully supported by Democrats in the California state legislature has now passed in the state Senate and heads to the Assembly. We recently discussed with longtime Internet voting expert Dr. David Jefferson why the bill is such an outrageously terrible idea. And we urge you once again to stop by Scrutineers.org/California to learn how (and why) you can help stop it before it becomes law and makes its way into the other 49 states!

• In a more encouraging update to a story we've recently been covering in detail, a three-judge federal appeals court panel (including judges nominated by Biden, Obama and Trump) have overturned the ridiculous ruling by a Trump-appointed lower court judge who found that a federal Amnesty Act for many Confederates in 1872 somehow gave amnesty to January 6th insurrectionists running for office 150 years later. This was part of a challenge led by Free Speech for People (FSFP) to the ballot eligibility of North Carolina's first-term Rep. Madison Cawthorn, under the U.S. Constitution's "Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause" (14th Amendment, Section 3). Though Cawthorn lost his recent primary race for reelection, the appeals court found the case was not moot, because Cawthorn's contest has not yet been officially certified. This is the second federal court to find that the clause may still be used to challenge insurrectionist running for office. FSFP called the ruling a "major victory", warning that other candidates, including Donald Trump, if he runs in 2024, will not be shielded "from the consequences of their actions" when seeking eligibility for the ballot during Constitutional challenges at the state level.

• And, in another story of ballot disqualification at the state level that we covered in detail earlier this week, the Michigan Board of State Canvassers on Thursday officially disqualified 5 of 10 Republican candidates seeking the GOP Gubernatorial nomination there --- including the two leading candidates --- after finding that they collectively turned in some 68,000 fraudulent petition signatures in hopes of qualifying for this year's August 2nd primary ballot. All of the GOP candidates falsely claim that Donald Trump only lost the state of MI through massive election fraud by Democrats, before their campaigns apparently went out and committed actual massive election fraud in hopes of qualifying to run. Several of the rejected candidates vow to appeal the decisions and blame the state for their own failure to vet signatures and those they hired to collect them.

• On Thursday, we detailed the story of the "Hiroshima of botched elections," as described by longtime Election Integrity advocate Sherry Healy, that has been playing out since the May 17 primary election for U.S. House in Clackamas County, Oregon. A disastrous ballot printing snafu --- and the way the disastrous Clackamas County Clerk handled it --- has prevented the finalization of several races, including one that was closely watched in Oregon's 5th Congressional district, pitting progressive Democratic challenger Jamie McLeod-Skinner against very conservative Democratic incumbent Rep. Kurt Schrader. On Friday, AP finally called the race for McLeod-Skinner as counting continues in that race. But, if it holds, it's seen a huge victory for grassroots progressives in unseating a sitting, rightwing House Dem (who had been supported by House leadership).

• And finally, before getting to our guest today, on Thursday, a New York appeals court panel rejected a plea by Donald Trump, as well as Ivanka and Don Jr., to avoid sitting for a deposition in state Attorney General Letitia James' bank, insurance and tax fraud investigation of the former President and his company. On Friday, the news got even better. A federal appears court rejected the Trumps' attempt to nix the investigation entirely.

NEXT, we're joined by our old friend HOWIE KLEIN, the great progressive House candidate expert, longtime proprietor of the Down With Tyranny blog, and co-founder of BlueAmericaPAC, to discuss primary victories (and losses)for progressive Democrats in the 10 states that have held their primaries so far this year. Also, for a preview of Super Duper Tuesday midterm primaries coming up in seven states on June 7th, including here in California (where Howie has some tips for voters in both state and key Los Angeles races.)

Among the races and candidates Howie offers insight on today...

• Pennsylvania's Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, now running as the state's Democratic U.S. Senate nominee;
• The huge win for progressive Summer Lee in PA's 12th Congressional District;
• Progressive Jamie McLeod-Skinner's apparent victory over incumbent Blue Dog Dem Rep. Kurt Schrader in Oregon's 5th Congressional District;
• The victory of state Rep. Andrea Salinas over a candidate supported by a rightwing crypto-billionaire and Democratic House leadership in OR-6;
• Rep. Madison Cawthorn's loss in North Carolina's Republican 11th CD and what that means for Democrat Jasmine Beach-Ferrara hoping to win that seat in November;
• The ongoing, incredibly close battle between rightwing, pro-NRA, anti-choice Dem Henry Cuellar against progressive challenger Jessica Sisneros in Texas' 28th CD;
• Rep. Lucy McBath's victory over Blue Dog Dem Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux in a rare member-versus-member contest in Georgia's 7th CD;
• And whether GA's far-right insurrectionist Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, victorious in her 14th District primary this past week, can possibly be unseated by Dem challenger Marcus Flowers.

That's just a taste. Tune in for much more from Howie on all of this, including his several tips for progressive Los Angeles voters on June 7th. (Here's one of them: Anyone but Rick Caruso, "L.A.'s Donald Trump," for Mayor.)

We're off next week, as Desi gets to go see her family for the first time since before the pandemic! Nicole Sandler fills in for us for a few days. And if all goes well, we'll be back before Super Duper Tuesday! See ya then!...

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On today's BradCast: More shameful GOP responses to America's continuing mass shooting epidemic; one step closer to some accountability for our corrupt former President; the Republican Party's shameful response to a very close primary election in Pennsylvania; and an unmitigated election disaster for voters continues to hold up a critical U.S. House race two weeks after Oregon's midterm primaries. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

Among the stories covered on today's program...

• This week in Uvalde, Texas, 19 fourth graders and two teachers were murdered after the shooter at Robb Elementary School had no problem purchasing two semi-automatic rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammo just days after his 18th birthday this month. The state's Republican Gov. Greg Abbott --- who is up for reelection this November --- declared after the massacre that the problem was mental illness and Texas must "do a better job with mental health." But last month, Abbott slashed $221 million from the department overseeing mental health programs in the state which, according to a new study, ranked 50th last year for access to mental health care. That, after Abbott signed bill after bill making it easier for Texans to buy, carry and kill as many people as possible, with high-powered, military-style weapons. (Did I mention that Abbott is up for reelection this November?)

• It's not only Texas Republicans working hard to make it as easy as possible to kill fellow Americans. Just days after back-to-back-to-back mass shootings in America, Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a bill in the U.S. Senate meant to help to prevent domestic terrorism. The measure was already adopted by Democrats in the House. Not one single Republican Senator voted in favor. (Several of them will be on the ballot this November.)

• In somewhat brighter news, a federal judge on Wednesday rejected a lawsuit by gun manufacturers, distributors and retailers which had attempted to block New York's new law allowing those in the firearms industry to be sued by the state, cities and individuals for endangering the public's safety and health. NY Attorney General Letitia James said the judge's ruling offers "a moment of light and hope" following the American carnage of the past two weeks. The trade group representing the domestic terrorism industry, The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), vowed to appeal.

