As we suspected tabulation of ballots has revealed problems with voting systems from all of the vendors. Hillsborough Co Florida is rethinking their contract with Premier/Diebold for $6M after having big problems counting votes. Manatee Co Florida also had a problem with Premier. Palm Beach Co had bad memory cartridges from Sequoia. Counties in Pennsylvania and South Carolina had problems with their ES&S system. We also have a run-off for senator from Georgia and a recount for senator from Minnesota. This election will last for another month at least....

Actor Tim Robbins, one of a few who've been very outspoken about election integrity concerns, was told he was no longer on the rolls yesterday in NYC, at the polling place where he'd voted for "more than a decade".

A "ruckus" reportedly ensued as Robbins fought to not have to vote on a provisional ballot, and eventually was forced to go see a judge in order to get to cast his vote.

Says Robbins, in the short video below, as he was in the process of getting the needed paperwork to fight to cast his vote in America: "This is what you have to do to vote... I had to go down to see a judge... My name was not on the roll, and I'm not the only one. According to workers, 30 people in 5 hours had been taking off the rolls. You can do the math on that. 6 per hour, per district across America..."

P.S. Note from Brad: Much to get caught up on today --- from the Al Franken mess in MN, questions about the Prop 8 results in CA, about Ted Stevens' Diebold re-election in AK, MO's close race for President and much more --- even as I've got a phalanx of promised media interviews, etc. to get through all day. Remember, most of the problems from Election Day don't begin to reveal themselves until the days following the election. So much catchup to come soon. My thanks for your patience, and for both Jim Cirile and Des' work in keeping this joint up to date-ish as I've been otherwise unable to do much BRAD BLOGGING over the last 24 or so...

UPDATE 12:20pm PT: The Nation's John Nichols notes the "Orwellian twist", given Robbins' appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher just over a week ago, urging people to fight for their right to vote not on a provisional ballot if they found themselves purged from the rolls on Election Day...

This morning there are some articles that were from last night after I sent the evening edition. Anything I entered this morning is strictly about problems with voting machines and tabulation of votes. Except for something that I feel needs to be in DVN that is not about technology and vote counting I will probably skip it unless it is a big story. I have also made things easier and added notes between brackets [ ] so the reader will know the manufacturer of the system and/or what the problem is that is being reported.

There are some problems with vote tabulation that will be followed. Hillsborough Co Florida is having problems with their Premier/Diebold system and with the vendor. Washoe Co Nevada is reporting 40 blank memory cards. Boulder Co Colorado is having problems because their Hart eScan optical-scan machines have problems with ballot dust and dirt...

Guest blogged by Jim Cirile

Live from Brad Blog Election Center in North Hollywood, CA, we pause from election updates to bring you these reports of election irregularities, oddities and irritations coming in from all over our great nation. We haven't vetted these, so don't shoot the messenger. Or as the Bard (that's Bard, not Brad) once said, "Hey, I don't make the freaking news, I just blab it to youse." When the dust has cleared and the euphoria of the election has subsided, we'll still have to address deal with the dirty tricks and voter suppression and... yes, the machines...

Guest blogged by Jim Cirile

Republican Congressman Tom Feeney, rated by nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (C.R.E.W.) as one of the "most corrupt members of Congress" for three years straight, has been defeated in Florida's 24th district. Regular readers of The BRAD BLOG readers know Feeney as the man who allegedly asked computer programmer Clint Curtis to write vote-flipping software in 2000 and escaped all accountability in an investigation stacked with Jeb Bush loyalists. (Full Curtis/Feeney scandal story summarized here, indexed in full here, new documentary film about the terrifying story here.)

According to the official FL Sec State website, as of 9:25 PM Eastern time, Feeney is losing to his Democratic challenger, Suzanne Kosmas by 19 percentage points--59% Kosmas, 40% Feeney. While we here at The BRAD BLOG are of course saddened that it was not Clint Curtis himself --- who left the Republican party after his dealings with Feeney and ran as a Democrat to unseat him in '06 and again in '08 when he lost in the primary --- who finally ended Feeney's ruinous reign, hey, any way we can get rid of Feeney, we'll take it. Of course, Kosmas is a corporate blue dog Dem with ethics issues of here own, as we've discussed here previously, but at this point we'll take the lesser of two evils and happily discharge Mr. Feeney. Here are your walking papers, sir. Job poorly done. Now Go Away. Hopefully to jail. Until then, we're sure he'll land in a cush lobbyist gig within a week.

