Now comes the vote-flipping on touch-screen machines in Davidson County (Nashville), TN, where early voting has also begun. This time, the problems occurred for David and Patricia Earnhardt, the director and executive producer of the award-winning election integrity documentary, Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections which details the history of problems with electronic voting across the nation and some of the whistleblowers and EI advocates who've helped to bring the matter to light. [Disclosure: The BRAD BLOG is prominently featured in the film.]

The Earnhardts' story of what happened to them last Friday when, among other things, Patricia's attempt to vote for Obama on the ES&S touch-screen wouldn't register at all, and at one point, with a poll-worker trying to help, had actually registered a vote for Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney --- five rows away from Obama on the screen --- follows below.

The first reports of vote-flipping on touch-screen machines (we expect many more, as we saw in both '04 and especially in '06) came in from two counties last week in West Virginia, which also uses ES&S touch screens across the entire state.

The machines in both TN and WV need to be taken out of use and impounded immediately. So far, it's been Democrats, again, who are being affected by these problems, while votes are flipping from Democratic candidates to others. While the DNC and the Obama campaign ought to be raising holy hell, so far they are not...

And speaking of GOP voter registration hucksters, it looks like Nathan Sproul of Sproul & Associates, the group accused of destroying Democratic registrations in several states during previous elections, has been hired by the McCain-Palin campaign and the RNC again this year. Knock us over with a feather...

From Saturday's Washington Post, on the "November Surprise" we've been trying to shout about for months now.

The lede: "Thousands of voters across the country must reestablish their eligibility in the next three weeks in order for their votes to count on Nov. 4, a result of new state registration systems that are incorrectly rejecting them."...

Rightwinger Laura Ingraham ably filled in for Bill O'Reilly in the "No Spin Zone" this week, by seeing her argument dismantled by constitutional attorney, prosecutor, and former (Republican-appointed) special counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, John Flannery on Fox "News."

Ingraham just couldn't believe there would be "all these reports" on the news about "massive voter fraud going on" all over the country, led by ACORN, if they weren't all true! (As we showed both here and at UK's Guardian, it's not true. It's a GOP hoax. More at our special coverage page here.)

Despite being in way over her head, having fallen for the hoax, Ingraham, naturally, played the loyal dead-ender and stuck to her empty guns. (Gosh, we hope there are no typos on Ingraham's own driver's license or voter registration, or she might find herself purged from the voting rolls entirely this November, as they're doing in Florida and so many other state, not mentioned on Fox "News," or even by the Democrats.)

The video follows below, along with further evisceration of Ingraham's "If this were happening to the benefit of the Republicans, the Democrats would be screaming fraud" argument...

See below for a rather breathtaking "Round-up of Problems Facing Voters Nationwide", such as registration backlogs, illegal voting roll purges, deceptive practices and dirty tricks, etc., now plaguing American voters across the country with just 17 days left before our country's biggest election ever.

All of that, while Fox "News" (whose asked me to come on live tomorrow, Sunday, at 2:40pm PT, btw, along with my old friend John Fund "for balance") continues to misreport, alarm and deceive their viewers in regard to the GOP's phony ACORN "voter fraud" fraud. Unfortunately, it's not just Fox who is irresponsibly and dangerously misreporting that scam --- though they seem to have made a small cottage industry out of it of late --- CNN and MSNBC have been filed loads of equally inaccurate and misleading reports on it as well.

But take a look at the "Round-up" below, sent this afternoon via email by the 866ourvote.org Election Protection coalition of non-partisan election watchdogs. And keep in mind that their summary below doesn't even mention the myriad electronic voting issues we've been reporting here of late --- touch-screen votes flipping, paper ballot electronic tabulators that can't count correctly or that add thousands of "phantom votes" or that drop thousands of real ones etc. --- cropping up, yet again, across the country...

Guest Blogged by Jim March

Folks, I'm writing to tell you personally about the most important election in America for election integrity: putting Brad Roach into the Pima County (Tucson) Arizona county attorney's office. Why do I believe it's the most important election in America in regard to the issue of Election Integrity? Click the cartoon above and/or read on...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Here we go again. Completely unverifiable touch-screen voting machines, in this case, made by ES&S, flipping votes from one candidate to another. Yet again. From the Saturday Gazette-Mail...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Tea-leaves from The Murfreesboro Post in Tennessee...

This is 3,292 voters voting in one day in six early voting sites and lines up to two hours long. What are they going to do on Election Day?