• In more good NY/Letitia James-related news, a four-judge state appeals court panel today upheld a lower court ruling that Donald Trump and his children Ivanka and Don Jr. must sit for a deposition in James' civil investigation examining the Trumps' "fraudulent" valuation of properties in bank, tax and insurance filings. The Trumps claimed their comments under oath could be used against them in a parallel criminal investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney into many of the same issues. The court agreed. But noted that that's why the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination exists. If the Trumps want, they may invoke it during their depositions, in the same "disgraceful" way, according to Trump, that "only mobsters" use it. Some difficult choices await in the very near future for our disgraced former President.

• In Pennsylvania, nearly two weeks ago, Trump-endorsed celebrity TV doctor Mehmet Oz and former hedge-fund CEO Dave McCormick battled to a virtual tie for the GOP U.S. Senate nomination. The winner will run against Democratic nominee, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman. As of today, Oz leads McCormick by fewer than 1,000 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast in the Keystone State's GOP primary. This week, McCormick sued in federal court to assure that all legal ballots are counted, including mail-in ballots that arrived on time but have a missing or incorrect date on the secrecy envelope. Another court recently ruled such ballots are valid and must be tallied. The RNC and Pennsylvania Republican Party, however, are intervening against McCormick to prevent those lawful, valid ballots from being tallied in the U.S. Senate primary and are attacking their own candidate, McCormick, for daring to enfranchise all Republican voters. On Wednesday, the state announced there will be an automatic statewide recount in the race, with about one-tenth of one percentage point currently separating the two leading candidates in the unofficial results. The official winner should be named by June 9.

• Another midterm primary election held on the same day in Oregon, on May 17, has far worse problems. The closely watched U.S. House race in the state's 5th Congressional District between grassroots-supported Democrat Jamie McLeod-Skinner and conservative Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader caused much excitement on Election Night, when McLeod-Skinner appeared on her way to unseating the incumbent Congressman. Then, with about 68% of the vote in, pretty much all of the counting stopped and hasn't moved much, if at all, since then.

  What happened? We're joined today by one of Oregon's longtime Election Integrity activists SHERRY HEALY --- co-founder of the California Election Protection Network, and, more recently, the Chair of the Oregon Democratic Party's Election Integrity caucus --- to explain the disaster in Clackamas County, OR which has held up the tally.

  As she details, a printing problem on the barcodes (used to identify party and precinct) on tens of thousands of the County's vote-by-mail ballots means they cannot be run through the computerized tabulation system. But, rather than count those ballots publicly by hand, the County's longtime beleaguered County Clerk, Sherry Hall (pictured above), decided that those tens of thousands of otherwise valid ballots should be "remade" by hand --- duplicated by election officials --- on separate ballot sheets so they can then be running through the optical scanners for tabulation.

  "This county clerk has a long history of bungled elections," Healy explains. "But this is the Hiroshima of botched elections." Healy details how Hall failed to adequately test the ballots for this problem after receiving them from the printer before sending them out to voters. Moreover, the decision to remake tens of thousands of ballots, rather than simply count them by hand, "imperils" the entire election, she charges.

  Healy calls Hall's decision "absurd" and "insane," explaining that a simple hand-count "would take less time and be more efficient and accurate" than recreating "in excess of 66,000" ballots.

  Hall, a Trump supporter elected to the job back in the Tea Party days about a decade ago, has a long history of problems in her office. Way back in 2012 we reported on an election official in Clackamas who was indicted on six felonies and two misdemeanors after she was found to have secretly filled in unvoted races for Republican candidates on incoming mail-in ballots.

  When Hall announced that the printing error on the ballots made them unscannable, she claimed that it was new deadlines adopted by the state legislature for the receipt of incoming mail ballots that would hold up her county's tally, as opposed to her own failure to test ballots before sending them out. More recently, she denied that she gave permission for a Schrader campaign observer to enter the counting room an hour early, before observers from the McLeod-Skinner campaign had arrived. Then security camera footage was obtained through a public records request revealing she had lied about that.

  It's unknown when the tabulation in Clackamas will finally be complete. The 5th Congressional District primaries on both the Democratic and Republican side remain uncalled, with just over 70% tallied in each almost two weeks after Election Day. (More have come in since air time today.) For now, McLeod-Skinner remains almost 15 points ahead of Schrader. But that could change. In the meantime, there are a whole lot of lessons to be learned from this entire mess, as we discuss with Healy today. (And, yes, Hall is also up for reelection this November.)

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with some disturbing news about this year's hurricane season (it officially begins next week, buckle up). But she's also got some encouraging news about accountability for an upcoming climate fraud trial for ExxonMobil, and the Biden Administration's EPA putting what may be the final nail into the coffin on a longtime controversial proposed mining project in Alaska...

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On today's BradCast: You'd think by now they'd certainly have learned that insecure, un-overseeable (and thus, unverifiable) voting systems are a terrible idea in the age of phony claims of "Fraud!" by the MAGA Mob. But, apparently, Dems --- at least a bunch of them in the California state legislature --- never seem to learn.

First up today, however, a quick review of everything, happening everywhere, all at once. And specifically some critical news today from overseas. On that overseas news...

• Joe Biden declared today in Japan that, "yes", the U.S. would intervene "militarily" if China were to invade Taiwan. That, he said, was a commitment made "even stronger" following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Other U.S. officials, however, say those comments do not reflect a change in U.S. policy. Okay...
• In Ukraine, a 21-year old Russian soldier who says he was ordered several times by superiors to kill an unarmed civilian, before he finally did, was sentenced to life in prison on Monday. He admitted to the crime and apologized to the wife of the 62-year old man that he killed. In truth, he seems to be a young kid who had no idea he would end up in a hot war in Ukraine when he signed up for the military to help out his family. There are likely to be hundreds of more such trials in Ukraine given the number of documented war crimes we've seen over the past three months of this horrific war.
• And, in what we hope is a blow to Russia's well-funded, worldwide propaganda regarding Ukraine, a veteran Russian diplomat at the U.N. office in Geneva, Boris Bondarev, resigned on Monday, declaring in a scathing letter to colleagues that "it is intolerable what my government is doing now." He describes how, over his 20-year diplomatic career for Russia, he has never been "so ashamed of my country", calling the invasion of Ukraine "not only a crime against the Ukrainian people, but also...against the people of Russia." He went on to deride "propaganda clichés in the spirit of Soviet newspapers of the 1930s" emanating from the Russian foreign ministry and charges that it is no longer "about diplomacy," but "all about warmongering, lies and hatred." This incredibly brave man concludes: "The Ministry has become my home and family. But I simply cannot any longer share in this bloody, witless and absolutely needless ignominy. Job offers are welcome..."

NEXT, in a whiplash inducing change of topic today, as primary season continues (with midterm elections on Tuesday in Alabama, Arkansas and Georgia --- and several important primary runoffs in Texas), we turn to the urgent matter of a new bill moving quickly through the California state legislature which would allow Internet Voting in the state --- or, as the bill deceptively describes it, "electronic Remote Accessible Vote by Mail" or "RAVBM".