In other great news, Congressman Robert Wexler is projected to win Florida's 19th district handily with 69% of the vote. Wexler, one of the few Congressional Democrats with teeth, has been a proponent of impeachment and accountability for the Bush administration. His return to Congress to finish his work is a very good thing indeed.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Problems with machines in Clay County, Arkansas. Pre-election tests were not performed and there aren't enough paper ballots to around...

Serious problems "continue to plague Virginia". The following info comes from the 866-OUR-VOTE website (via the Institute for Southern Studies)...

UPDATE: RAW STORY has more on "massive voting machine failures and voters being turned away from polls," and a call to extend polling hours in VA. VA uses 100% unverifiable DRE (usually touch-screen) systems across virtually the entire state. When machines of that sort break down, voters can't vote, unless there are emergency paper ballots on hand, and officials bother to give them out to voters.

UPDATE II: More on the dirty tricks at Virginia Tech, including a map to the remote pollsite students are being sent to.

Note: This is the same county in VA (Richmond) where the registrar had purposely distributed incorrect information to Virginia Tech students, as we reported back in early September, to warn them they might lose scholarships and ability to be declared dependents on their parents tax forms if they registered to vote there.

"More than 100 voting machines in Kenton County have been shut down on a judge's order" after they failed to properly register straight-party votes in Kentucky.

The failed machines are Hart InterCivic eSlate DREs (Direct Recording Electronic devices, usually touch-screen, though Hart's machines use a wheel and a button instead of a touch-screen). These are the same machines which Hart spokesman Peter Lichtenheld had previously argued could not lose or flip votes after they were similarly reported to have not been recording straight-ticket ballots correctly in Houston last week. Details from WLWT, a local KY NBC affiliate, follow...

Minutes ago, on CNN, they reported that "mechanical problems" are their quickest growing category of problems coming in to their hotline. "They hadn't even registered on our ticker previously," said the host. Perhaps because the Obama/DNC campaigns didn't tell them about all of the problems they've been finding?

A press release issued from 866-MYVOTE1 and CNN...at 9:30am PT reports on an alarming number of calls coming from "key states, like Pennsylvania, Virgian and Florida," And yes, as predicted, problems in Philadelphia where "there are extensive reports of machines simply not working." A perfectly predictable issue, that this horrifying chief of Philly elections didn't seem to care about just days ago.

Details from the CNN/VoterAction.org press release follow...

Wide-spread voting machine failures have been reported to the Obama/DNC election protection hotline in Nevada since early voting began more than a week ago in the state, The BRAD BLOG has learned. All voters who vote in person in the crucial battleground state are forced to cast their votes on 100% unverifiable Sequoia EDGE touch-screen voting machines with the VeriVote "paper trail" printer add-on.

Attorneys monitoring the incident reports coming in to the hotline have taken no action in regard to removing the failed machines from service, despite reports of the presidential race not appearing at all on some ballots; voters having problems selecting their preferred candidates; machines not starting up at all; "paper trail" printers jamming or running out of paper, and; a number of machines at a number of sites which refuse to work at all.

And this is just during early voting. A number of those startling reports are posted at the end of this article...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) received this letter [PDF] well over a week ago from Oakland County, MI, concerning ES&S precinct-based optical-scan systems that "yielded different results each time" the "same ballots were run through the same machines"...

This problem, discovered during pre-election "Logic & Accuracy" testing of the systems, would hardly be the first time that ES&S has failed to deliver on maintenance contracts, adversely affecting voters and election results in the bargain. We saw many similar problems during the 2006 primary election cycle. These precinct-based scanners are used throughout the nation, as ES&S is the nation's largest distributor of voting systems in the U.S.

The EAC received this letter a week ago, and we're trying to learn when it was finally posted to their website. But, more importantly, as they have a mandate via the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 to serve as a "clearinghouse" for such voting system problems, has the EAC sent a warning about this issue to any other jurisdictions where the same equipment or company is used?

From an emailer in Florida...

And we continue to hear from other sources that the bottleneck in Florida is at check-in with the state's new, computerized voter registration system, not with the new paper ballot op-scan system which is used after a voter votes. (Though there have been reported problems with the state's new Diebold print-on-demand system for printing ballots for voters to fill out as well.)

