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It's Up to You, New York: 'BradCast' 3/21/24
Trump staring down barrel of both civil and criminal accountability in NY; Also: Biden forgives another $6B in student loans; U.S. seeks 'sustained ceasefire' in Gaza; Scientists baffled by spike in record global heat...
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  w/ Brad & Desi
Biden EPA issues biggest climate regulation in U.S. history; Rio hits 144°F heat index!; Exxon CEO blames YOU for climate change; PLUS: U.N. issues climate change 'red alert'!...
Previous GNRs: 3/19/24 - 3/14/24 - Archives...
'It All Comes Down to Brett and Amy': 'BradCast' 3/20/24
Guest: Slate's Mark Joseph Stern on another stunning week of federal judiciary debacles; Also: Primary results from AZ, FL, IL, KS, OH, CA; Biden EPA's 'biggest climate move yet'...
American 'Bloodbath':
'BradCast' 3/19/24
Trump is promising political violence whether he wins or loses; Also: Navarro goes to prison; Scofflaw MI MAGA attorney arrested; SCOTUS allows TX to override federal law, Constitution; Biden's SOTU success...
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  w/ Brad & Desi
EPA finally bans all uses of asbestos; Biden unveils billions for rebuilding communities broken by highway construction; Extreme heat in Africa; PLUS: MA coastal town follies...
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Corporations 'Taking a Bazooka' to NLRB, Hoping to Declare it 'Unconstitutional': 'BradCast' 3/18/24
Guest: Labor journo Steven Greenhouse; Also: Putin's 'election'; Trump can't find $450M...
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Schumer Steps Up; Trump Associates Paid Biden 'Bribe' Liar $600k: 'BradCast' 3/14/24
Also: TikTok foolishness; NY hush-money trial delay?; Navarro must go to jail; Trump owes $400k for failed 'Steele Dossier' suit in UK...
'Green News Report' 3/14/24
FL bans heat protections for workers; Methane leaks continue; GOP Project 2025 would ban Paris Agreement; PLUS: CA snowpack is back, but too late for salmon...
After Accountability for Fraud, What's Next for the Corrupt NRA and Gun Safety Reforms?: 'BradCast' 3/13/24
Guest: Brady Center's Kelly Sampson; Also: Biden, Trump clinch; GA judge nixes 6 counts...
How to Media Better and Other Smart Ideas:
'BradCast' 3/12/24
Press quietly resets weeks of misreporting on Biden; Suggestions for NYT; Stephanopoulos v. Mace; Also: Buck quits; RNC 'bloodbath'; WI's MAGA Speaker Recall...
'Green News Report' 3/12/24
Biden touts climate jobs boom at SOTU; Feb. obliterated global temp and ocean heat records; PLUS: Great Barrier Reef hit with yet another 'mass bleaching event'...
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GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal 2012...
VA GOP VOTER REG FRAUDSTER OFF HOOK
Felony charges dropped against VA Republican caught trashing voter registrations before last year's election. Did GOP AG, Prosecutor conflicts of interest play role?...

Criminal GOP Voter Registration Fraud Probe Expanding in VA
State investigators widening criminal probe of man arrested destroying registration forms, said now looking at violations of law by Nathan Sproul's RNC-hired firm...

DOJ PROBE SOUGHT AFTER VA ARREST
Arrest of RNC/Sproul man caught destroying registration forms brings official calls for wider criminal probe from compromised VA AG Cuccinelli and U.S. AG Holder...

Arrest in VA: GOP Voter Reg Scandal Widens
'RNC official' charged on 13 counts, for allegely trashing voter registration forms in a dumpster, worked for Romney consultant, 'fired' GOP operative Nathan Sproul...

ALL TOGETHER: ROVE, SPROUL, KOCHS, RNC
His Super-PAC, his voter registration (fraud) firm & their 'Americans for Prosperity' are all based out of same top RNC legal office in Virginia...

