Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

On Thursday, The BRAD BLOG interviewed Ron Shepston, who is running for Congress in California's 42nd District. The current holder of the seat is the ethically challenged Republican, Gary Miller (R-CA), who is regularly named as one of the Most Corrupt Members of Congress.

We first asked Shepston, an airplane engineer, about election integrity issues. Interestingly, despite running in the extremely "red" Orange County against the Republican Miller and expressing concern for election integrity issues in general, Shepston was not worried about the fairness of elections in his own district:

"I vote in my district and I do think we have fair elections there... I do worry about election integrity in general. I wonder what Republicans are afraid of when they don't want to have fair elections. I don't want to have to guess, I don't want to have to trust that my vote or that voters' votes count. I want verified ballots."

Unfortunately, as Orange County is one of two counties left in California where unverifiable DRE (usually touch-screen) voting machines have been allowed for use by all, Shepston seems somewhat out of step with the ability, or lack thereof, to verify even a single vote cast on such machines in his own district. Almost inexplicably, CA SoS Debra Bowen decertified use of almost all DRE systems in the state, other than one per polling place to meet federal accessibility voting standards, and DRE machines made by Hart InterCivic. Shepston's Orange County still uses those wholly unverifiable Hart voting machines.

Shepston, who says he considers himself part of the netroots movement, is a political newcomer who was encouraged to run for office by fellow bloggers at the Daily Kos website. Yet despite the fact that many of these bloggers are helping with Shepston's campaign, he directed some harsh words towards the Daily Kos:

"It's not the community that it used to be... And what's happened is that now that I've been there for so long I know the good writers and I go to just them. I don't branch out because it seems like every other diary that I get to it's just not worth it to me anymore. I don't learn anything... It's turned into a shouting match sometimes. It's not the same community that it was when I was there before."

Our complete interview (6:46), shot this week at a fund raising event here in Los Angeles with Ambassador Joe Wilson (more videos to come), follows below. You can find out more about Shepston at his Ron Shepston for United States Congress website...

Good news for voters across American on Friday, as the judge in the Pima County, AZ, court case has finally agreed that citizens can try and see how citizens voted in elections, even if they are run by Diebold.

Via email from AZ Electon Integrity advocate Jim March...

Congratulations! And thank you, EI folks in AZ!!!

Previous BRAD BLOG coverage of the Pima County case here...

As God is my witness, there will be blood...okay, hopefully not blood...but massive Election Disasters this November. Disasters which might have, should have, could have, otherwise been averted had Election Officials bothered to actually read this blog every couple of days over the last four years, and done a damned thing about it other than make excuses for their horrible decisions and continuing state of denial.

Keep in mind, we are going to save the most troubling aspect of this report for the very end, so those of you who can take no more of this garbage, will be able to bail out before hand.

If you can take it, prepare to be amazed by the end, as we wend through the massive failures in Arkansas last Tuesday, through mind-blowing new (disastrous) federal "Electronic Voting Reform" legislation just announced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) with Sen. Bill Bennett (R-UT), before landing in West Virginia, where a candidate on last week's ballot assures us everything is just fine because the guy spotted by voters opening up the voting machines and going inside of them to make adjustments at the polls during Election Day was him.

It's as bad as it sounds. Read on, if you feel strong enough, otherwise, abandon hope all ye who enter here...

Some 33,500 registered voters in Oregon received two ballots in the mail for this year's primary election in the country's only 100% Vote-by-Mail (VBM) state. Though Secretary of State Bill Bradbury says he's confident the problem will be handled, and that no voter will get to cast two ballots, that snafu is a small concern compared to the larger ones presented by VBM.

Many Oregonians will tell you they believe their system is wonderful, yet many of the Election Integrity advocates on the ground there, including many we've spoke with at the Oregon Voting Rights Coalition, warn that the success of the state's VBM program is largely based on good procedures put in place by Bradbury, and which they fear may disappear, as they are not statutory, when he is someday no longer the state's SoS.

