[Now UPDATED with additional reports of additional vote-flipping and touch-screen failure from other NC counties at bottom of article.]

Aaand the touch-screen voting machines continue to flip votes during the early voting period. Right on schedule. Just as always. But, for the second time this week we have the unusual occurrence of votes reportedly flipping away from the GOP.

Yesterday our report was of a touch-screen in Dallas, TX, caught on video flipping an attempted vote for Republican Gov. Rick Perry to straight-ticket Green Party selections in Dallas, TX.

Today's report, where the local election official is also misleading voters by downplaying the incident, comes from the same type of 100% unverifiable ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting machine, but it took place in Craven County, NC, according to P. Christine Smith of the Sun Journal...

Tyson also went on to report there were long lines reported as voters waited to use the two touch-screen voting machines available at one location (paper ballots don't cause that problem) and, even more disturbingly, "machines reporting 250 ballots cast where 400 voters had signed in to vote."

Well that's a problem, isn't it?...

As you may know, the U.S. Senate race in Alaska between GOP nominee Joe Miller and Democratic nominee Scott McAdams, Mayor of Sitka, has been thrown into what's quickly turning into a potential three-way toss-up with Sen. Lisa Murkowski's write-in bid for the seat.

She and her father have long been insider fixtures within Alaska's political establishment, and so now both the state Democrats' supporter McAdams and Miller's campaign are accusing the Department of Elections, run by the state's Republican Gubernatorial administration, of taking sides to help Murkowski by inappropriately making a printed list of those write-in candidates who have filed a declaration of intent (under AS 15.25.105) available to voters who ask for help at the polling place.

A series of letters back and forth between the Alaska Democratic Party (ADL)'s attorney Joe McKinnon and the Director of the state's Division of Election (DoE)'s Gail Fenumiai highlight a questionable-at-best assertion that the printed list of write-in candidate names should be shown to voters if/when they ask questions about how to cast a write-in vote.

Fenumiai argues that the best way to provide assistance when it's requested, as required by both state and federal law, is by showing voters the list. McKinnon disputes the argument, and offers specific citations of law, demonstrating that the statutes are very specific about what sort of help may or may not be provided to voters at the polling place. He argues that offering the name of a write-in candidate to voters constitutes "electioneering," as specifically barred inside or within 200 ft. of the polling place...

-- Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG

Aaaand here we go again. Our first report of touch-screen vote flipping of the year during early voting. And, for an added twist, this time it's Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry who seems to be getting screwed by the 100% unverifiable ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting system in question.

Most such reports of touch-screen vote-flipping or vote-hopping, historically, have been from Democratic voters seeing their votes flip to candidates of other parties, though there have been isolated reports over the years of Republican voters experiencing the very same problem. Indeed, another report has been published today from a voter in Collin County, TX, who says his vote flipped from Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White over to the Republican Perry.

The Dallas incident was posted as a YouTube video by programmer Don Relyea and began to go viral early this morning, before being set to "private," presumably by Relyea, at YouTube a few hours ago. So, unfortunately (for now), we're unable to show the video itself, though we watched it several times this morning before it was made unavailable, and have a step-by-step analysis of precisely what is seen in the video, as detailed by an Election Integrity expert who reviewed it a number of times to explain what is actually seen in it.

The removal of the video, seemingly shot via a cell phone camera, may be due to Texas law barring recording equipment of any kind in polling places. Dallas County Elections Administrator Bruce Sherbert told The BRAD BLOG that he has now referred the matter to the District Attorney for investigation, not due the purported incident of vote-flipping, but rather due to Relyea's video-taping of the event.

Sherbert's explanation for what is seen in the video, however, downplays the purported problem and does not appear to sync up with what is actually seen in the video supporting Relyea's contention that his attempted vote for Perry was being inappropriately flipped to a number of Green Party candidates on the ES&S iVotronic system...

Think Progress has a great report today on the billionaire industry titans, U.S. Supreme Court Justices (including Scalia and Thomas), infamous front-group astroturfers and Rightwing media scammers who meet in secret twice a year --- as they did last year in Aspen and will again this January in Palm Springs --- to plot how they will spend their billions to keep "liberty" and "freedom" available to all (of them) and to plot the 2010 and 2012 elections for Republicans.

