Another Election Director with the temerity to speak out with concerns about E-voting has been done away with. This time in Texas.

As Early Voting starts today in the crucial Texas Primaries, it looks like we've got yet another new martyr --- from the rare ranks of Election Officials --- who has reportedly been taken out by "the powers that be" during a fight for the ideas of Election Integrity, which he even went so far as to mention on a Houston television news report, if you can imagine such a thing.

The following details come from today's FortBendNow...

Via Mark Crispin Miller, from New Yorkers for Verified Voting's tireless Election Integrity champion, citizen Bo Lipari...

Kudos to NY's EI folks! Please keep up the great work! Read Bo at NYVV for more details...

[UPDATED: See end of article for information on who this "DHinMI" tool actually is.]

Markos Moulitsas and the band of self-important anonymous losers that he's allowed to dominate the front page at the world's largest supposedly-Progressive blogsite continue their cowardly march towards full self-destruction.

Today's example comes by way of a comment from the anonymous (read: cowardly) "DHinMI", one of the loudest, most obnoxious and knowledge-challenged of Kos' stable of front-page sidekicks hell-bent on further discrediting the once-prestigious website:

Though, unlike Bev Harris and ourselves, who put our real names behind everything we do, "DHinMI" enjoys anonymity as he/she spews his/her unsupported, fact-free allegations. He/she does, however, offer an email address where folks might try to offer this numbskull a few facts if he/she ever becomes interested in any (which seems rather unlikely at this point): DHinMI@yahoo.com

"DHinMI's" comment, ironically enough, is posted in support of a front page article by Moulitsas himself today, in regard to a NYTimes article reporting that some 80 precincts in some of NYC's most African-American dominated precincts registered 0 votes for Barack Obama in their unofficial tallies. Kos then goes on to wonder if the article thus indicates that NYC's "voting machines don't spit out paper ballots? That should be SOP for these things."

NYC, of course, still uses the old lever machines which, of course, do not "spit out paper ballots", something that it seems great champions for the cause of Election Integrity, such as Kos and "DHinMI", ought to know by now.

What "should be SOP for these things," is that people who write at high-profile, influential Internet sites ought to learn what they're writing about before they write about them so that they don't mislead folks into believing they know what they're talking about.

Today's Daily Dose of Daily Kos loser-dom comes on the heels of yesterday's report in which they ominously threatened former CIA agent, Larry Johnson, with permanent banning should he have the temerity to continue his support of Hillary Clinton on their site. Why they seem hell-bent on proving Bill O'Reilly right over there remains a mystery to us, and further begs the question of how long it'll be before the dKos readers who tend to "get it", even as the front-pagers don't, will continue on at that place.

Previous BRAD BLOG-reported examples of dKos front-pagers, including "DHinMI" and Kos himself, busily destroying dKos' previously good name can be found here.

UPDATE: "DHinMI" isn't that anonymous after all. And whaddaya know, he's a member of the official Democratic Party machine. Knock us over with a feather...

The conspiracy theorists at the New York Times today tell us something is amiss, but proceed to ultimately tell us nothing about why it happened, suggesting that all is just fine...and that it'd be even better if the city "upgraded" to new electronic voting machines...

So how did the numbers change from 141-0 to 261-136 and from 118-0 to 118-116? No confirmed explanation is given, but some lazy guesswork about how votes are counted on NYC's old lever voting machines is proffered by local Election Officials, and dutifully passed on by the Times who --- before proceeding with a misleading "ad" for new electronic systems --- soothes our concerns by informing us that an unspecified number ("a handful") of districts also reported zero votes for Clinton in the original, unofficial tallies...

More voter registration problems. This time in Louisiana during today's Democratic Party Primary. From the Obama campaign website just after 7pm ET tonight...

For what it's worth, Obama reportedly won today's primary, but problems with voter registration rolls are quickly emerging this year as a huge problem in state after state. Our reporting from just the last week reveals problem after problem...

Georgia: Widespread bottlenecks for voters as problems occur with Diebold's new e-pollbook system and the state's new Photo ID restrictions. Voters waited in line for up to two hours in some places.

New Mexico: 17,000 (11%) forced to vote on provisional ballots in Democratic Caucus as previously registered Democrats find they are no longer on voter rolls recently privatized by voting machine company ES&S.

Arizona: We've begun receiving reports from voters and local officials of polling places where some 40% of voters were forced to vote on provisionals, after state registration system outsourced to ES&S. [UPDATE: One such report is now published here, from a poll worker who reports that of 1291 ballots cast at her polling place, 540 --- some 41% --- were forced to vote provisionally.]