In the meantime, one of the unintended consequences of the success that EI advocates have had in helping to expose the failures of electronic voting systems, is that absentee and/or VBM systems have been growing in popularity.

For the voters, they believe such systems offer a "paper trail" not available to voters using touch-screen systems at the polling place. Many are unaware that their mailed-in ballots will be scanned by the same error-prone, easily manipulated optical-scan machines which handle paper ballots for precinct-based voting. But even worse, ballots mailed in, if they arrive safely, and are counted at all, are usually counted "in the dark," versus ballots scanned either at the polls on Election Day, or at county headquarters after the close of polls when citizens are often there to watch.

It is also much harder to track such ballots. Unlike ballots cast at the polls, where sign-in rosters can be compared to the number of ballots counted, it's far more difficult to match up such numbers after ballots are dropped into the black hole that is the U.S. Postal System.

For both major political parties, particularly the Democrats of late, the control they can have over ensuring voter "turnout" under such systems, and the increased participation that comes with it, is a big plus, and one of the reasons why they've been pushing mail-in elections of late.

But for those of us who prize transparency, security, privacy, and verifiable accuracy over partisan politics, all VBM elections remain a terrible idea. Here's why...

Texas' Republican Attorney General has found that there's little or no "voter fraud" of note down there either, despite a promise two years ago, according to the Dallas Morning News, to "root out what he called an epidemic of voter fraud in Texas," and his creation of a special unit which "tapped a $1.4 million federal crime-fighting grant" to expose the election stealing rascals.

For all of his crime-fighting in those two years, across the big Lonestar State, TX AG Greg Abbott has prosecuted just 26 cases, "all against Democrats, and almost all involving blacks or Hispanics," according to the Morning News, most of which resulted in "small fines and little or no jail time."

Additionally, almost all of them (18 of 26) involved mail-in absentee ballots where elderly voters were "illegally" given assistance in mailing their ballots, versus in-person voter impersonation of the type that cynical GOP attempts to mandate draconian polling place Photo ID restrictions are purportedly meant to deter. (In reality, they are meant to deter Democrats from being able to cast their legal ballots, so Republicans can more easily "win" elections.)

Just eight of the 26 prosecuted cases, the Morning News found, out of Abbott's two-year effort, involved any kind of ineligible or manufactured votes --- only 2 actually involved individuals casting fraudulent ballots at the polls, the rest were registration fraud issues --- and none of them revealed any larger conspiratorial scheme meant to effect the results of an election.

In the meantime, critics charge Abbott has been ignoring complaints about Republican election skulduggery, and we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that nobody has bothered to prosecute Republicanist Ann Coulter, for her several demonstrable voter fraud-related felony crimes in Florida despite, dead-to-rights evidence as published by The BRAD BLOG since early 2006.

We'd also like to point out, that in addition to there not being "an epidemic of voter fraud in Texas," there is similarly no such epidemic among space aliens either. Though Ted Rall suggests we may wish to implement some new measures there too...just in case...

Guest Blogged by Michael Dean...

The software most likely to steal elections is the BALLOT DEFINITION SOFTWARE loaded onto paper-based optical-scan and DRE (usually, touch-screen) voting machines in county elections offices across the U.S. just before the machines are sealed with security tape and transported to election polling locations.

And yet, the frightening reality is that there is little or no oversight of that software itself, nor of the people --- usually sub-contractors, who could be anyone from a non-U.S. citizen, to a criminal, to a political party operative --- who program that ballot definition software. Moreover, there is little or no testing of such software, despite the fact that it stores the ballot positions for all candidates and initiatives on every ballot, on every voting machine, and tallies the votes for all of them on election day.

For all of the concerns about election fraud, via the electronic voting systems in use across the nation today, and the eye on the source code for the software itself, few seem to have their eye on the ballot definition software, which can --- even on e-voting systems where the hardware, and main program software has been tested, certified, and audited --- succeed in flipping an election without detection, either by error, or on purpose.