Rachel Maddow correctly noted (see video below) that these waits in FL, GA, and elsewhere, amount to a "poll tax." She's right.

As I noted last week, we have just one early voting location in all of Los Angeles --- the largest voting jurisdiction in the country, larger than 41 states combined --- and at this point, I have no idea if I'll be able to vote myself if the lines are too long tomorrow, since I have to go on air LIVE, hell or highwater at 3pm PT to anchor the NovaM Radio Network's "Special Election Night Coverage."

Here's what the lines looked like this weekend at L.A.'s only early voting location, a 40-minute drive from where I live (photo: Margery Epstein)...

And here's Rachel making her case, and pointing to 10 hour lines in Atlanta and elsewhere...

[Ed Note: Please "Reddit" this one up, as Republicans have been trying to down rate it over there!]

A devastating article on Sunday destroys the GOP's claims of "voter fraud" as a member of McCain's own (amusingly named) "Honest and Open Election Committee" has admitted that Republicans are unable to cite a single "documented instance of voting fraud that resulted from a phony registration form."

The admission underscores our bold and knowing assertion of same, back in the early days of this year's fake GOP ACORN "scandal", when such assertions weren't popular, as noted for history both here at The BRAD BLOG and at the UK's Guardian.

The fact-based comments were made despite the once-honorable Republican nominee's dangerously specious claims during the final Presidential debate, that the ginned-up "crisis" was "one of the greatest frauds in voter history" and was "maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

Looks like someone in his own campaign failed to get the memo. But it's not about facts, it's about fears, even ones that they themselves have created. As we've come to learn, that's more than good enough for the U.S. Supreme Court at least, and certainly for those attempting to keep you from being able to cast your legal vote...

-- Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG

Why corporate mainstream journalists have a need to identify everyone as either "liberal" or "conservative" is beyond me. But setting that aside, of far more import is the substantive information in Washington Independent journalist Jonathon E. Kaplan's report today featuring lead Obama attorney Bob Baeur's attempt to defend against my fervent critique of the campaign's woefully inadequate and dangerously misguided efforts in dealing with the massive voting machine problems occurring around the country since early voting began (and, of course, well before even that)...

[Note 11/3/08: An updated version of the article, now posted here, scales by on the "liberal" thing, after I sent a gentle complaint to Kaplan.]

The article does nothing to assuage my concerns about the Dems' self-proclaimed "behind the scenes" efforts on these matters. Bauer was still unable to offer a shred of evidence that the campaign or the DNC has taken such concerns about the use of wholly unverifiable voting systems --- and worse, allowing and actually encouraging election officials to access those machines during the election, at the time they are most vulnerable to tampering, for "recalibration" --- with the gravity the issue deserves.

Incredibly (though no longer surprisingly), the Democrats persist with their tortured logic that taking action on problems with voting machines will somehow depress the electorate, before quickly changing the subject to concerns about Republican chicanery on the front-end voter suppression stuff.

As an Election Integrity advocate recently noted rather eloquently, the front-end voter suppression issues and the back-end voting machine failures are two sides of the same coin. You can't worry about one without worrying about the other. The Dems, unfortunately, are still worried about only one side of the coin, as Kaplan's report demonstrates all too clearly (yet again) today...

3 days until Election Day.

Just a comment to those who want to dismiss ‘vote-flipping’ as voter error. All kinds of people go to the polls to vote. They are highly educated and high-school dropouts. Rich and poor. They have long fingernails and nails bitten to the quick. They have thin fingers and wide fingers. They are going to softly touch the screen or touch it hard. Vendors and election officials tend to blame vote-flipping on the voters. They touched the screen too hard; drug their finger; had long fingernails; or their fingers touched too large an area. So, is it the voters fault? NO! It is the vendors who designed, built and sold these machines that don’t work for all voters and it is the election officials who bought those machines.

A large majority of the ‘vote-flipping’ has been on older ES&S iVotronic DREs; those machines that were featured on last year’s Dan Rather Reports. The cheaply built, poorly tested touch screens that were used as components on those systems should have been scrapped long ago. It’s not the voters fault and this constant pointing of fingers is wrong. The vendors need to remember that when they point a finger at the voters they have three fingers pointing back at the real culprit, themselves; and it makes no difference what those fingers look like, they are the fingers of blame....