The following report, of another Obama vote lost, comes from Nashville (Davidson County, TN), as did the similar one last week. ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting machines failing again, harming Democrats each time. The same machines are failing in one county and state after another, are still in use, haven't been impounded, and voters still do not get to vote on paper ballots.

The "thousands of attorneys" from Obama and the DNC are still completely AWOL. [Note: See update at bottom of story.]

From the Tennessean...

Have we mentioned that the "thousands of attorneys" from Obama and the DNC are still completely AWOL?

Quick links to our previous coverage, of similar incidents, in at least three other states, follows --- along with a quick list from experts about what you need to do (since Obama and the DNC apparently won't) when/if you have a similar problem with a touch-screen voting machine...

Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films has put together this short film about what's really at the heart of the GOP's ACORN "voter fraud" scam (appx. 5 mins)...

Our own special coverage page of the GOP's ACORN "Voter Fraud" Scam is here...

The film above quickly notes the GOP's nearly identical efforts to swiftboat ACORN in 2000 and 2004, we should point out that today, those same folks are not only doing it again in 2008, they are now sending out private investigators to intimidate voters in NM. And more incredibly, taking the White House politicization of the U.S. DoJ to an unprecedented new level, George W. Bush himself has now asked the DoJ to "investigate" the OH GOP's allegations of some 200,000 voters after the case was recently rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Further, while the piece above is not bad, it looks like they forgot to include John McCain's own statement to ACORN, when he was their keynote speaker at a 2006 rally, and told the assembled volunteers they were "what makes America special." That short video follows below as a reminder...

Guest blogged by DES

This week, Broward County, Florida, Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes said, with a straight face, "No one could have anticipated that this election would be so historic and draw as much attention as it has," and defended her choice to oppose expanding early voting hours next week due to "logistical problems."

In addition to the problems in Florida, there are now reports that longtime GOP "voter fraud" hoaxster Pat Rogers (also known for his involvement in the U.S., Attorney Purge Scandal for the bogus "voter fraud" allegations he filed in 2004, and as a board member of the now-defunct and fully-debunked GOP astro-turf group, "American Center for Voting Rights," or ACVR), is apparently using private investigators to intimidate voters in New Mexico.

Details on those stories and many more --- pre-election litigation over polling place photo I.D. restrictions in Georgia and Ohio, absentee military ballots in Virginia, GOP efforts to close early voting polling places in Indiana, GOP calls for the Dept. of Justice to investigate ACORN just days before a federal election --- from across the country, all follow in the detailed round-up below...

Last week I ran the video of an interview that Russia Today (an extremely popular English language state-sponsored Russian satellite/cable channel) flew into town to conduct with me. That posting included some thoughts on the interview, which also included some of my thoughts on problems in the U.S. corporate media.

Now, the RT reporter Anastasia Churkina files a broader report on concerns about the e-voting systems to be used in our upcoming election, including more from my interview with her, and another with my friend Thom Hartmann. Here's that new report (appx 4 mins)...

By the way, between those two Russian TV appearances, and a live one scheduled for Monday with Clint Curtis on Riz Kahn's Al Jazeera English program (to discuss the new documentary Murder, Spies & Voting Lies), I will have easily spent more time on foreign TV this year than on American TV. Heckuva job U.S. corporate media!

For convenience, the video of my "complete" interview (at least what ran on RT, as I discussed last week) is posted again below (appx 3.5 mins)...

We soon may not have Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff) --- the Florida congressman accused of conspiring to create vote-rigging software, and one of the country's most corrupt --- to kick around anymore, as reports The Miami Herald on Friday.

But that good news could lead to even better news...

This is just getting worse and worse. Now it's happening in Texas. (And in MO, if you read to the end of the article). And the vaunted "thousands of attorneys" from the Obama campaign and the DNC are still nowhere to be found.

With every incident so far reported of touch-screen vote-flipping during early voting in this year's general election --- from county to county in WV and in Nashville, TN) --- it's been the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machine that has failed, flipping votes from one candidate to another not chosen by the voter. In most every instances [see update below], it's been an attempted Democratic vote, flipped to a Republican, or another party.