The story includes the actual invitation letter [PDF] to the upcoming Palm Springs event, from Vast Rightwing Conspiracy funder, billionaire Charles G. Koch of Koch Industries Inc., along with the agenda and participants of last year's Aspen meeting attached to it.

The letter begins creepily enough: "If not us, who? If not now, when?", but my favorite part is this part from the reprint of the agenda of last year's meeting...

It's getting incredibly difficult to keep up with the amount of The Crazy out here of late. So here is a very quick round-up of the latest today (so far)...

• She Did What?!: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' activist Tea Bagger wife --- and, apparently, long-term denialist --- Virginia leaves a voice message to Anita Hill asking her to apologize for Hill's accusations, twenty years ago, that she was sexually harassed by Thomas. Hill's attorney was "shocked" by the call. In 2007, in a New York Times op-ed, as we noted at the time, Hill said she stood by her testimony. Hill repeated the sentiment again today, saying she has "no intention of apologizing because I testified truthfully about my experience and I stand by that testimony," as WaPo reports on yet another woman who knew Thomas back then coming forward today to say "The Clarence I know was certainly capable not only of doing the things that Anita Hill said he did, but it would be totally consistent with the way he lived his personal life then."

• Kreepy Scam: Matt Osborne from Osborne Ink notices our report on the insane email from Gary Kreep, Esq, Executive Director of the group calling themselves "United States Justice Foundation", sent out to the Tea Bag set on Monday, warning that ACORN is "still alive and ready to steal the November 2 elections" with "MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD". (Never mind that the org has been knocked out of business by the O'Keefe/Breitbart/MSM "pimp" hoax, and that they've never been shown to have stolen even one vote, much less an entire election.) Osborne tweets to us that Kreep is the same cretin who actually aired an Obama Birther Infomercial asking viewers to send him money for...something or other. He's doing the same thing in his latest ACORN "voter fraud" email scam.

• More Birther/Voter Fraud Fraudster Connections: TPM picks up on Mother Jones' report that the so-called "voter integrity program" discussed by Illinois' GOP candidate Mark Kirk on a recorded phone call "was launched by the Illinois Republican Party, working with a conservative political action committee and an anti-Obama birther". Without evidence for the claim, Kirk had cited two predominately African-American areas of Chicago as "vulnerable" and "where the other side might be tempted to jigger the numbers somewhat."

• He's back!: And speaking of phony "voter fraud" allegations, we reported some weeks ago on the Houston group calling themselves "King Street Patriots" and their "True the Vote" campaign warning about, as usual, massive Democratic voter fraud!!! (Sans evidence to support the actual claim, naturally). Their call to draft "poll watchers" has now reportedly led to voter intimidation charges such as "poll watchers 'hovering over' voters, 'getting into election workers' faces' and blocking or disrupting lines of voters waiting to cast their ballots" as early voting has opened in Houston where a fire recently destroyed all 10,000 of their 100% unverifiable e-voting machines (don't worry, they borrowed more from neighboring counties). The DoJ has now been called in to investigate the complaints. But, as it turns out, one of the folks supposedly responding to the complaints of voter intimidation on behalf of the county attorney's office is none other than John Tanner, George W. Bush's disgraced Voting Section Chief at the DoJ. Tanner was forced to step down from his post after The BRAD BLOG, in 2007, infamously caught him, on video, downplaying concerns of racial discrimination and intimidation at the polls by telling folks at an L.A. seminar that white people are more likely to be disenfranchised because "minorities...die first". He looks to be making a similar "both sides do it" play now in Houston, telling TPM "There are a lot of allegations out there on both sides." Really? Where are the complaints of voter intimidation by Democratic poll watchers in Houston? None have so far been reported, but we'll try to get more info on this.

• Uhhhh...: Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI)'s opponent, businessman Ron Johnson has a "deer in the headlights moment", caught on tape, during an interview with the Green Bay Press-Gazette editorial board when he was asked what he plans to do to bring back jobs for the middle class. He can't think of anything other than cutting government spending and freezes up when asked for more specifics. The moment helped lead to the paper's endorsement of Feingold for the first time ever (previously, they've always endorsed his opponent.)

• Mythgivings: If you missed it in yesterday's Green News Report, WV's GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate, in a debate Monday, discussed "the myth...and I say myth, that there is Global Warming." His Democratic opponent in the coal state, Gov. Joe Manchin, while not necessarily believing GW is "a myth", none the less ran a campaign ad last week displaying his manliness by shooting a hole, literally, through "Cap and Trade" legislation (which had been killed months ago anyway in the U.S. Senate.)