The measure, Senate Bill 1480, sponsored by Bay Area Democratic state Senator Steve Glazer, is opposed by dozens of world class voting system and cybersecurity experts --- both groups and individuals --- and is supported only by a handful of groups, including Microsoft and a couple of disability rights organizations. Nonetheless, it passed out of California's Senate Appropriations Committee on Friday and will quickly receive a vote on the Senate floor as early as today, before moving to the state Assembly and on to the Governor for his signature, if it's adopted there.

Dangerous Internet Voting schemes have long been prohibited in California. But SB 1480 would remove that prohibition to allow it for use by "qualified disabled individuals" once the Secretary of State certifies an Internet Voting system. Until then, those individuals would be allowed to vote via fax, according to the measure. Opponents see the targeting of disabled voters as a first step toward broader implementation of Internet Voting schemes.

We're joined today to explain all of this by one of the nation's most prominent Internet Voting experts and opponents. DR. DAVID JEFFERSON is a veteran of Livermore National Lab, a former board member of VerifiedVoting.org, and a pioneer in research at the intersection of computing, the Internet, and elections for 20 years. He has also served as advisor to five successive Secretaries of State of California on technology-related issues, specifically on voting technology.

Jefferson explains today what a terrible idea SB 1480 is and why, detailing the many concerns about security of transmission over the Internet, lack of transparency, and how even fax transmissions now use the Internet to send and receive information which can be easily intercepted and changed during transit without either the voter or election officials having any idea that it happened.

The wording "electronic Remote Accessible Vote-by-Mail" in SB 1480 is, itself, "kind of a contradiction in terms," says Jefferson, "because you are no longer mailing a piece of paper back. After filling out the ballot on your computer screen or mobile device, you then click a button that says 'send back by fax' or some other electronic means. It inevitably travels over the Internet from the voter to the jurisdiction that is going to count it. So it's not a voter-verifiable ballot by the time it gets to the jurisdiction, and it's not meaningfully auditable because it's not voter-verified. It's subject to many, many cybersecurity hazards along the way."

"California has been a leader in not allowing any form of Internet voting. Some other states have copied that because they often look to California for leadership on technical issues," Jefferson observers, adding: "This would be, in my opinion, a giant step backwards."

"It's pretty clear to many of us that the long-term goal of some of the moneyed backers of bills like this --- and by the way, it's not just California, these bills pop up all over the country --- that their long-term goal is to open the door to Internet voting to all voters, if they can," he tells me. "They've tried before, and in some states they have succeeded, for some time, and it fortunately hasn't lasted. So yes, that's a realistic concern."

Bottom line, warns Jefferson: "If an election is attacked through the Internet, it's hard to even know that the attack has even occurred."

One would think CA Dems would know that by now, as they've tried over and over again (unsuccessfully, to date), to pass a measure that would lift the state's prohibition on using the Internet for voting or transmitting votes. SB 1480 is opposed by, among others, Brennan Center for Justice, California Voter Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Verified Voting, Public Citizen and some of our personal favorites like the Coalition for Good Governance, Free Speech for People, and Scrutineers.org, not to mention about a dozen grassroots "Indivisible" organizations and the Progressive Democrats of America. But, apparently, that hasn't yet been enough to slow down what will absolutely be a nightmare for California voters and others across the country, if this terrible idea becomes law.

The longtime election integrity advocates at Scrutineers.org have created an action page on SB 1480 at Scrutineers.org/California, with details on the legislation and steps you can take right now to let the state Senate, Assembly and Sec. of State know that this is a horrible idea for California, the rest of the nation, and secure, overseeable, verifiable American democracy itself...

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Compare and contrast on today's BradCast. Shoddy treatment of real election observers versus velvet glove treatment of wingnut con-artists claiming the 2020 election was stolen. In one case, longtime non-partisan election integrity observers are locked out from overseeing public election processing before this past week's critical primary elections in a North Carolina county. In the other, longtime phony GOP "voter fraud" fraudsters pretending to be election integrity advocates see their false claims in a propaganda film expensively debunked by both law enforcement and state election officials in Georgia. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

First up, it's the fraudsters who recently released a propaganda documentary into theaters called 2000 Mules. We debunked the film's central claims in detail on this program when it was first released about two weeks ago, as it began trending in rightwing social media circles along with claims from many easily-duped folks that the film proves the election was stolen from Donald Trump.

A number of media outlets explained at the time why it doesn't even come close to doing any such thing. The film relies on cell phone geolocation tracking data and some security camera footage of absentee ballot drop-boxes in several swing states won by Joe Biden to claim that thousands of "ballot mules" illegally "harvested" tens of thousands of fake ballots (from somewhere or other) and deposited them unlawfully to steal the election from Trump. Supposedly, all of those ballots were unlawful votes for Biden, but there is no evidence for that either.

The film was produced and directed by a longtime rightwing activist named Dinesh D'Souza (who pleaded guilty to actual federal election fraud crimes some years ago, before being pardoned by Donald Trump). D'Souza highlights the claims of a longtime, dark money-funded, many times discredited, fake "election integrity" group from Texas calling themselves True the Vote. But, apparently, not mentioned in the film is that their cell phone "evidence" of repeated visits within 100 feet of drop-boxes and security camera footage was already reviewed and rejected by both the FBI and the Director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) before the film was even released earlier this month. A September 30, 2021 letter from GBI Director D. Victor Reynolds explains that, after a full investigation, and consultation with the FBI, the data submitted "does not rise to the level of probable cause that a crime has been committed."

That finding was further buttressed this week when Georgia's state Board of Elections dismissed the groups allegations of fraud by tracking down those shown on camera as depositing multiple ballots into drop-boxes. As Washington Post reports, state investigators tracked down the voters shown in the film and were able to confirm the ballots they deposited were actually those of direct family members, which is perfectly lawful in the state.

It's unknown how many tax-payer dollars were wasted by state (and federal) officials on these wild goose chases into perfectly legal voting, based on D'Souza and True The Vote's absurd claims.

Meanwhile, things were very different this past week in North Carolina, where actual election integrity advocates were prevented from doing their work of overseeing elections on behalf of the public and were even threatened with arrest in Wake County, the closely divided swing-state's most populous county.

We're joined today by two guests we've known for a while and who have been on the show in the past. LYNN BERNSTEIN is the founder of Transparent Elections NC and JOHN BRAKEY is the Director of AUDIT-USA. (Listeners will remember Brakey as the guy who originally exposed on this program, and later in video that went viral, that election denialists in Maricopa County, Arizona last year were examining paper ballots under microscopes for evidence of bamboo fibers to prove their false claim that thousands of fraudulent ballots were somehow cast from someone or another in Asia. Brakey served for months as a public observer of that failed "forensic audit" by the now-defunct Cyber Ninjas in Phoenix.)

This week, the groups of both Bernstein and Brakey published a press release announcing that the two had been barred from the grounds of the Wake County Board of Elections in advance of last Tuesday's midterm primary tabulation. The announcement charged they "were threatened with arrest and prevented from observing routine election administration activities by Wake County election administrator Gary Sims, in violation of North Carolina State Election Law."