These are the same machines that lost 18,000 votes in Democratic-leaning Sarasota County in the 2006 U.S. House Race for Katherine Harris' old seat. The Democrat, Christine Jennings, was declared the loser to Republican Vern Buchanan (whose own wife had trouble voting for him that day), by just 369 votes. Several academic studies, and even the GAO, have been unable to rule out either tampering or hardware/software error for the disappeared 18,000 votes.

As we wrote earlier this week, after there was finally one report of a vote flipping from Democratic to Republican in TN (a very rare instance, btw), these machines need to be taken out of service now, impounded and quarantined immediately, and every voter needs to be given a paper ballot where these machines are currently being used. Voters who have such problems need to inform other voters waiting in line which machine should not be used (and we offer other tips below, as well).

[Update: The rare vote-flip from Republican to Democratic now seems to have been a hoax carried out by local Republicans, according to a TN election integrity activist who did some digging and reporting. Details here...]

The latest reports today of ES&S vote-flipping come from Palo Pinto County, TX, where two voters --- one of them an alternate election judge and office manager of the Palo Pinto County Democratic Headquarters --- saw straight-ticket Democratic votes flipped to straight-ticket Republican votes. Two times for the first person, and three times for the alternate election judge!

The report is a doozy...

Said David Alan Grier at the end of Comedy Central's Chocolate News this week, after being shown a touch-screen voting machine which tries to talk him out of voting for Barack Obama, tells him that he's Muslim, and then registers the vote for John McCain anyway: "For all you Barack Obama supporters out there, if you see a machine like this, beat it like it stole something. Cause it almost did. Your vote."

Not that we'd ever advocate the way Grier resolves the problem. (Though we admit it was quite satisfying to watch. Like pornography for election integrity geeks. 2 mins...)

Finally! A lawsuit [PDF] has finally been filed today in federal District Court in Pennsylvania, against the Democratic Secretary of the Commonwealth, Pedro A. Cortes and the Commissioner of the state's Election Commission, Chet Harhut, over Cortes' recent directive that paper ballots only need be given out to voters in the event that every voting machine in a precinct breaks down.

That stunning decree was in opposition to PA's state law which allows election officials the discretion to give emergency paper ballots to voters if even a single machine breaks down in a precinct.

That neither Obama nor the DNC have said a word about this in the month or so since Cortes issued his directive has been maddening, and should be an outrage to voters of all parties in the Keystone State, sure to be another battleground state this November. The lawsuit was finally filed today by the state's NAACP in concert with the 866-MYVOTE1 Election Reform Network.

While the complaint should call for paper ballots to be made available to any voter who wishes one, or, at a minimum, to be given out if just one machine breaks down in a precinct, or even if the wait time in line is longer than 30 minutes, unfortunately, the suit calls very conservatively for emergency paper ballots to be given out if 50% or more of the voting machines in a precinct break down. But at least it's something, we guess, particularly in lieu of Obama and/or the DNC taking any action at all here, given they have the most to lose by the ridiculous action from state Democrats.

Pennsylvania uses unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) machines across most of the state, and saw machine failure after failure, as we documented in detail during their April primary this year. The failures resulted in untold numbers of disenfranchised voters, as noted in news reports, and logged by calls to the 866-MYVOTE1 hotline...

From WV's Sunday Gazette Mail today, yet another report of vote-flipping on ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machines...

Every county was told by the SOS to recalibrate all touch-screen machines. This is the ES&S iVotronic machine again and it appears the voter voted straight-party, in this case, as we have warned against, but that's not entirely clear from the article.

Today's report follows reports within the last week of votes flipping from Democratic to Republican (or other) candidates on ES&S iVotronics touch-screens in at least two different WV counties, and in Davidson County (Nashville), TN. Just yesterday, there was a report of votes flipping, on the same machines, from Republican to Democratic in Decatur County, TN.

Enough! We've called for these machines to be immediately impounded, and taken out of service --- just as the GOP called for when Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) received similar reports of touch-screen votes flipping during his unsuccessful 2006 re-election attempt --- and for paper ballots to be made available to all voters instead. To date, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have called for the impounding/removal of these failed voting machines. ES&S is the largest voting equipment supplier in the nation, with systems in dozens of states.