Concerned yet? Read on...

In case you missed it, tremendous news for democracy lovers everywhere late yesterday, as the week ended up being a very good one for the voters, for a change...

• In Missouri, GOP vote-suppressor Thor Hearne lost one, and the voters won one for a change, as the attempt by Republican legislators in the state house to pass a Constitutional amendment requiring Photo ID restrictions and proof of citizenship sure to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of legal, registered voters went down in flames on the last day of the legislative session.

• On the federal level, GOP voter-fraud zealot Hans von Spakovsky (cue evil music), finally withdrew his nomination to the FEC, which had been blocked by Sens. Obama and Feingold. The standoff had kept the FEC from have the required quorum of commissioners needed to do business in a crucial election year. With vS out of the way, perhaps a responsible, pro-voter set of commissioners can now take their place. But we'll see. Rick Hasen has the outlook. Either way, it's another very big victory.

• In Tennessee, both houses have approved a bill to require a paper ballot for every vote cast! The bill has to go back to conference to work out one last point, but given its extraordinary success in both houses (it passed unanimously this week in the state Senate!) it's likely to be enacted quickly. This is a huge win for the tireless Election Integrity citizen heroes on the ground in TN, and a loss for the pro-machine, pro-invisible/unverifiable ballot crowd there, including Davidson County's Republican Election Commissioner Lynn Greer, who once told me, after I attended a meeting there, that "paper is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on this country." Apparently he was serious. The good news: the responsible folks in the state disagree with him. The bad news: the requirement for paper ballots won't take effect until 2010. But we'll take what we can get!

• Finally, in Arizona, as Steve Rosenfeld, as one of my guests yesterday while I was guest hosting The Peter B. Collins Show told us, the DoJ has finally settled a lawsuit against the state where Sec. of State Jan Brewer, who once called Election Integrity advocates "anarchists" and "conspiracy theorists" has been doing everything she could, for years, to keep legitimate voters from being able to properly cast their ballots and have them counted accurately. The state has now finally agreed to follow the law (National Voter Registration Act of 1993, known as the NVRA or the "Motor Voter Bill") by performing voter registration services at public assistance facilities such as welfare clinics.

We spoke about most of the breaking good news above last night on the PBC Show (audio archive here), and will try, for the next few hours at least, to enjoy some of the great news, for a change, on several fronts in the continuing Republican War on Voting.

By way of late update, MO sources tell The BRAD BLOG that the Republicans' state Constitutional Amendment to require draconian proof of citizenship and photo ID in order to cast a legal vote --- which the MO SoS reports could disenfranchise as many as 240,000 legal Show-Me State voters --- is still likely to come up for a vote today in the MO Senate, as this is the last day of the legislative session before recess.

All eyes were on developments on the floor until the early hours last night, when the Senate was still in session as of 2:30am, even as Columbia Tribune reports there may be attempts to amend the language to make the Constitutional revision more "palatable" by allowing for the disenfranchisement to not take place until 2010, instead of this November.

The Senate session is scheduled to end today at 6pm CT, and we're monitoring the situation. We hope to have an update tonight when we'll be guest hosting the Peter B. Collins Show at 5pm PT (7pm CT ).

Advocates for democracy (small "d") are still urging Missouri residents to call their Senators to ask them to vote NO on HJR48, which could be all the GOP needs to keep the important swing-state in the R column this fall! Here's the details you'll need...

Missourians for Fair Elections has much more, including breaking details, such as the late call just posted from the catholic Sisters of Mercy to oppose this legislation!