LATimes: RNC's 'Fired' Sproul Working for Repubs in 'as Many as 30 States'
So much for the RNC's 'zero tolerance' policy, as discredited Republican registration fraud operative still hiring for dozens of GOP 'Get Out The Vote' campaigns...

'Fired' Sproul Group 'Cloned', Still Working for Republicans in At Least 10 States
The other companies of Romney's GOP operative Nathan Sproul, at center of Voter Registration Fraud Scandal, still at it; Congressional Dems seek answers...

FINALLY: FOX ON GOP REG FRAUD SCANDAL
The belated and begrudging coverage by Fox' Eric Shawn includes two different video reports featuring an interview with The BRAD BLOG's Brad Friedman...

COLORADO FOLLOWS FLORIDA WITH GOP CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION
Repub Sec. of State Gessler ignores expanding GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal, rants about evidence-free 'Dem Voter Fraud' at Tea Party event...

CRIMINAL PROBE LAUNCHED INTO GOP VOTER REGISTRATION FRAUD SCANDAL IN FL
FL Dept. of Law Enforcement confirms 'enough evidence to warrant full-blown investigation'; Election officials told fraudulent forms 'may become evidence in court'...

Brad Breaks PA Photo ID & GOP Registration Fraud Scandal News on Hartmann TV
Another visit on Thom Hartmann's Big Picture with new news on several developing Election Integrity stories...

CAUGHT ON TAPE: COORDINATED NATIONWIDE GOP VOTER REG SCAM
The GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal reveals insidious nationwide registration scheme to keep Obama supporters from even registering to vote...

CRIMINAL ELECTION FRAUD COMPLAINT FILED AGAINST GOP 'FRAUD' FIRM
Scandal spreads to 11 FL counties, other states; RNC, Romney try to contain damage, split from GOP operative...

RICK SCOTT GETS ROLLED IN GOP REGISTRATION FRAUD SCANDAL
Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) sends blistering letter to Gov. Rick Scott (R) demanding bi-partisan reg fraud probe in FL; Slams 'shocking and hypocritical' silence, lack of action...

VIDEO: Brad Breaks GOP Reg Fraud Scandal on Hartmann TV
Breaking coverage as the RNC fires their Romney-tied voter registration firm, Strategic Allied Consulting...

RNC FIRES NATIONAL VOTER REGISTRATION FIRM FOR FRAUD
After FL & NC GOP fire Romney-tied group, RNC does same; Dead people found reg'd as new voters; RNC paid firm over $3m over 2 months in 5 battleground states...

EXCLUSIVE: Intvw w/ FL Official Who First Discovered GOP Reg Fraud
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GOP REGISTRATION FRAUD FOUND IN FL
State GOP fires Romney-tied registration firm after fraudulent forms found in Palm Beach; Firm hired 'at request of RNC' in FL, NC, VA, NV & CO...
The Secret Koch Brothers Tapes...


Next week's long-demanded hand-count in Phoenix may confirm long-standing allegations of the electronic manipulation, on Diebold tabulators, of the 2006 Pima County RTA special election
And, then again, it may not...
By Brad Friedman on 4/3/2009 3:23pm PT  

- Special Report by Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG

The 400 previously rejected absentee ballots in the Coleman/Franken U.S. Senate race in Minnesota won't be the only ballots being carefully counted next week. Neither will the more than 5,000 being counted in the NY-20 U.S. House special election where (fewer than) 25 votes, out of 150,000 cast, currently separate the winner from the loser.

A hand count of thousands of paper ballots that could trump all of the above, at least in regards to national importance, will quietly occur next week in a highly-secured Maricopa County, AZ, facility, as part of a years-long criminal investigation. Ironically, coming as late as it does, three years after the election, the results of the count, no matter what they may be, will not affect the actual outcome of that election --- even if it is found that the results were originally rigged by elections officials.