We've got audio clips today of the pair being told they were not allowed on the grounds of the Wake County BOE, and of Bernstein's husband Nick being escorted out during the public comment period by law enforcement at a BOE meeting on Monday.

So, what's going on here? Bernstein, an aerospace engineer, trained international election observer and longtime election integrity advocate, claims that "Sims has personally harassed me at Board of Elections meetings in front of the Board and he also threatened to call the police on me when I came to observe on Election Night for the 2020 primary, when I was an at-large observer for the Wake County Democratic Party." She says she and Brakey arrived outside the Wake BOE last week for only minutes before "the police arrived and said we were banned forever" from the grounds of the public facility.

Brakey, who was in town to help oversee tabulation and other often dull, but incredibly important public election oversight procedures, says "It's election time, and this is what I do. I travel the country and I try to work with and mentor other election transparency activists." He tells us that Sims was "out there in four minutes" after they arrived at the BOE and "he was steaming just having [Bernstein] there."

But why was all of this even happening? And why is Wake, according to Bernstein, the only county in the state that does not allow observers of the tabulation on Election Night? "If there's a motive behind all of this, it is not election fraud or anything like that," Brakey tells me. The pair speculate it has something to do with Sims hoping to move the County from their current hand-marked paper ballot system to an expensive, unverifiable touchscreen Ballot Marking Device computerized system for voters. Bernstein has long opposed moving to that type of system, as has Brakey (along with most cybersecurity and voting systems experts.)

Tune in for many more details on all of this, but I wanted to give this incident and both of these folks the highlight they deserve for what seems to be an outrageous attempt to prevent their important work bearing witness for the public when it comes to our public elections. "The actual act of voting is a secret process," Brakey notes. "Counting is a public process. It used to be, and it must be again."

We are more than happy, of course, to welcome Wake's Election Administration Gary Sims to respond on the program with his side of the story as well if he chooses to do so. We'd love to have him!

Finally, we close today with a few thoughts on all of the above, and a bit of listener email regarding trillions of tax-payer dollars in subsidies ("socialized welfare") to fossil fuel companies --- the most profitable companies in the world --- even as clean, renewable energy companies continue to struggle without the same kind of financial support from the government...

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We've got an amazing --- and chilling --- story for you on today's BradCast, about what has turned into a wave of proprietary voting system software theft in several key swing-states since Trump pretended the election was stolen in 2020. But the most disturbing part is that many of these thefts having been carried out by or with the help of actual elected GOP election officials in several states! And there is one in particular, in Georgia, which has just come to light which we focus on today, because our quick-thinking guest actually recorded a damning phone call she received from someone who claims to have been a part of that scheme. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

Before we get there today, however, we've got a very (too) quick round-up of results from Tuesday's primary elections in North Carolina, Kentucky, Oregon, Idaho and Pennsylvania, and some news on several of them that you may not have heard elsewhere. Among the most noteworthy of those races...

• The loss of North Carolina's insurrectionist U.S. House Rep. Madison Cawthorn in his GOP primary, and what will now happen to the federal court case regarding Free Speech for People's challenge to his eligibility to run at all under the U.S. Constitution's "Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause." We've been covering that story closely in recent months and we've got comment today from the group's President on what may happen now in the federal case.
• News on several apparent wins by progressive candidates for the U.S. House in PA and OR, including one that is set to result in the defeat of an incumbent establishment-backed Democratic Congressman and the other likely headed to a recount.
• The good news for Democrats in the contest for PA Governor, as far-right Trump-endorsed insurrectionist wingnut state Sen. Doug Mastriano won the GOP nomination to run against state A.G. Josh Shapiro. Suffice to say for now, Republicans are not happy about their nominee.
• And the critical race to fill the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Pat Toomey, where progressive Lt. Gov. John Fetterman easily won the Democratic contest and the battle for the Republican nomination is likely headed to a recount between Trump-endorsed celebrity TV doctor Mehmet Oz and pretty-much-just-as-Trumpy former hedge-fund CEO Dave McCormack. Both are now waiting on late arriving mail-in ballots to be tallied in the exceedingly close race, even though Republicans in 2020 argued that late arriving mail-in ballots in the Keystone State were all illegal and should have been tossed out. Not anymore, apparently. (And we wonder how long it'll be before they notice yesterday's BradCast rounding up several Republican-leaning counties where voters were turned away for hours after polls opened, thanks to voting system failures.)

THEN, it's on to the remarkable story of GOP election insiders in critical swing-states such as Michigan, Colorado, Ohio and Georgia, who, following the 2020 election, conspired with a cabal of election denying Team Trumpers to breach secure facilities in elections offices. They made illegal image copies of hard drives from key voting system computers containing sensitive, proprietary software and voter databases in at least 8 counties across the country...for some reason.

Part of this story is newly revealed evidence about one such a case in Coffee County, Georgia, which includes a damning recorded phone call received by our guest today, MARILYN MARKS of the Coalition for Good Governance. The caller admits to an elaborate scheme to copy and analyze hard drive data from the county that Trump is said to have won by about 40 points. He also told Marks that he hacked into her legislative filings in her long-running lawsuit against the state, which seeks to replace Georgia's unverifiable touchscreen voting systems with simple, verifiable hand-marked paper ballots.

You'll need to tune in for the full details on this story. It's broad and, at times, complicated. And, yes, we share some of the disturbing audio from that phone call to Marks from an Atlanta bail bondsman by the name of Scott Hall who brags about chartering a jet to Coffee County with a group that "scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives and scanned every single ballot" with "the entire elections committee there" who, he claims on the call, said "we give you the permission. Go for it."

We pull together a bunch of threads from a bunch of investigative news sources (as well as some of our own reporting) on all of this, on the broad scheme carried out by some of Trump's top "Stop the Steal" compatriots and the almost inconceivable lack of apparent investigation --- or worse, cover-up --- by GA's Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger regarding the still mysterious incident in Coffee County.

As noted, you'll need to tune in for the full details, but among the stories and recent detailed investigative reports referenced and/or cited in our coverage today...

• Mesa County Court Judge Removes Peters as Designated Election Official for the 2022 Election (CO SoS)
• Trump allies breach U.S. voting systems in search of 2020 fraud ‘evidence’ (Reuters)
• PRESIDENTIAL FINDINGS TO PRESERVE COLLECT AND ANALYZE NATIONAL SECURITY INFORMATION REGARDING THE 2020 GENERAL ELECTION (Draft Executive Order)
• Georgia county under scrutiny after claim of post-election breach (Washington Post)
• Georgia’s Alleged Dominion Voting System Breach (Coalition for Good Governance)
• Building the "Big Lie": Inside the Creation of Trump’s Stolen Election Myth (ProPublica)
• The Plot to Overturn the Election (PBS' Frontline and ProPublica)

Among the questions discussed with Marks: What the hell is going on here? Is it a violation of state and/or federal law to make discreet imaged copies of this software? Why was Team Trump doing it in the first place? Is Sec. Raffensperger's office investigating what happened in Coffee County, GA or not (they are offering conflicting statements, including in Marks' legal case challenging the use of the state's Dominion touchscreens)? What kind of threat does all of this pose to elections around the county in 2022 and 2024 in Georgia (their midterm primaries are next week) and in the many other states which use the very same software --- now stolen by these people --- to run their elections?