Recently related BRAD BLOG stories:

• TAKE ACTION NOW: Thor Hearne and MO GOP Attempt to Rewrite Constitution to Allow Voter Disenfranchisement
• GOP Vote-Suppressor-in-Chief Thor Hearne Deserves a Raise, Gets a Boost from the NYTimes, and Continues His Unapologetic Assault on Nuns, Vets, Students, Hurricane Victims, Married People, the Elderly, and Palsy Victims
• NYTimes Cleanses Thor Hearne's Record, Scrubs Front-Page Reference to the GOP Vote-Suppressor's 'American Center for Voting Rights'

UPDATE 5/16/08: The good guys win one for a change! Measure fails to be passed by the MO Senate before they completed this year's session! Details now here...

Jason Leopold over at The Public Record has more goods today on GOP Vote-Suppressor Extraordinaire Thor Hearne, including confirmation that he is working behind the scenes with the Missouri state Congressman (Rep. Stanley Cox) who drafted the Constitutional Amendment currently barreling through the state Senate to require proof of citizenship and Photo ID proof of residency before voting.

For the record, MO already has a Voter ID requirement, so this new restriction is meant to do nothing more than keep Democratic-leaning voters from being able to vote. Period.

The Senate session goes on hiatus as of this Friday, so the question is whether the Dem majority can hold off the effort to disenfranchise some 240,000 state voters, according to the MO SoS, who could be affected by this cynical attempt at stealing November. Failure to fight off the effort could result in the Show-Me state, a crucial swing state, in going to the Republicans this November simply by virtue of voters turned away for lack of specific types of Photo ID in the City of St. Louis alone.

An urgent call has been put out for MO residents to call their Senators immediately and urge them to vote against HJR 48, Thor's latest move, the Constitutional amendment to require incredibly draconian proof of citizenship and state residency with Photo ID before you're allowed to cast your legal ballot!

So for those in Missouri, please take action NOW to fight for your democracy and Constitutional rights! Call your Senators, and defeat this amendment! Here are some helpful tools for you, courtesy of PDA...

Recently related BRAD BLOG stories:

• GOP Vote-Suppressor-in-Chief Thor Hearne Deserves a Raise, Gets a Boost from the NYTimes, and Continues His Unapologetic Assault on Nuns, Vets, Students, Hurricane Victims, Married People, the Elderly, and Palsy Victims
• NYTimes Cleanses Thor Hearne's Record, Scrubs Front-Page Reference to the GOP Vote-Suppressor's 'American Center for Voting Rights'

LATE UPDATE 5/16/08: Details on HJR48 status, on the final day of Senate session!

LATER UPDATE 5/16/08: The good guys win one for a change! Measure fails to be passed by the MO Senate before they completed this year's session! Details now here...

For more information on the "non-partisan" tax-exempt ACVR "Voter Fraud" scam and the snakeoil salesmen who invented it, Bush/Cheney '04 National General Counsel Mark F. "Thor" Hearne and RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, please see BRAD BLOG's full Special Coverage of the "American Center for Voting Rights" at https://BradBlog.com/ACVR.

The good news: The complaints about references made to GOP vote-suppressor Thor Hearne's now-defunct front group, American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), have resulted in the New York Times dropping the reference to ACVR from yesterday's front-page article, to which we referred yesterday, with no small amount of disgust.

The bad news: The Times didn't bother to note their error (at least not in this online version of the story) as one would expect, as per transparent, journalistic ethics. More disturbingly, nor did they bother to note Hearne's continuing paid-partisan position as the GOP's top "voter fraud" scammer-in-chief, pushing for disenfranchising Photo ID laws around the country, his role in writing the very laws he's quoted discussing, his discredited and debunked ACVR group or their participation revealed at the heart of the U.S. Attorney Purge which pushed out Republican attorneys for not pursuing non-existent cases of "voter fraud" with enough fervor, or even his post as the national general counsel for Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. who mislead Congressional members during hearings on these matters in 2005.

The story now refers to him only as "a lawyer from Missouri who has been a strong advocate for voter ID laws." Almost sounds like Honest Abe Lincoln, don't it?