After almost three years; hundreds of legal documents; scores of hours in courtrooms; precedent-setting legal findings forcing the public release of Diebold computer databases supposedly recording how citizens voted in their own elections; allegations of potential hacking and fraud believed to have been possibly carried out by election official insiders; indications of tampering described as the result of "human error" by a report commissioned by the state AG, as part of a criminal investigation subsequently described by critics as a "whitewash"; arrests of local election integrity advocates; and lord knows how many articles documenting it at all here at The BRAD BLOG over those years, the paper ballots from the curious 2006 Regional Transit Authority (RTA) election in Pima County (Tucson), AZ, will finally be counted, beginning next Monday, as part of a criminal investigation being carried out by the state's Attorney General.

The hand-count of all 120,821 ballots from that special election will be carried out not in Pima, but under the supervision of "certified professionals who work for the Maricopa County (Phoenix) Elections Department," according to a 2-page letter [PDF] sent by the AG's office to the chairman of the Democratic Party of Pima County. The "strictly-monitored" count will either settle, once and for all, the matter of whether that election was conducted fraudulently by election insiders manipulating the vulnerable electronic Diebold tabulation system --- or it won't...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




CFO Kevin Krakora was largest inside trader during mass August 2007 sell-off, near historic company high, as reported exclusively by The BRAD BLOG
Diebold's bad month gets worse...
By Brad Friedman on 3/25/2009 8:19pm PT  

It's been a bad month for Diebold (DBD), what with the findings in CA that their voting machines drop votes and their audit logs allows deletion of records; their admission that all of their voting machines fail to record ballot deletions, and that their ATMs were hacked, likely by insiders, just to point to a few of their recent embarrassing headlines.

But things are getting still worse by the minute, it seems. This, from Cleveland's Plain Dealer today:

Diebold Inc.'s chief financial officer has stepped down in the wake of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into possible violations of federal securities laws.

Kevin Krakora, 53, who also stepped down as executive vice president, will remain in a nonfinancial reporting capacity until the matter is resolved, Diebold said Wednesday in a filing with the SEC.

There are more details at the Dealer (though caution is advised: most of their reporting is based on statements given by Diebold, so bring plenty of grains of salt!).

That said, The BRAD BLOG broke an exclusive story, in August of 2007, concerning a mass sell-off by 10 Diebold officers who had all managed to unload hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of stock, each on the very same day on Aug. 7th, when the share price was near an historic high. It fell quickly and preciptously thereafter (15% in the next week alone) following news of Diebold spinning off its election company into a "new company" named Premier Election Solutions.

The largest sale of stock made on that day, Aug. 7th 2007, was by Kevin Krakora, the CFO who stepped down today. He had sold $167,107 worth of stock (3,150 shares) at the near-historic high of $53.05 per share.

Diebold stock plunged in value more than 50% over the next several months, following the mass Aug. '07 selloff. It's been falling ever since, with one exception in March of 2008 when United Technologies Corp. (UTC) attempted an unsuccessful takeover of the company. The stock shot up momentarily on that news, but has been largely falling again ever since.

Shares of Diebold closed on Wednesday at $21.53, down 5.4% on the day. The last time the stock was at that bargain basement price was prior to George W. Bush's "election" (aided in part, by the way, by a Diebold tabulator in Volusia County, FL, which gave negative 16,022 votes to Al Gore --- an anomaly which has never been explained by anyone).

We couldn't tell you whether the news of Krakora's stepping down today has anything to do with our coverage of the questionable insider trading in August of '07. Or whether it stems from other questionable Diebold activities --- they've been facing a class-action securities fraud lawsuit from shareholders since 2005; under SEC investigation since 2006; and under DoJ investigation since 2007; and admitted overstating '07 earnings in early 2008.

But if we helped in any way, you're welcome, America!

The BRAD BLOG has covered your electoral system, tirelessly, fiercely and independently for years, like no other media outlet in the nation. Please support our work, which only you help to fund, with a donation to help us continue the work so few are willing to do. If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details on that right here...