"Certainly they were violating state and federal laws," Marks tells me. "The difficult part of this is It puts virtually all states that are using the Dominion system --- without doing thorough audits and [using] hand-marked paper ballots --- it puts all of these at risk."

"If what Scott Hall and other have said happened truly happened, then there are people who have unauthorized copies of software off the server and off of all of the components," she explains. "These people can now craft and test malware and how to exploit the vulnerabilities in an election."

Marks believes the initial effort was meant "to try to find evidence or perhaps even fabricate evidence," regarding the 2020 election. But it has since gone far beyond that.

Raffensperger, she says, is offering "nothing but stonewalling" and "is telling different things to different people." She notes there is "no record of opening an investigation" in Coffee. That, as the Secretary's second-in-command, Gabe Sterling, seemed to suggest in a recent court deposition that there WAS an investigation of the server in Coffee, that it was actually quietly seized by the state, but that he "can't remember" the findings from the inquiry.

"There are many mysteries to unfold here. We don't know who has been in the system and how far any malware may have spread if it were implanted." She warns the Secretary's office and state Elections Board "want to hide their heads in the sand despite" the mounds of recent investigative reporting (as linked above) on what is going on here.

"The system has been breached," Marks cautions chillingly, before explaining what must be done now to safeguard our elections --- including from insider election officials who have now put our entire democracy at very serious risk. Even hand-marked paper ballots, she notes, are still tabulated by these same computer systems.

"Remember, the remedy we are seeking [in our suit] is not simply hand-marked paper ballots but hand-marked paper ballots with very thorough audits. IF we get the audits, yeah, there can be hacking but any outcome-changing hack will be detected and can be corrected," Marks argues. "While you can't get rid of the risk, you can remedy that risk."

Again, much more detail on today's show. It's a doozy. Please tune in...

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On today's BradCast: The lengths Donald Trump's supporters will go to to justify his sore loser attempt to steal the 2020 Presidential election is amazing. Now they've got a pretend documentary in hundreds of actual movie theaters which turns out to prove nothing. All of it, naturally, is nonsense. We explain why today. [Audio link to full show follows this summary below.]

Folks on the right were celebrating on social media over the weekend in the wake of the release of a film named (somewhat offensively) 2000 Mules. It was somehow released into more than 250 theaters across the nation last week. The film was made by Rightwing activist Dinesh D'Souza, who pleaded guilty to federal election fraud crimes back in 2014 --- before being pardoned for them by Trump in 2018. That's the guy who has now made a "documentary" claiming millions of votes were stuffed into absentee ballot drop-boxes in swing states to steal the election for Joe Biden in2020. Sounds legit.

The claim is made along with fellow GOP "voter fraud" fraudsters from a long-discredited Texas group named True the Vote. Apparently, the group paid millions to obtain publicly available, anonymized cell phone geolocation data that purportedly shows where cell phones were from October 1 through Election Day in 2020. Using that data, TTV claims in the film that thousands of so-called ballot "mules" were being paid by unnamed non-profit organizations (why didn't they name them?) to collect illegal ballots for Joe Biden and deliver them into ballot drop boxes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

If all of this sounds absurd, it's because it is. The data can't actually be tied to any voter --- and is only accurate to about 100 feet, according to experts --- meaning that anytime someone drove past a drop box, or walked passed it (the drop-boxes are often placed in high traffic areas) on their way to and from work or something, they are a "mule" for stuffing ballot boxes for Joe Biden! Sorry about that delivery guys and mail men and election workers and students who just happen to walk or drive by each day on their way to classes! You're all now "mules" for Biden!

Who paid all of these "mules"? And how did this conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people stay so quiet without any participants blowing the whistle? And what actual, ya know, evidence do D'Souza and True the Vote have that crimes were actually committed here? Well, that's where it gets a bit dicier. And, by dicier, I mean made up out of whole cloth with no actual proof of anything whatsoever. But they have video of people dropping ballots into those drop-boxes! (Which, of course, is perfectly legal. In most states, folks can delivery ballots of family members and disabled voters, etc. Perhaps that's why the filmmakers thought it wise to blur out the faces of those voters?) There seems to be no actual proof of crimes here, including who supposedly paid these people (or even that anybody was paid at all!)

Still, it was enough to cause easily-duped Rightwingers to become very excited about over the weekend, as the #2000Mules hashtag trended on social media. So today, we debunk the nonsense in some detail with an assist from AP, who finds "gaping holes" in the film's claims, and from Greg Palast, who explains the "belly laughs" provided by the film's "proof" of fraud.

"D’Souza’s charge is mind-blowing. He claims that there are as many 54,000 mules that were organized and paid in at least five big cities. In Fulton County (Atlanta), he tells us 92,670 ballots were stuffed illegally into drop boxes," Palast reports. "That’s astonishing --- because there were only 79,000 ballots cast in drop boxes in Fulton County!"

"And in Detroit, it was worse," he adds. "'Mules' stuffed 226,590 ballots into Detroit area drop boxes --- way more than the total number of all mail-in ballots --- about three times the number of ballots in drop boxes."

Of course, none of these facts kept Trump from holding a fancy premiere screening at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and declaring the pretend documentary exposed "great election fraud"! It's all so ridiculously silly, that we'd rather ignore it. But since it's in 270 theaters, brought in a million bucks on its first day, and has a bunch of duped wingnuts declaring they finally have "evidence" that the election was stolen in 2020...it seemed a good idea to help you understand this latest con so you can explain it to your duped friends, families, neighbors and co-workers in turn when they shout "2000 Mules!" at you in the days ahead.

As to actual election fraud (not unlike the type that the filmmaker D'Souza admitted to committing), last week a women in Arizona was sentenced on voter fraud charges after being convicted by the state's Republican Attorney General. She cast two ballots in 2020, one for herself and another for her dead mother. They were both Republicans. And when interviewed by investigators she claimed she didn't do it, but was certain that massive voter fraud was definitely going on and that the criminals who do it should be locked up!

Well, the nice white Republican voter fraudster woman was found guilty and, despite the prosecutors asking for at least 30 days in jail, the judge let the woman, 64-year old, Tracey Kay McKee --- who knew she was violating the law and then lied to officials about it --- off the hook with probation, some fines and community service.

Compare her case to Crystal Mason's --- a black mother of three in Texas --- who had the book thrown at her last year. She was on federally supervised release from jail and was never told she couldn't vote while on release. When she went to her precinct to vote, she was told she was no longer on the rolls. A helpful poll worker directed her to fill out a provisional ballot, which she did. The ballot was never tallied, but Mason was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison last year for attempting to vote while on supervised release when she believed she could do so legally. That'll teach her to be black and to try to vote in this country!