In other words, the infamous GOP snake-oil salesman Hearne has been cleansed of his baggage by the New York Times themselves. So, apparently, he remains in good stead as a source when it comes to the Times, NPR, etc. Credibility, apparently, is not a necessary quality for sources quoted by such organizations. Nor, apparently, is transparency.

What's next for the Times? Quoting Ahmed Chalabi as an unimpeachable source claiming Sadam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction? Oh, wait, never mind...

...CONTACTS...
NYTimes Public Editor, Clark Hoyt: public@nytimes.com
NYTimes Letters to the Editor: letters@nytimes.com

Miller-McCune's David Rosenfeld files a good story on the dreadful state of the hackable, insecure, error-prone machinery --- both DRE/touch-screen and paper-based optical scan --- still used across our electoral landscape in 2008.

Despite a few small-ish errors, Rosenfeld succeeds where so many before him have been unable: Properly quoting both the scientists and Election Integrity experts who know what they're talking about, while giving fair opportunity to respond from voting machine company and elected officials who are either in denial, uninformed, or simply willing to lie.

Folks like Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org, Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org, computer scientist David Wagner of UC Berkley, and yours truly (from The BRAD BLOG) are quoted from the truth-telling side.

On the misleading and/or state of denial and/or lying side, we hear from a Diebold spokesman, and officials from both the NH and TX Secretaries of State offices.

The latters' comments --- particularly those from the SoS offices, where one would think they have a duty to both be informed and tell the truth about their voting systems (unlike Diebold, where we might expect them to continue their long, unfettered, and desperation-built reputation for lying) --- are simply stunning.

Diebold spokesperson Chris Riggall (yes, an unfortunate name for a voting machine spokesperson) offers the usual nonsense in response to all of the many independent tests around the country which have found the company's voting systems --- both paper-based and touch-screen --- to have been easily hacked in seconds. "In some cases the studies have been lacking in appropriate perspective and balance," Riggall misleads in response.

But the TX and NH SoS officials quoted were even more outrageous in their outright states of denial, and/or the ease with which they are willing to simply mislead (okay, lie to) the reporter...

The parade of disenfranchised and/or soon-to-be-disenfranchised elderly, nuns, U.S. veterans (even those disabled in Iraq and Afghanistan), hurricane victims, and other Democratic-leaning voters continues this week, following the recent Supreme Court decision to allow the disenfranchisement of thousands of such (previously) legal voters in Indiana.

While much of the coverage --- such as today's report by Art Levine at HuffPo --- has been intelligent and serious, the New York Times took the lazy way out in a front page story today, lending credence to the discredited GOP "voter fraud" huckster, Mark F. "Thor" Hearne, with quotes and reference to his defunct, sham organization, The American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR).

Writing about him and it, as if he were legit, and as if the ACVR were still in operation, the article's author, Ian Urbina --- who has written very good reports in the past --- didn't bother to mention the controversy surrounding Hearne and his group, that they had disappeared themselves under the glare of the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal, that they had lied on federal tax forms claiming that the group had not "attempted to influence national, state, or local legislation, including any attempt to influence public opinion on a legislative matter or referendum" (fraudulent tax form here), that Hearne himself has been behind every step of the systematic and dishonest scheme to get laws of this sort on the books across the country, and finally, Urbina didn't even bother to note that Hearne had been the national general counsel to Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. and remains the top election lawyer for the Republican National Lawyer's Association.

It's all easy to find, of course. We've even set up a Special Coverage page at https://BradBlog.com/ACVR so folks like Urbina --- and NPR who similarly quoted Hearne as if he were legit recently --- wouldn't have to look too far.

But darn that "liberal media" again. For the record, we sought comment from Urbina, who we've been a source for in the past, and who has done good work over the years, but he declined to comment on our criticism here.