12 days until Election Day.

There is just too much news to fit into one DVN today so there will be one edition this morning (Pac time) and one at the normal time. We will be doing that through the election as the amount of news grows.

So far today a federal lawsuit has been filed in Pennsylvania seeking an earlier use of emergency paper ballots than is presently the dictate of the Secretary of State. The SoS has dictated that emergency ballots can only be used when all of the machines at a poll site are shut-down for some reason. The lawsuit hopes to loosen up that dictate to when 50% of the machines are shut-down for some reason.

While the West Virginia SoS has dictated that all of the states ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machines must be recalibrated we are still getting reports of vote switching.

[Ed Note: Please see the "IMPORTANT UPDATE" to this story at the bottom of this article. - BF]

Yesterday we reported the problems experienced at the Davidson County (Nashville), TN polls by Election Integrity filmmakers David and Patricia Earnhardt. Patricia, like so many others before, in so many elections past, saw her vote flip before her eyes on the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen system from her intended candidate, Barrack Obama, to the Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney.

Last week, we noted voter reports from two different WV counties, Putnam and Jackson, both counties where the same ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machines (which are notorious for flipping and losing thousands of votes and costing at least one Democratic U.S. House nominee her rightful seat) similarly flipped votes away from Democratic candidates.

Earlier today, John Gideon reported on ES&S iVotronics in SC which fail to include a number of races on the final review screen. In at least one county in that state, during the Republican Primary earlier this year, the machines had failed to even turn on at all, leading voters to scramble to find scraps of paper to vote on. ES&S is the nation's largest supplier of voting machines.

Now, finally --- and thankfully --- we have a report of voters experiencing votes flipping from the Republican candidate John McCain, to the Democratic candidate Barack Obama in a second TN county. Does this mean someone can actually take some action to get these machines the hell out of service now?!...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

According to today's Island Packet voters on Hilton Head Island (Beaufort County), South Carolina discovered that some races were missing on the final review screen of the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting machines, at the end of the voting process, after voters completed their selections...

Everything we've been warning about for years here at The BRAD BLOG --- and that both the Obama and McCain campaigns continue to ignore --- seems to have been neatly wrapped up in a report by John Zarella of CNN in a report on his personal experience during early voting in Florida...

His full report, with video, is at RAW STORY...

If you think that's bad, just wait for the Election Day meltdown. Why the Obama campaign and DNC are not raising holy hell --- and demanding paper ballots for every voter, in every precinct, in every state, along with back-up paper plans for the e-registration computers (as untested and unreliable as the e-voting machines, and made by the same failed private companies) --- I still cannot tell you. They have the most to lose, but still seem to be in a complete state of denial about these problems.

Steve Rosenfeld at AlterNet also has details on the sorely lacking Democratic strategy for dealing with voting machine problems.

At best, it can be said that Obama and the DNC are (again) bringing a dull butter knife to a gun fight. Minus the knife.

Guest Blogged By John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org

Misinformation being circulated, concerning straight-party voting in Texas (and elsewhere) is beginning to be a big problem, and will undoubtedly lead to voters deselecting their preferred Presidential candidate, and possibly flipping their own votes to another candidate. This from the Travis County today:

These "poll cats" should be stopped by local authorities. But, unfortunately, the above incident wasn't the only problem with straight-party voting in Texas, and even election officials, at least one in Williamson County, appear to have been circulating the same incorrect information to voters...

I've written both here and at the UK's Guardian to point out that not a single case of ACORN "voter fraud" has been shown anywhere despite the Republican's phony outrageous and MSM's knee-jerk reporting of it.

That changed on Friday (for about a minute) when the GOP and their always-reliable and incurious media echo chamber began trumpeting "undeniable proof that a significant number of fraudulent votes were cast in Democrat primary races for the New Mexico legislature as a result of ACORN's voter registration fraud."

Knock us over with a feather, but those charges have now fallen apart as well...