• Louder Than Words: Obama's Dept. of Justice appeals for an "Emergency Stay" of the Federal Judge's recent order for a "worldwide injunction" on the military's unconstitutional "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. This comes after Obama has repeatedly claimed he will end the policy "on [his] watch"; after the Military instructed recruiters yesterday to begin accepting openly gay applicants; and after Arabic translator Lt. Daniel Choi --- who had been discharged from the military for being gay --- walked into the Times Square recruiting office yesterday to sign up again (great video there, btw! Choi says there was plenty of "unit cohesion" in the office, even after his application to serve his nation openly.)

• Man in the Mirror: Glenn Beck, The Crazy personified, says the idea of evolution is "ridiculous" because he hasn't "seen a half-monkey, half-person yet". Sigh...

Seeing more of The Crazy out there? Let us know about it in comments.

And, also speaking of the long-waged Republican War on Democracy, it's nice to see a bit of in-depth coverage of issues that actually matter from local news reporters for a change. Here's Melissa Sims of KARK 4 News in Arkansas last night, on the vote caging of Tim Griffin, the Karl Rove protege installed as U.S. Attorney without Senate confirmation by the Bush Administration during their infamous U.S. Attorney purge.

Griffin, notoriously, was discovered to have sent caging emails to RNC colleagues during the 2004 election in Ohio. He denies any wrong-doing, though BBC investigative journalist and author [and occasional BRAD BLOG guest blogger] Greg Palast who first reported on the caging emails in Griffin's name, believes otherwise. Several other independent reporters similarly confirmed his involvement in the scheme. Griffin has never been held legally accountable, in any case, despite being forced to tearfully resign as USA during the Attorney Purge investigation. He is now, incredibly, the GOP's nominee for Arkansas' 2nd District U.S. Congressional seat, proving --- yet again --- that IOKIYR.

KARK's Simas took the time to cover the matter in some detail --- a 7-minute report is extraordinary for local news --- even as it's been largely ignored by...well, just about everybody, certainly in Arkansas, until now...

Note: Simas' written report published on KARK's ArkansasMatters.com website along with the video report, is very good as well.

[Much thanks to RAW REPLAY'S David Edwards for the video embed!]

UPDATE 10/20/10: Palast picks up on this same story and writes over at Truthout that attorney Robert Kennedy Jr., having looked at the Griffin caging emails, believes that what the SarahPAC-endorsed candidate Griffin did "was absolutely illegal and he should be in jail."

Speaking of GOP voter suppression efforts, there's this sleazy little dirty trick today, as now running on Hispanic television in Nevada, where a group calling itself "Latinos for Reform" is deceptively instructing the community "Don't Vote!" this November --- particularly in the razor-thin race between incumbent Democratic Sen. Harry Reid and his Republican challenger Sharron Angle.

You'll be shocked to learn that, of course, as TPM reports, the ads are the work of Republican political consultant, Robert Desposada. Whodda guessed it?

Here's the attention-grabbing spot, as translated into English...

And here's the version in Spanish actually airing in NV...

[UPDATE: ThinkProgress reports Univision, a subsidiary of NBC/Universal, is accepting $80k to air the GOP group's ads in Nevada. | LATER UPDATE: Univision decides to not run the ads after all, telling Think Progress late today, "Univision will not be running any spots from Latinos for Reform related to voting."]

And, perhaps this is a good time for a note for those who may not be aware as Election Day nears, particularly if you read our report yesterday on the "Republican War on Voting 2010" and little else here at The BRAD BLOG over the years: Our coverage of election issues is non-partisan...

We've seen a lot of insane, hyperbolic Rightwing scare emails in our time. But the one posted at the end of this article, signed by the appropriately named Gary G. Kreep, Esq., Executive Director of a group calling themselves the United States Justice Foundation (USJF), warning that ACORN is "Still alive and ready to steal the November 2 elections"(!!!) just may take the cake.

As expected, as they now do every election year, the Rightwing is ginning up this year's Republican War on Voting right on schedule. They've been at it so long, and have disinformed so many of their own gullible voters and politicians, that it's likely most of them have come to actually believe their own cynical propaganda about "massive voter fraud" by Democrats and their evil evil election-stealing allies at ACORN!