Terminates all contracts - including voter registration system - following California county's discovery, disclosure of major flaws in Diebold/Premier voting systems...
By Parke Bostrom on 3/25/2009 1:42pm PT  

Guest Blogged by Parke Bostrom of the Humboldt Transparency Project

At the California Secretary of State's public hearing regarding the possible decertification of Diebold's tabulator systems, GEMS v1.18.19, in relation to the "Deck Zero" covert deletion of 197 ballots in the November election, the audit log's magical "clear" button, and the GEMS audit logs failing to report when ballots were manually deleted by the operator, Diebold/Premier representatives tried to shift blame for the 197 deleted ballots onto the Humboldt County, CA, Registrar of Voters, Carolyn Crnich.

Crnich responded, "If you're saying that your system needs to be checked every damn time we turn it on, I agree with you."

Crnich's use of an expletive seems to have pushed Diebold/Premier's legal counsel over the edge, causing them to reach for and firmly press the "nuke" button in response, by petulantly informing the county of termination of licensing for the use of any of the company's products.

Several days after returning to Humboldt, following the hearing in Sacramento, Crnich received two letters from Premier. Both letters arrived in a single envelope, but unlike Premier Khrushchev's two letters to President Kennedy, Crnich did not get to choose which letter to respond to....

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




By Brad Friedman on 3/22/2009 1:43pm PT  

"I triple guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad."
Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf (aka "Baghdad Bob"),
Iraqi Information Minister, April 2003

Michelle Shafer is the "Baghdad Bob"-in-chief of the e-voting industry. She's the VP and spokesperson for Sequoia Voting Systems and spokesperson for the e-voting industry as a whole via the Election Technology Council (ETC), a "trade group" created and sponsored by the nation's top four e-voting companies (ES&S, Sequoia, Diebold/Premier, and Hart Intercivic) to help spread their anti-science, anti-reality, pro-e-voting propaganda.

In the very last line of an article published on Thursday, on yet another e-voting related issue (which we may cover in more detail later), Michelle "Baghdad Bob" Shafer is quoted thusly:

Sequoia spokeswoman Michelle Shafer noted, however, that no electronic voting system has been compromised in an election.

As irony would have it, Thursday was also the very same day that news broke of the arrest of a cabal of election official insiders --- including a circuit court judge, the school superintendent, and a number of both Democratic and Republican polling place judges --- charged with having used the electronic voting system to compromise election after election, from 2002 to 2006 in Clay County, Kentucky.

Of course, very strong evidence exists that many other elections have been similarly manipulated on electronic voting systems by election insiders (see here, for just one example), including by both election officials and employees of the various private vendors whom Shafer represents. Much of that evidence, however, has been held at arm's length from citizen election integrity advocates under the absurd argument that that information is a proprietary, legally-protected trade secret. That specious argument has been made for years by the very government-funded corporate welfare queens, like Shafer's companies, that have been paid by our government to privatize our public elections.

So it's been difficult, at least until last week, to point disinformation experts like Shafer to the very evidence that reveal her statement, repeated time and again, to be a lie --- thanks in no small part to the "trade secret" claims of folks like Shafer. Get it? It's a helluva self-perpetuating scam...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




Info-stealing malware discovered on their Windows-based ATM systems
Experts suspect insider attack...
By Brad Friedman on 3/21/2009 10:37pm PT  

From bit-tech.net:

According to anti-virus provider Sophos – via ITWire – code has been discovered for a piece of malware that targets automated teller machines from US manufacturer Diebold, better known for its range of voting machines.

The code for the software uses undocumented features to create a virtual 'skimmer' which is capable of recording card details and personal identification numbers without the user's knowledge, which suggests that the creator had access to the source code for the ATM. While this doesn't directly point to an inside job, the possibility certainly can't be ruled out.

Sophos believes that the code was intended to be pre-installed by an insider at the factory...

ITWire explains: "It appears to be an inside job, as it uses undocumented functions of the ATM software and appears to use the printer. This suggests the people behind the malware have access to the Diebold software".