We've got some time for a few quick calls at the end of today's show too. Enjoy!...

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As midterm primary elections begin in earnest next month, today on The BradCast, we catch up with the latest successful attempts by GOP states to undermine their constituents' wishes through new, partisan gerrymanders following the 2020 Census and the Courts which are helping them do so. In the meantime, a Democratic-leaning court in New York today did the opposite, blocking a Dems from gerrymandering in the Empire State. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Before we're joined by our guest to discuss all of that and more today, just a quick kudos to Rebecca Beitsch at The Hill for coming up with a new euphemism --- or, at least, one we haven't seen used yet by the rest of the corporate media --- to report on new evidence documenting the failed Trump/GOP attempt to steal the 2020 Presidential election. It's getting more difficult by the day to do so without using the correct word, "steal", when doing so. Sure, anyone can describe the GOP's attempt to "undermine" or "overturn" or "question the results". But that gets stale after a while. So, congrats to Beitsch for reporting on their attempt to "UNWIND the 2020 election", just to freshen things up! <insert eyeroll emoji here>

Then, we're joined today by redistricting expert and author DAVID DALEY, Senior Fellow at FairVote, to get caught up on a whole bunch of recent court rulings (and outrages) from over the past week or three when it comes to the last minute efforts --- largely by Republican-controlled states --- to game the 2022 midterms (and elections for the next ten years), with outrageously partisan gerrymandering of U.S. House maps.

Daley walks us through a number of such cases, including in several states where, over the past decade, large majorities of voters have adopted ballot initiatives to prevent the very gerrymandering that Republicans appear to be getting away with, nonetheless, in their newly redistricted maps.

In Ohio, the GOP-majority Redistricting Commission has had its new maps rejected four different times in recent weeks by the state's Supreme Court, with the help of its Republican Chief Justice. Despite being ordered by the court to follow the state's Constitution --- which now requires districts that generally reflect the partisan balance of the closely divided, if GOP-leaning state --- Republican Commissioners (which include state Gov. Mike DeWine, whose son sits on the state Supreme Court but refuses to recuse) aren't even trying anymore. With primaries scheduled for next month in the Buckeye State, the Commission is "just not meeting" anymore at all, says Daley. "They're trying to run out the clock so the federal court imposes one of the unconstitutional maps that has already been rejected by Ohio's state Supreme Court."

The state's previous gerrymandered map gave the GOP a 12 to 4 advantage in U.S. House districts. The new ones, repeatedly rejected by the state court, would give them a 13 to 2 advantage, despite the roughly 53-45% partisan split in the 2020 Presidential election and a 2015 mandate from more than 70% of voters rewriting the state Constitution to ensure new maps reflect the statewide partisan makeup.

In Florida, where voters also voted for redistricting reform, things are even more obnoxious and anti-democratic. The GOP-controlled legislature produced a map giving Republicans a 16 to 12 advantage, but it was rejected by Governor and Presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis for his own hand-drawn map that is likely to result in 20 Republican House seats and just 8 Democratic ones. State Republicans "already produced a pretty good Republican gerrymander," Daley explains, "and DeSantis said, 'Wait a second, I can do even better than that.'" With the state's high court packed with his own appointees, Daley warns, "that is not a Supreme Court that we should look to for any sort of help when it comes to fair maps."

Back in 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that federal courts may play no role in preventing partisan redistricting, leaving the matter the chaos of each individual state court to decide. But on the matter of racial gerrymandering, SCOTUS is still happy to tell states what they can and can't do, even when the High Court's own rulings disagree with each other.

Daley explains how SCOTUS jumped in, back in February, months before the primaries, to block a new black-majority district ordered in Alabama by a lower federal court under the Voting Rights Act because. The Supremes, on the stolen and packed Court, determined it was just too soon before the primary election to draw up a new map. But late last month, after the Wisconsin Supreme Court approved a new state legislative map drawn by the state's Democratic Governor, SCOTUS ordered the state to rewrite the map, just weeks before the primaries, to remove a new black legislative district created in Milwaukee.

"The US Supreme Court has been eager this cycle to help Republicans and to put their foot on the scale against Democrats," Daley charges, describing their rulings as "Heads I win, tails you lose. They're not even pretending anymore."

And then we get to New York, where it was Democrats' turn to face the music for gerrymandering the state's U.S. House map to add three new likely Democratic U.S. House seats. Today, mid-show, NY's high court blocked the map (appropriately, as Daley sees it), ordering a court-appointed Special Master to draw up new maps in time for this year's primary (which the court also postponed until August to allow time to create the new maps.)

Last week, Daley, a longtime proponent of fair maps in all fifty states, wrote at CNN about what he saw as the "indefensible" map drawn up by NY Dems, describing it as "among the most obscene partisan gerrymanders nationwide." NY courts clearly agreed, but even Daley's own opinion article seemed to make the case for what Democrats tried --- but failed --- to do.

"If blue state courts roll back Democratic gerrymanders, but red state judges rule as partisan ideologues, a pro-GOP bias will be baked into the national map for another decade," he wrote. "A maximally gerrymandered national congressional map is...bad in nearly every way except, perhaps, compared with the previous decade's map, rigged so Republicans held control in 2012 even when they won 1.4 million fewer votes."

As regular listeners and readers know, over the past year I've (regrettably) changed my position on partisan gerrymandering, given the gaming of the system by Republicans which has succeeded in endangering America's small-'d' democratic project entirely. Short of federal legislation to ban partisan redistricting everywhere (an effort by Dems that was blocked by all Senate Republicans last year), I've been calling on states controlled by Democrats to gerrymander wherever possible. I hate that position. It's bad for many voters in the states but, ultimately, important for something resembling democracy on the national level at a time when democracy is facing a serious challenge from the forces of authoritarianism.

But Daley disagrees with. At least in as much as he has argued that such an effort could never be successful. "A national map that has been rigged for one side to win is extraordinarily dangerous, especially when one party has completely broken faith with democracy," he tells me as we debate this point again today. "Gerrymandering the hell out of Illinois and New York doesn't save democracy. It doesn't give Democrats that much of a leg up on fixing this. It is a band-aid, when what you need is a tourniquet. It's not sufficient. By all means, go ahead and put a band-aid on, but don't think it's going to stop the bleeding."

"I'm calling for a national standard that fixes the problem in New York as well as in Texas," he argues (as do I). "Because there are not enough New Yorks to balance out the Texases and Floridas. Democrats can gerrymander the hell out of these states if they want, but it's not going to help them. What they need to do is fix the overall structural problem, or it's only going to get worse."

Prepare for it to get worse...

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On today's BradCast: Guilty pleas for voter fraud in a Trump stronghold in Florida. The Colorado state GOP endorses a federally-indicted election tamperer for Sec. of State. Trump's Chief of Staff is removed from the voter rolls amid a state probe into his own apparent voter fraud after he tried to steal the 2020 Presidential election. And yet the fraudulent GOP 'voter fraud' industry continues raking in the cash and making it harder for certain people to vote by pretending that Democrats are committing massive voter fraud. Quite a racket. [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

Among the many stories covered on today's program...