California: Various reports of voters registered for one party to find they were switched to another, or not registered at all. Confusion about how to handle non-partisan voters in Los Angeles County leads to nearly 100,000 votes which may not be counted properly.

Many states are just now fully implementing new, statewide, computerized registration rolls as mandated by the disastrous Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. The systems are being outsourced to private companies in many states, and more and more Election Days seem to be turning into Beta Tests for the new systems...

No idea who this guy is, but according to his personal website, Mike Elgan is a "technology culture writer" who "learn[s], think[s], write[s] and speak[s] about technology culture for" a bunch of well-respected IT magazines and websites.

Looks like he may have forgotten the "learn" and "think" part lately.

Given his self-proclaimed expertise in such matters, one would think he'd know better than to forward the irresponsible information found his article "Why Can't Voters Vote Right?: Computers can save democracy, if only we give up our affection for paper ballots" as posted at InternetNews.com and at Datamation, etc.

I don't wish to spend too much precious space on his nonsense, but it's folks like him, at high-profile outlets, who haven't bothered to take the time to educate themselves on the issues they pretend to be experts on (or have, and yet don't care how wrong they are) and who have helped to get us into the very electoral issues threatening democracy today. Those issues would be the very ills that Elgan foolishly blames the voters for, before going on to recommend his brilliant prescription for curing the maladies: Much more of the very same toxic medicine that has made us sick in the first place.

I've sent him a personal email, with my phone number, offering to assist him in finding his way out of the fog, along with a link to this recent article, which includes a handy, bullet-point list on just some of the science and tech-based reasons why his uninformed proposal for straightening out our electoral woes is ridiculous.

His proposal includes laughably off-the-mark suggestions like...

Tom Herman of Vocalo.org (a project of Chicago's National Public Radio) had some good questions about how votes are counted in Illinois, and elsewhere, over the weekend. I tried to give him some good answers. I believe it was a very good, sober discussion on these questions, and one that might come in handy tomorrow and beyond.

Appx. 14 mins, download MP3 or listen online right here...

The courageous anonymous diarists at Daily Kos, the world's largest so-called "progressive" blog site, continue their pre-emptive suicide.

Today's dangerous mislead comes courtesy of anonymous poster "smintheus", who warns readers, in advance of Super Tuesday, that no matter what happens, there is nothing to worry your pretty little head about...

Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) continues misleading America about his two different election reforms bills. On Saturday night's CBS Evening News (video here), he says, in regard to the upcoming Super Tuesday Election: "There will be states around the country where the election results will be in question, and there will be no way to resolve the question."

What he fails to mention is that, should either of his own two federal Election Reform bills be passed into law as currently written, there will still be states around the country where the election results will be in question, and there will still be no way to resolve the question, because he still refuses to include a ban on touch-screen voting machines in either of his two bills.

Incredibly, even his newly introduced "Emergency" bill (which we wrote about back here) would give money for paper ballots only to jurisdictions that don't already use unverifiable touch-screen (DRE) voting systems with so-called "paper trails"...

Last week, Reps. John Conyers (D-MI) and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), both of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to the former Ohio Secretary of State and Co-Chair of the state's Bush/Cheney '04 campaign committee, J. Kenneth Blackwell, inviting him to appear next week at a subcommittee oversight hearing on voter suppression issues.

To the surprise of almost nobody, Blackwell has refused the invitation to testify, claiming his "schedule [would] not permit" him to attend the hearings.

The snub, according to both the following report from Jon Craig at the Cincinnati Enquirer and additional indications given to The BRAD BLOG by a Judiciary staffer other than the one quoted by Craig, may lead to an escalation of the longtime standoff between Conyers and Blackwell. A congressional subpoena requiring an appearance by the controversial former SoS, who presided over one of the worst-run Presidential Elections in American history, may well be in the offing.

As Craig reports today at the Enquirer's political blog...

Though our own Judiciary source spoke to the same point, if not quite as directly, the comments above from Godfrey offer an additional indication that we may be headed to a showdown.

Such a subpoena would require a majority vote of the committee, which likely wouldn't come in time for the hearings currently scheduled for next Friday, according to Craig's report.

After virtually ignoring the issue for some six straight years, our hometown newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, has run a two-part, 2,800-word "series" on concerns about voting machines, right on schedule, just in time to do absolutely no good at all before next week's upcoming Tsunami Tuesday election in the state. Waytago, LATimes!