"Undocumented functions" just like those found on Diebold voting machines, naturally. And "access to the Diebold software" such as that gained by either a company insider, or someone who happened to find the source-code for Diebold's voting machine software just left by the company, available for download by anyone, on an unprotected Internet site...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




By Brad Friedman on 3/18/2009 2:00pm PT  

I guess I'm just in the minority here, but I'm having a bit of trouble getting exercised about $165 million (just to put that into perspective, the movie sequel The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian had a budget of $200 million) in bonuses to AIG employees.

Yeah, it's a shame that approximately one-tenth of one-percent of the $144 billion made available to the company by the federal government in bailout monies went to such bonuses, but where is all the furor from public officials, media outlets and bloggers --- from both Right and Left --- over the 12 billions of dollars (with a "b") sent over to Iraq as pallets of cash (literally, shrink-wrapped $100 bills), which then simply disappeared into that trillion (with a "t") dollar rat hole without accounting or explanation?

Where is the outrage and accountability there? Nowhere.

How about the $4 billion (with a "b") that went to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 to purchase privately made electronic voting systems which don't work and don't meet the federal standards it was claimed that they did?

It's curious, but not particularly surprising by now, the stuff that folks in Congress get selectively pissed off about, the stuff that media (both mainstream and blogosphere) go selectively wall-to-wall over, versus the stuff they don't.

You'll pardon me if I'm not particularly moved much at all by the latest round of AIG sturm-und-drang, hand-wringing, navel-gazing, finger-pointing and speechifying. Oh, and about the still-free bin Laden, and the still-free anthrax killer...well, don't get me started. Guess those things don't much matter.




Startling admission made during public hearing in CA to consider decertification of the company's voting and tabulation software...
By Mitch Trachtenberg on 3/17/2009 11:06pm PT  

Guest Blogged by Mitch Trachtenberg, with Brad Friedman

Even the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold's) electronic voting and tabulating systems --- used in some 34 states across the nation --- fail to record the wholesale deletion of ballots. Even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. That's the shocking admission heard today from Justin Bales, Premier's Western Region manager, at a State of California public hearing on the possible decertification of Diebold/Premier's tabulator system, GEMS v. 1.18.19.

An election system's audit logs are meant to record all activity during the system's actual counting of ballots, so that later examiners may determine, with certainty, whether any fraudulent or mistaken activity had occurred during the count. Diebold's software fails to do that, as has recently been discovered by Election Integrity advocates in Humboldt County, CA, and then confirmed by the CA Secretary of State. The flaws, built into the system for more than a decade, are in serious violation of federal voting system certification standards.

The problems may lead to decertification of the company's voting systems, as well as an examination of voting systems made by other companies to determine if they too may have been able to sneak such violations past both federal and state testers...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




By John Gideon on 3/5/2009 4:31pm PT  

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

A Diebold/Premier spokesman, Chris Riggall, has finally spoken about the California Secretary of State’s report on the discovery of violations of the accuracy standards required by federal law and violations of the voting systems standards. In our featured article Riggall shrugs off their violations by minimizing the report.

"I think it's fair, from our perspective, to say that the report editorializes in a number of ways that don't reflect the sort of even-handedness that one would like to see," Riggall said, adding that he sees the software error simply as a "contributing factor" to Humboldt County's inaccurate election results. "To say it caused it and to solely attribute that discrepancy to the software is, in our judgment, not accurate and not objective."

I say balderdash. Diebold knew they had a problem back in 2004 and they issued "work arounds." If they had a problem and knew it why did they not recall the software and provide good software in its place? Why did they not provide warnings and instructions in their operator’s manual? Why did they only send an email with a two paragraph attachment that didn’t even have the company’s logo on it? What did/does the company have to hide? How many elections nationally were affected before Diebold discovered the problem? How many elections were affected after Diebold sent their unofficial "work around"? ...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




By John Gideon on 3/4/2009 4:23pm PT  

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

On the heels of yesterday’s announcement of a letter to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and a full report on the findings of an investigation by the California Secretary of State’s office, we have articles from Kim Zetter in her blog for Wired Magazine and one from one of the principles of the “Humboldt County Election Transparency Project,” Mitch Trachtenberg that is posted on The BRAD BLOG.