If you read TPM Muckraker, you know the RNLA ("Republican National Lawyers Association," though "Republican National Liars Association" would be at least as accurate) has been running a series of a bunch of disinfo seminars over the last few days, featuring all of the "voter fraud" fraudster all-stars and the usual suspects like grand-daddy of the GOP vote-fraud-myth set, John Fund in what they disingenuously describe as their "unprecedented" "election education efforts".

On the ground, of course, the years of disinfo has translated into Rightwing voter suppression efforts meant to do absolutely nothing more than challenge and/or intimidate Democratic-leaning voters on Election Day in order to squeeze out an advantage for Republicans as needed. We covered the shameful efforts of the "True The Vote/King Street Patriots" bunch a few weeks back. Since then, new organized efforts at playing out the GOP's great anti-democracy tradition have popped up around the nation, as expected.

The email from the "USJF" today, encapsulates the growing madness brilliantly...

I'm no good at raising money for The BRAD BLOG - so let's see if I have any better luck helping out progressive filmmaker John Wellington Ennis to complete his newest documentary, Pay 2 Play: Democracy's High Stakes, covering the Supreme Court's Citizens United disaster and other related bastardizations of our democracy by the highest corporate bidder.

As his website describes the new film: "The cost of running for office makes candidates beg, borrow, and steal. PAY 2 PLAY shows how our elections encourage extortion, and how to stop it."

John is also the director of 2008's high-lariously informative Free For All: One Dude's Quest to Save Democracy (which features yours truly, but is brilliant nonetheless!)

Unfortunately, progressives are not shoveled barrels of free money as partisan scammers Andrew Breitbart, James O'Keefe, and the other liars and snake-oil salesmen on the Right are. Progressives actually have to beg for funds and then produce actual, truthful material in the bargain! That takes time, effort, and funding. So it's gonna take money to get money out of our politics once and for all! Please help. Ennis is doing his part, big time, so please help him out to finish the film if you can afford to toss in a few dollars!

If you need any more convincing, here's a slightly shortened version of an appearance I made at one of his fundraisers in Santa Monica last week [apologies for the echoey sound, it gets easier to see and hear as it goes forward!]...

A University of Michigan computer scientist and his team were not the only ones attempting to hack the Internet Vote scheme that Washington D.C. had planned to roll out for actual use with military and overseas voters in this November's mid-term election.

According to testimony given to a D.C. City Council committee last Friday by J. Alex Halderman, asst. professor of electrical engineering and computer science at University of Michigan, hackers from Iran and China were also attempting to access the very same network infrastructure, even as his own team of students had successfully done so, taking over the entirety of the Internet Voting system which had been opened for a first-of-its-kind live test.

[See our report last week on details of what had already been disclosed about Halderman's startling hack prior to last Friday's hearing.]

"While we were in control of these systems we observed other attack attempts originating from computers in Iran and China," Halderman testified. "These attackers were attempting to guess the same master password that we did. And since it was only four letters long, they would likely have soon succeeded."

In his stunning public testimony --- before a single member of the D.C. Board of Ethics and Elections (BoEE), and a nearly empty chamber --- Halderman explained how the team had, by the time they discovered their fellow intruders, already gained complete control of the system, it's encryption key and its passwords. The system was developed as part of an Internet Voting pilot program with the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation.

As The BRAD BLOG reported last week, Halderman's team was able to take over the system within 36 hours after it had gone live for testing. After having "found and exploited a vulnerability that gave [them] almost total control of the server software," his team was able to steal the encryption key needed to decode "secret" ballots; overwrite every single ballot cast on the test system; change the votes on those ballots to write-in candidates; discover who had already been voted for and the identities of the voters; install a script that would automatically change all votes cast in the future on the same system; install a backdoor to allow them to come back later; and then leave a "calling card" --- the University of Michigan fight song --- which was programmed to play in the voter's browser 15 seconds after each Internet ballot had been cast.

But the new disclosures offered before the committee on Friday, including the hack attempts by computers in China and Iran, may have been as explosive, if not more so, than the previous revelations. They certainly illustrate and underscore a grave national security threat present in electronic voting systems such as the one D.C. had planned to use, as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories computer scientist and cyber-security expert Dr. David Jefferson told me during an interview last Friday night on the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show which I was guest hosting last week.