In the days immediately following the horrible SCOTUS decision, we quickly turned to our old home state of Missouri, where the huckster Hearne has been basing his well-funded voter suppression operation on behalf of the White House and the RNC for years, going back at least as far as the moment we originally outed him in 2005 just after he had created the not "non-partisan," tax-exempt front group, ACVR, and testified just days later at a Congressional hearing, led by Ohio's felonious Rep. Bob Ney. Hearne told of fraud having been committed in Ohio in 2004, but by John Kerry's campaign, after Hearne described himself to legislatures only as a "longtime advocate of voter rights and an attorney experienced in election law."

We called on MO's Sec. of State Robin Carnahan for an exclusive interview, while we were hosting KPFK's "Special Election Year Coverage" last week (audio here), and took the opportunity to inform her, if she didn't already know, that Hearne's group lied on his federal tax form, and has, to this day, illegally failed to discose the source of his group's $1 million in start-up funding.

Our interview with Carnahan took place even as Missouri's Republican legislature was in mid-debate on the House floor about a new state Constitutional Amendment to require proof of citizenship in order to register to vote and for a similarly draconian Photo ID requirement as those approved by the SCOTUS for the polling places in the Hoosier State.

Kansas City Star reporter Dave Helling noticed our interview with Carnahan, and wrote a quick item about it, noting her characterization of these anti-voter efforts as "absurd," and alleging that she has not been quite as available to "reporters in the state"...

...But whether the MO SoS has been available to Helling or not, she has been making quite a bit of noise ever since, concerning what a study by her office has found to be some 240,000 largely Democrati-leaning voters in the Show-Me State who would be disenfranchised by the Republican law as she explained to us on air.

Meanwhile, over in Arizona, a law that has already made it on to the books will similarly be keeping legal Americans from casting their legal votes this year.

Thor Hearne deserves a raise...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Presidential candidate Ralph Nader held a press conference in Los Angeles on Saturday where The BRAD BLOG asked him about whether the upcoming election would turn out any differently than the 2004 election which Nader believes was hijacked by the Republican Party and the 2000 election which the Supreme Court decided. The video (2:37) of the exchange follows below...

The text transcript of the above begins with our question to Nader:

BRAD BLOG: In 2004 you said that the Republican Party was able to “steal the election before election day” and that the “election was hijacked from A to Z”. And in 2000 the Supreme Court decided the election. Do you have any reason to believe that 2008 will turn out any differently?

Nader's answer to that question includes reference to the state-by-state partisan gaming of elections, and "this huge electronic miasma with different kinds of machines," made possible by billions made available as a "procurement item."

"Whenever you get a procurement item that interferes with election integrity," responds Nader, "you have politicians that are crooked and companies that seduce them into this kind of dishonesty."

His full answer to our question is transcribed below, along with the complete video of his entire 30 minute press conference...

"Why in the world would either the Legislature or the secretary of state or anybody object to local elections officials trying to ensure that their system operates as intended and that they get it right?" asked FL Supreme Court Justice Harry Lee Anstead as he crawled out of his cave to officiate at a hearing yesterday in Tallahassee.

The nearly-unheard of voice of reason momentarily reared its lonely head on Wednesday, if perhaps just temporarily, from the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole down which American elections have almost entirely disappeared.

Anstead was questioning attorneys representing Sarasota's still-unresigned, democracy-hating Election Supervisor Kathy Dent and FL's Sec. of State Kurt Browning. The pair are attempting to nullify the democratic (small "d") citizens' ballot initiative successfully voted in by a majority of Sarasota voters in 2006. The initiative called for improvements in the county's election system --- including paper ballots with post-election audits --- in hopes of offering more accuracy and integrity.

Needless to say, Dent and Browning are against that idea.

The following snippet of yesterday's extraordinary exchange --- including the attorney's remarkable response to Anstead's question --- comes from a Sarasota Herald Tribune report today.

Silly Harry. Clearly he needs to get out more...

Context, for those who still may need it...