Yesterday I mentioned the letter sent by the Secretary of State to the EAC. In that letter is a request by Bowen that the EAC “consider requiring that, for every voting system certified by the EAC, the voting system vendor report any and all flaws and problems with the system to the EAC and to the elections officials in the states where the system is used when such flaws are discovered.” This morning I was reminded by a member of the EAC staff, who receives DVN, that in the “Testing and Certification Manual” the EAC already requires what the Secretary has suggested they require....

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




New CA SoS report confirms findings of 'Humboldt Transparency Project,' discovers even more egregious failures in widely-used Diebold voting counting system
One of the citizens who designed the software, responsible for the startling discoveries, offers his thoughts...
By Mitch Trachtenberg on 3/4/2009 1:40pm PT  

Guest Blogged by Mitch Trachtenberg of the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has released a remarkable 13-page report [PDF] of her office's investigation into how the Diebold/Premier GEMS software silently dropped all votes contained on 197 ballots from the Humboldt County, California, November 2008 general election.

The report shows that this version of GEMS not only deleted a batch of ballots without any request by --- or alert to --- the elections staff, but also failed to note the deletion in the system's audit log. The report also points to other startling deficiencies with Diebold/Premier's software: "Key audit trail logs in GEMS version 1.18.19 do not record important operator interventions such as deletion of decks of ballots, assign inaccurate date and time stamps to events that are recorded, and can be deleted by the operator."

That's right. The Diebold/Premier vote tabulation system in question not only fails to record all events accurately, and sometimes at all, it also allows anyone with access to the system to completely delete audit logs, covering the tracks of any tampering that may have occurred, at any time, on the system.

Any of these flaws, the report concludes, "appears to violate the 1990 Voting System Standards to an extent that would have warranted failure of the GEMS version 1.18.19 system had they been detected and reported by the [federal] Independent Testing Authority [ITA] that tested the system."...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




By John Gideon on 3/3/2009 4:10pm PT  

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Yesterday, the California Secretary of State released a letter [PDF] to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and a report of their findings with regards to the problem discovered in early December, in Humboldt Co., with disappearing ballots on the Diebold GEMS v. 1.18.19 voting system.

The letter actually challenges the EAC to take action in “requiring that, for every voting system certified by the EAC, the voting system vendor report any and all flaws and problems with the system to the EAC and to the elections officials in the states where the system is used when such flaws are discovered.” And Secretary Bowen has taken the action herself by sponsoring legislation in California that will do what she has challenged the EAC to do.

The report is amazing in that it reveals why our voting systems are failing. The issues with the GEMS software go much deeper than just the fact that the system may lose votes. The state also found readily apparent violations of the federal voting system standards. These violations seem to have been ignored by federal test labs, by the National Assoc. of State Election Directors (NASED), and their consultants who qualified the voting system for use, and by-passed CA Secretaries of State and their consultants.

The big question is, will the EAC, staffed by people who were involved in the original NASED “rubber-stamp” of GEMS 1.18.19, take any action? Will they post the letter and report it in their “clearinghouse?” We certainly hope so. The present CA Secretary of State, Debra Bowen, and her staff deserve congratulations and appreciation for a job well done so far. It will be interesting to hear what follow-up actions will now be taken on the federal and state levels....

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




Maddening chain of email, querying the status of the Diebold failure discovered in Humboldt County, CA, illustrates the EAC's continued protection of e-voting vendors, at the expense of the voters
ALSO: CA said likely to decertify the flawed Diebold system, while the EAC fails to take any action at all...
By John Gideon on 2/23/2009 12:13pm PT  

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

"It is through the Constitution that we control the reins of government and insure that it remains the protector of individual, unalienable Rights - i.e., the servant of the People.