The hack of the system forced the D.C. election administrators to shut down their plans for the pilot program which was to have gone live in days, as encouraged and partially funded by the federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, which allocated millions of dollars for such Internet Voting pilot programs.

The revelations of the intrusion attempts from China and Iran, however, would not be the only new, previously unreported bombshells Halderman offered during his Friday testimony...

[Hat-tip to longtime BRAD BLOG toon sherpa Pokey Anderson]

Related... If you didn't hear my interview on last night's Mike Malloy Show with 70-year old Laird Monahan who, with his 67-year old brother are currently walking across the U.S. in order to highlight the Supreme Court's horrific Citizens United decision, unleashing unfettered, undisclosed (and often, even un-American) corporate money into U.S. elections, I'd highly recommend giving it a listen.

The Monahan Brothers, both Vietnam vets coincidentally, are American Heroes in my estimation, and their story should be told on not just every progressive media outlet in the nation, but more importantly, on the corporate mainstream media outlets who don't seem to want to offer much coverage to this story for some reason, as Laird and I discussed last night.

Click here to listen to listen to the interview with Laird. It's in the "HOUR 2" audio archive.

As we posited in our coverage yesterday of D.C.'s Internet Voting scheme which was hacked with the University of Michigan fight song just days after experts had warned against the entire scheme, J. Alex Halderman, asst. professor of electronic engineering and computer science at the university, was, indeed, at the heart of the hack.

He details tonight that he and a small team of students were happy to participate in the test that D.C. election officials had announced, with just three days notice, inviting hackers to try and penetrate the system they planned to use this November, as developed with the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation.

Halderman writes in his explanation of how they did it:

And if you think that's chilling, Halderman goes on to note that all cast ballots on the system were modified and overwritten with write-in votes, all passwords taken --- including the encryption key, which e-voting supporters constantly suggest will keep such systems safe --- before they went on to install a back door to let them view any votes cast later, after their attack, along with the names of voters and whom they voted for...

Last week we told you about D.C.'s intention of running an insane live experiment on live voters in a live election with an untested, wholly unverifiable, easily-manipulated Internet Voting scheme this November, and about just some of the computer security and election experts who have been desperately trying to warn them against it.

And now we find out that the very short planned pre-election test phase, in which hackers were invited to try to manipulate the system, has been abruptly aborted in the wake of a, um, disturbing (if not wholly unpredictable) development.

The failed system in D.C. was developed with the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, an outfit that is working with election officials around the country to push Internet Voting everywhere, along with other computerized voting schemes. Simply because a system is "open source" does not mean it's secure, particularly when it relies on concealed vote counting, as all of their e-vote schemes do.

Below, along with our quick list of other recent known e-voting hack events, computer scientist Jeremy Epstein in "The Risks Digest," which describes itself as a "Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems," offers the quick timeline of recent developments in the District of Columbia's plan "against advice from many computer scientists, pursuing a trial of a prototype system for the November election."

The result, as seen below, in this latest assault on citizen-overseeable democracy is, of course, a stunning surprise to absolutely nobody other than perhaps the D.C. election officials interested in this horrific scheme and the profiteers who must have tricked them into believing that it was a secure and/or good idea [emphasis added]...

Who could have foreseen it? (Oh, right, we did, months ago, when we described this year's appalling SCOTUS decision in Citzens United as "a case that would live in infamy.")

The following comes from Washington Post today (which, btw, doesn't bother to correct blatant errors in its reporting on other matters, but that's a different issue):

Along with the madness of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) and Vote-by-Mail, Internet Voting is the other scheme/virus that makes my head explode --- as if the existing e-voting system we already use in the U.S. isn't unverifiable, unoverseeable and susceptible enough to malfeasance and malfunction as is.

So with the little patience I can muster to even mention this latest particular nightmare at all today, I'll defer to Washington Post's coverage yesterday --- sure to be ignored until it's too late ("Who could have foreseen it?!") --- of the experts' latest warnings against D.C.'s planned live democracy experiment of using an untested and unverifiable Internet Voting scheme on real voters, in a real election, beginning in just a few weeks.

The WaPo column includes this explanation of two letters sent to D.C. officials this week, urging them to take a different path...

Four advil and three shots of vodka please.

UPDATE 10/4/10: Aaaaand...whaddaya know, D.C. Internet Vote scheme --- the one experts above were warning about --- gets hacked. Who could have forseen it?! Details here...