• Perhaps you haven't heard, but new weekly jobless claims haven't been this low since 1968, with companies increasing wages to hang on to their employees. Sounds terrible. No wonder Biden's approval ratings are so low. (Of course, in addition to downplaying such stories or not covering them at all, some in the corporate media have turned this great news for American workers into terrible news for businesses, focusing on "labor shortage" and "high costs" of maintaining workers.)

• New polling from Gallup finds Americans overwhelmingly support Biden's proposals to tackle climate change and move the nation to clean renewable energy. Huge --- and I mean huge-- majorities support stuff like tax credits for Americans to install solar power at home; incentives for businesses to move to renewable energy; increasing mileage standards on cars and trucks; major investments in electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Most of those wildly popular ideas (all mercifully attacked by the America haters at Fox "News") were in the Biden/Democrat Build Back Better bill, which every Senate Republican plus the corrupt Joe Manchin helped to kill last year.

• Then there's the never-ending GOP "voter fraud" industrial complex which is having another terrific year! Brain-poisoned suckers, terrified about non-existent massive voter fraud by Democrats, continue to send their money and votes to the scammers who are actually committing the fraud while making it harder for certain Americans to vote at all.

  In Florida, a bunch of old, white Republican retirees in The Villages have been indicted for and/or pleaded guilty this week to double voting in the Trump stronghold. Because they're white and Republican, they're getting off with slaps on the wrist. (Contrast that with folks like Crystal Mason, a black woman from Texas who didn't know she wasn't allowed to vote after being released from jail before casting a provisional ballot at the direction of a poll worker. Her vote was never counted --- unlike the double voters in FL --- but she's been sentenced to five years in prison. The Trump/DeSantis voters who pleaded guilty for voting in two different states in 2020, are getting off with no jail time at all.)

  In Colorado, the state Republican Party held its big confab over the weekend. They endorsed a candidate for U.S. Senate who told them this week that Trump won in 2020, while comparing the election to what "we felt after 9/11". But the CO GOPers really went all in for Tina Peters, the Clerk of Mesa County who snuck into a secure storage area in the middle of the night last year along with accomplices with fake IDs, turned off the security cameras and made unlawful copies of sensitive voting system software before releasing it to the public over the Internet. She's now been charged with a 10-count federal indictment for her election tampering. But the CO Republican delegates over the weekend rewarded her with an overwhelming majority endorsement to become the state's chief election official in her bid to become CO's next Secretary of State. Don't worry. If Peters wins, the state Republicans' choice for Governor told the crowd this weekend that he'd pardon her. (Cuz, Rule of Law, Law and Order and all that. Also: unclear if he knows Governors can't pardon federal felons.)

  And, just to top off the madcap fraudulent fun, Mark Meadows --- Donald Trump's Chief of Staff who tried to help him steal the 2020 Presidential election --- has now been removed from the voting rolls in North Carolina, where the former Congressman and "election integrity" warrior appears to have been unlawfully registered. In a mobile home where he never spent a night and may have never even visited. Even as he was registered to vote --- and voting --- in Virginia. (Add him to a long list of high-profile GOP voter fraud fraudsters we've covered over the years, including Ann Coulter, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and MANY more!)

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report with news of climate change-fueled, catastrophic rains and deadly flooding which killed hundreds in South Africa this week; new science finding that our climate crisis is supercharging hurricane rainfall; and some brighter news on wind energy which hit a remarkable new milestone last week! (Don't tell Trump! He's still pretending that windmills cause cancer!)

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We've got a very busy and eclectic BradCast for you today. For good or ill. You'll decide. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among the stories covered on today's program...

• Another mass shooting today, this time in a crowded subway train in Brooklyn. At least 10 were shot and 17 injured. Reportedly, however, even with 5 victims said to be in critical condition, authorities say none of the injuries are life-threatening. The gunman, wearing a gasmask and releasing smoke bombs to add to the nightmarish chaos, appears to have used a semi-automatic handgun with several large magazines and was only stopped, after at least 33 shots, when one of the cartridges is believed to have jammed. The suspect was still on the run as of airtime.

• Also in New York, recently-minted Democratic Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin was arrested and indicted on several federal felony charges related to bribery, fraud and falsification of records on Tuesday, in an alleged scheme during his time as a state Senator involving campaign payoffs from a real estate developer (who was previously arrested, but is not Donald Trump). Among the records Benjamin is said to have falsified are the vetting documents used by Gov. Kathy Hochul when selecting him for the job of Lt. Gov. after she ascended from that job in the wake of the resignation of the previous Democratic Governor, the scandal-plagued Andrew Cuomo. Benjamin resigned late today. But getting him off the June primary ballot, where he was set to run for election against two other Democrats, is a different matter.

• You may have heard today via screaming headlines that new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on finds inflation in March was at 8.5% over the past year. It is the highest rate since December of 1981 when that failed, one-term President Ronald Reagan was in the final month of his first year in office. There's probably a bunch of other stuff you haven't heard today beyond the screaming "Inflation hits 40-year high!" headlines from our corporate media. We help you understand some of that stuff.

• President Joe Biden's recent action to release a million barrels of oil a day, for the next six months from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve immediately helped to lower gas prices at the pump. They've been falling pretty much every day since that unprecedented move, though they remain high thanks to Russia's war in Ukraine and the oil industry's continued profiteering. Today, in a bid to further lower gas prices, Biden announced a plan to waive the ban on summer use of E15 gasoline, which contains a 15% ethanol blend. Desi Doyen helps us make sense of that news and why it is both good and bad.

• Last week, following a months-long investigation, Arizona's very MAGA, vote-suppressing Attorney General Mark Brnovich, finally released a report [PDF] on his probe of allegations of fraud in Maricopa County (Phoenix)'s 2020 Presidential election. That probe was requested by the very MAGA state Senate after the exceedingly MAGA Cyber Ninjas failed to find any evidence of fraud in their own months-long so-called "audit" in the state's largest county, where Joe Biden won by some 45,000 votes, delivering the state to a Democrat for the first time in decades.

  As it turns out, Brnovich failed to uncover any evidence of fraud or any other crimes, though he did pretend to find "serious vulnerabilities" in the County's elections procedures. But those "serious vulnerabilities", according to the Chair of the County's Republican Board of Supervisors, the County's Republican Controller (its chief election official, who won his position during the same 2020 election), the County's former Democratic Controller (who lost that year), and the state's Democratic Sec. of State are all calling out Brnovich for a BS report that fails to find any evidence of any problems in the election at all, even while using words that help Fox "News" and the losing former President and all his MAGA friends pretend that he did. (Brnovich is in a contested primary race for the GOP U.S. Senate nomination, after all.)