The series reports absolutely nothing that has not already been reported over the last several years here at The BRAD BLOG, which is why the LATimes folks makes the big bucks and we don't.

They do, however, include an important point at the very end of the second article, in quoting from one of the country's most notable long-time voting machine apologists, Kimball Brace...

Our friends over at BuzzFlash are featuring an exclusive interview with David Earnhardt, filmmaker of Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections, today.

Disclosure: Though we appear in the film, and Earnhardt advertises it here at The BRAD BLOG, we do not make money on the sale of the film. BuzzFlash, however, does, if you purchase it through BuzzFlash's sales link, which we recommend you do, in case you've yet to see this seminal film. They and Earnhardt deserve the support.

We hope you'll read the interview, as well.

We've got a small, if friendly, nit to pick with both Earnhardt and BuzzFlash's Mark Karlin in regard to one section of the interview in which they discuss the notion of ballots being printed out by machine, as opposed to marked by hand by the voter.

Machine-printed ballots can never be verified, after an election, as actually reflecting the voters' intent, and thus --- except for cases of disabled voters who wish to vote on such devices, as necessary, in order to vote privately and independently --- there is no legitimate reason to use such voting machines. Ever. That is, of course, if such machines even work at all. When they don't, voters can't even cast their votes.

The quick, scientific-study-based bullet points on why such machine printed ballots or "paper trails" can never be known to reflect voter intent follow below for those who'd like to know...

New Hampshire reportedly reaps $3 billion from its "first in the nation" Primary Election privilege. In the bargain, they have demonstrated to the rest of the nation how not to hold an election.

More embarrassing video tape, taken during the shameful NH Election Contest hand counts, as shot and posted by BlackBoxVoting.org...

Blogged by Brad, from on the road...

Behold the "chain of custody" for the ballots in New Hampshire's ongoing Election Contest hand counts. The man seen in the still frame below, on the right, is NH Sec. of State Bill Gardner...

The above video clips were recorded and compiled by election watchdogs Bev Harris (of BlackBoxVoting.org) and Susan Pynchon (of Florida Fair Elections Coalition), both of whom were on the ground in Concord during the initial stages of the requested Democratic and Republican hand counts following the Primary Election in the Granite State. Harris offers more commentary on the video above right here.

Previously, Harris posted a stunning photo essay detailing the embarrassingly poor condition of the ballot boxes themselves --- unsealed, open for anyone to reach their hand in --- as they were picked up from towns around the state and delivered to the counting area at Concord's State Archives building.

The counting continues today for Republican Albert Howard, though New Hampshire SoS Bill Gardner, seen in the above video, has requested a halt in the counting for two days next week. That, after apparently misrepresenting Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich's serious concerns about "significant variances" discovered during counting of just one New Hampshire county so far. Disparities have been discovered as high as 10% for some candidates in some precincts.

Following on our report last Saturday of massive voting machine failures that kept voters from voting for hours in Horry County, SC, Kitty Pilgrim, on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight (video at left), reported yesterday on plans for SC to use the same machines again in this Saturday's Democratic primary.

At the same time, the Governor and Legislature in Colorado are finally beginning to get it, and simply override the incompetent SoS there, who can't seem to say "E-Voting machines that don't work should NOT be used in elections." So the Legislature appears ready to do it for him.

We're also happy to see the good John Bonifaz, of VoterAction.org, making an appearance to call for accountability (let's get our money back!) from the voting machine companies that have knowingly defrauded America.

And a NOTE TO KITTY PILGRIM: Your reporting keeps discussing "paperless voting machines" in reference to Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) machines that have no "paper trail." Adding "paper trails" to such machines is meaningless. They cannot be verified as reflecting the voter intent anymore than on a DRE without "paper trails."

If you stop and look carefully at your own reporting on SC last week, you'll note that the machines would not work at all until noon, as folks were scrambling to vote on scraps of paper, paper towels, etc. Had those DREs had "paper trails," they still would not have worked, and voters still would not have been able to vote on them.

References to "paperless voting machines" imply that machines with "paper trails" are somehow a solution. They are not. Only paper ballots are a solution. This is something that even Rep. Rush Holt's latest "Emergency Bill" doesn't seem to understand, incredibly enough. That bill (referenced in the CNN report above) would give money to jurisdictions to move to paper ballots, but only if they use "paperless" DREs. If they have DREs with "paper trails," however, they would not be eligible for that money under Holt's bill as written, incredibly enough.

Let's be careful what we wish for and/or report on, guys!