"Therefore, it behooves the People to show the Government that the People know what their Rights are and what Government's obligations are, that the People are watching Government as it exercises its delegated powers and that the People are prepared to act if the Government steps outside the boundaries drawn around its power by the Constitution." --- We The People Foundation

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) works for the People. It doesn't work for special interests. It doesn't work for the voting system vendors. The EAC has an obligation, spelled out in its past advisories, public statements and, most importantly, in federal law, to carry out oversight of the voting systems we, the People, use in our federal elections. It does not matter that the EAC commissioners are not elected to their positions. They are still servants of the People.

Not long after being created by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, the EAC published, on June 8, 2004, "Chairman Soaries' Remarks about Electronic Voting Security Strategy for the November 2004 Presidential Election." The comments, by then EAC Chairman DeForest "Buster" Soaries included recommendations "to insure election integrity and promote voter confidence in the administration of the 2004 federal election," and stated, in part: "[The] EAC should solicit information about suspicious electronic voting system activity including software programming and should request aggressive investigative and prosecutorial responses from the U.S. Department of Justice Elections Crimes Branch in the Criminal Division."

The above was restated in a July 13, 2004 "Commission Advisory Letter" [PDF].

It's clear that if there is to be any federal body to recommend investigation and/or prosecution to the DoJ, in regards criminal violation of federal law concerning voting systems, it is to be the EAC, the body charged with testing, certifying, and performing as the "national clearinghouse...with respect to the administration of federal elections" (42 U.S.C. § 15322) and the electronic voting systems employed across the country.

And yet, the EAC has continued to utterly fail in those duties, as a particularly maddening chain of inquiries and emails --- back-and-forth and round-and-round --- that we'd sent to the EAC commissioners and their spokesperson over the past three months illustrates all too well. All we were trying to do was get a simple answer to a very simple question...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




Claims lack of jurisdiction to order retention of ballots from 2006 election, even if counting them might reveal results were 'rigged'
Opponents of counting argue ballots should now be destroyed...
By David Safier on 2/4/2009 2:35pm PT  

Guest Blogged by David Safier of Blog for Arizona

If a judge’s ruling in Pima County, Arizona, stands, ballots from the long-contested 2006 Regional Transit Authority (RTA) election will be destroyed, and there will never be a definitive answer as to whether or not the election may have been rigged, as critics have charged.

It’s too late for the actual results of the election to be changed, but knowing whether the election was tampered with is critical to guaranteeing the integrity of future elections, according to local Election Integrity advocates who won a landmark lawsuit, resulting in the unprecedented release of terrabytes of Diebold databases. The databases, containing information on how voters voted, were found by the judge in the suit, to be public records.

Yet, the same people who ran the '06 RTA election are still in charge of elections in Pima County, and the same election software is still in place. If one election was rigged, there is little stopping them from rigging others in the future.

The RTA bond measure was reportedly passed by voters in 2006, but Pima County Democrats and Libertarians believe there is substantial evidence the measure actually went down and the results were flipped in the vote counting computer. The optical-scan paper ballots themselves have never actually been counted. They’re sitting in sealed boxes in the County Treasurer’s office, and may soon be destroyed. The Democrats and Libertarians went to court last month, asking the judge to save the ballots, so they may actually be counted in the future.

In his ruling, however, Judge Charles Harrington's claims he has no jurisdiction in the matter...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




By John Gideon on 1/13/2009 4:10pm PT  

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

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

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After Finding Diebold's Tabulator Had Secretly Deleted Ballots from '08 Election, Humboldt's Election Chief Rushes to Buy New System From Different Vendor Without Adequate Public Discussion Period, According to Election Advocates
State-Commissioned Studies Find Hart InterCivic Ballot Scanners Vulnerable to 'Simple Attack', 'Malicious Alteration of Vote Totals'...
By Brad Friedman on 12/19/2008 1:05pm PT  

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

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

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

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