  We let you know what Brnovich actually found (and didn't), even if none of it prevented the MAGA state Senate President who helped kick off all this madness from from claiming the report finds "fraud" (it doesn't) or one of the most rightwing MAGA state Senators from taking to her Twitter account in response to the report to call it "flaccid" and to insist that "WE WANT ARRESTS NOW." --- For what exactly? That part remains unclear. It may take a few more months or years and more millions of dollars of tax-payer money spent by "conservatives" in the state to get to the bottom of it.

• Finally, Desi Doyen brings our latest Green News Report with some troubling new news on methane and climate change, as well as microplastics now being found in human blood and lungs. But she's got some better news on new mileage standards from Biden's Dept. of Transportation and on the electrification of tens of thousands of government vehicles and school buses in Los Angeles and Boston...

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Santa, according to my guest today on The BradCast, is a "democratic socialist". Sarah Palin, on the other hand is...well...Sarah Palin, and she has decided to "un-quit politics." [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

Before we get there today, however, a bit more on the grim news coming out of Ukraine this week, as independently documented evidence of horrific war crimes by Russia continues to mount. On Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the U.N. Security Council from Ukraine and charged that if the U.N. is unable to remove Russia's veto, as a permanent member of the Council, then they might as well dissolve it entirely. He has a point.

Then, before we get to Sarah and Santa...The news that shouldn't be news at all. Three Republican Senators have now announced they intend to vote in favor of Joe Biden's nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, perhaps the most qualified jurist every nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. On Monday night, Utah's Mitt Romney and Alaska's Lisa Murkowski declared they will support Brown's confirmation, joining Maine's Susan Collins who did so last week. None of that should be news at all, but in the Republicans' twisted, hyper-partisanized world, voting for a SCOTUS nominee tapped by a Democratic President apparently it is. During Monday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, South Carolina's Lindsey Graham (who voted for Jackson's appointment to a federal Appeals Court seat just last year, but refuses to vote for her this year) said the quiet part out loud when he declared that if Republicans win back the Senate in November, none of Biden's nominees are likely to be seated to the federal bench.

In other insane GOP Congressional news, Michigan Rep. Fred Upton announced today that he will not seek re-election. He is the fourth of 10 Republican House members who voted in favor of Donald Trump's second impeachment (for inciting the January 6th insurrection) to retire instead of run for re-election.

Meanwhile, way up north in Alaska, more than 40 candidates are now running in the upcoming June Special Election to fill the state's one U.S. House seat, which had been held for 49(!) years by Don Young, the 88-year old Republican Congressman who died suddenly last month.

Donald Trump has chosen his favorite candidate in the race, the one my guest today describes alternately as "The Quitter" and the "former half-term Governor", Sarah Palin. The failed 2008 Vice Presidential candidate is emerging from Alaskan and rightwing media obscurity in hopes of finding relevance again in the far-right wingnut world she helped create during her 2008 run, just before quitting politics halfway through her first term as Alaska's Governor. Palin signed up to run for the Special Election and regular general election primaries --- both to be held on June 11th --- on the final day to qualify, last Friday on April Fools Day. (Seriously.)

We're joined today by one of the nation's foremost Palinologists, JEANNE DEVON, who made a name for herself as "AK Muckraker", helping to introduce Palin to the world in 2008 at her award-winning The Mudflats blog. She has since gone on to co-write a NYTimes best seller, Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin - A Memoir of Our Tumultuous Years, and served as Press Secretary for Alaska's state Senate Democrats and as Communications Director for the state's Democratic Party. (She is currently working with FX to develop a television series based on her book, The Blood of Patriots, which she co-wrote will Bill Fulton about the Alaska militia movement.)

Before we get to Palin and the potentially insane way that Alaska is about to run its Special Election, Devon offers some thoughts on the decades long legacy of the late Don Young who, though "he didn't have that much power anymore" after being stripped of Congressional committee assignments due to "blatant corruption," was still "an institution, and Alaskans like their institutions."

While some in the media have been regarding Palin as the front-runner to fill Young's seat, Devon seems less convinced. "Palin's approval rating and likeability has been underwater since she quit [in 2009.] She is not a popular figure in the state anymore." Devon cites a comment she saw at today one of the "hardcore fringey rightwing" Facebook groups she sometimes drops in on, suggesting those folks do not appear to be fans. "Very hard pass," she reports one commenter as writing, adding "she quit once when the going got tough. And in my mind that defines her entire political career."

A lack of popularity is not all Palin will have to contend with. There are more than 40 candidates running in both the Special and regular primaries, which will be held on the same day. Palin has signed up for both. But in addition to several progressive candidates Devon cites, with impressive resumes and following, she seems most excited about one candidate on the ballot with at least as much "name recognition" as Palin: Santa Claus!

Yes, Claus is "actually a member of the North Pole City Council" and "literally on the ballot". He represents what Devon describes as "one of the most conservative towns in Alaska" and "he is a democratic socialist --- of course --- because he's Santa!"

Devon notes, however, that "Santa Claus has also said he will not run for the next full term. He will just run to finish the end of Don Young's term. Because we are now faced with two elections."

As to those two elections, they will be run under a new scheme in the state. For the first time, anybody who wants to run for office can simply sign up to run, no petition gathering necessary. (Thus, the 40+ candidates!) The top four vote-getters in the primary will then go on to the general election, which will use Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) --- a confusing and difficult to both count and oversee method of voting, allowing voters to rank their choices for the office. (As I explain to Devon, when and if Alaska tires of RCV, as many jurisdictions do after using it, when they discover that neither voters nor candidates understand it, they may wish to look into the simpler Approval Voting method, allowing voters to choose Yes or No for all candidates on the ballot. Easier to understand, to count and to oversee, since computers and centralized counting aren't needed for the complicated math and many rounds of tallying necessary under RCV.)

Of course, Devon has much more insight on what is likely to be a fascinating and/or hilarious race, with both Palin and Clause on the ballot. Additionally, there are six Democrats on the Special Election ballot. Among them, she cites "Christopher Constant, who was the first openly gay person to be elected to the Anchorage Assembly --- and remember, Anchorage is half the population of the state. Then there is Mary Peltola, who long ago served 12 years in the legislature. She's an amazing Native leader who is also an expert in fisheries, which is important up here. And there's a sitting legislator from Fairbanks named Adam Wool. So all of these are Democrats who could certainly fill that slot."

She also has some thoughts to share on Sen. Murkowski, who is up for re-election this year as a Republican --- after voting to remove Trump from office in his second impeachment and declaring her support for Ketanji Brown Jackson this week. Will that doom her chances of re-election? Tune in to find out what Devon has to say about that race --- which will also be run as a top-four primary contest with an RCV general, in a state which has a history of plenty of election and tabulation controversy in recent years.

Finally, after that amusing segment, Desi Doyen joins us to ruin all the fun, as usual, with our latest Green News Report, including special coverage of the U.N. IPCC's latest report warning that Planet Earth is likely to blow past the climate targets set by the Paris Climate Accord, even though, as the scientists note in their report, it is still not too late for the nations of the world to institute mitigation efforts to avoid catastrophic global warming in our all-too-near future...

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