There is something very wrong here.

Hopefully, soon will come the GOP's ACORN "voter fraud" fraud backlash, though I realize that's still very much a hope given the continuous rightwing media's full-throated reporting attempt to punk American democracy in regards this issue.

Palm Beach Post, thankfully, bothered to do some actual reporting yesterday, and led with the following good news:

The story goes on to quote FL Secretary of State Kurt Browning who says: "'we have not seen a persistent problem across the state of Florida' with registration fraud by ACORN or other groups."

And FL's Republican Governor Charlie Crist who says: "There's some who sort of enjoy chaos. That's kind of what's going on more than fraud."

Bingo, Charlie. And rather ironic, given the outrageous statement John McCain made during last night's debate; the GOP's own far-worse-than-ACORN's record of registration form problems in California; Crist's own record of voter purges in his own state; and the Republican Party's dismal history of trying to use ACORN at the last minute, just before elections, in order to wreak the "chaos" that Crist was referring to...

After being asked a question about keeping Obama supporters from also voting for Democrats down the ticket at a press conference in D.C., Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA), a former chair of the National Republican Congressional Commitee (NRCC) said: "Well you're talking about voter suppression and we would never, ever do anything along that line, for the record."

The room broke into laughter during his comment! (video 1:14 mins)...

Ari at the Oxdown Gazette covered it also and notes that nearly one-quarter of John McCain's laughably and insultingly named "Honest and Open Election Committee," "chaired by Warren Rudman and John Danforth, has been involved in GOP voter suppression efforts or unfounded partisan claims of voter fraud. Of the 21 members of the committee, five have been engaging in these shady efforts."

See his report for the details on those liars, hooligans, and anti-democracy champions. Transcript of the above video follows below...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

From the Charleston Daily Mail...

This last sentence is important. The county, and apparently other counties around the state, had already done their Logic and Accuracy testing and they had failed to find this problem. Thus the L&A testing was not thorough enough to find problems in the ballot programming done by ES&S. Of course, there is another question and that is who did the L&A testing? The county? Or ES&S?

And, as we've implored recently, do not use the straight-party ticket option when voting! Machines have failed across the country, in state after state, to count such votes accurately!

Golly, for a group that's committed so much "voter fraud" for so long (if you're gullible enough to believe the lies that RNC/FNC has been telling you) it's mighty strange that, as News One notes, "McCain attended an ACORN convention just two years ago."

The once-honorable Republican's campaign has even seen fit to produce a video smear ad, attempting to tar Obama with "associations" with ACORN, and alleging the group has committed "massive voter fraud" to boot! (They've yet to produce any actual evidence for that, unfortunately.)

But more than just attending the ACORN-sponsored February 2006 rally, ACORN confirms in a statement today that McCain was actually the keynote speaker!

So now, they wonder, why it is that McCain seems to have "lost that loving feeling"?

"It has deeply saddened us to see Senator McCain abandon his historic support for ACORN and our efforts to support the goals of low-income Americans. Maybe it is out of desperation that Senator McCain has forgotten that he was for ACORN before he was against ACORN," noted Bertha Lewis, Chief Organizer of ACORN.

"We expected Senator McCain to support our efforts to give voice to millions of Americans who have never participated in an election before," she continued. "We are surprised at his efforts to vilify an organization that, until recently, he saw as an ally."

Hmmm...So, why was John McCain "palling around with" an organization that "has violated more Americans' civil rights to have their votes counted than any group since the KKK," as described by noted Florida 'vote-rigger' and McCain surrogate Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff)? Or was Feeney speaking out of school? If so, we've yet to hear McCain condemning the outrageous remarks, or distancing himself from Feeney, the three time winner of CREW's "Most Corrupt Members of Congress" Award.

Also, we can't help but wonder, in regard to McCain's meeting with ACORN, where he spoke on immigration reform, by the way...were there were any preconditions before he agreed to meet with them?

Special Coverage of the GOP's ACORN "Voter Fraud" Scam right here...

Now updated below with video of McCain's appearance, when he tells the ACORN crowd: "What makes America special is what's in this room tonight."...

Please read my column this week at the UK's Guardian on "The Republican Voter Fraud Hoax".

It's a disgrace that these issues are often covered better in Great Britain and even in Russia, than they are in my own country. If you can, please join me in trying to change that.

Well, isn't this rich? Tom Feeney --- yes, that Tom Feeney, the one who is alleged to have commissioned vote-rigging software for touch-screen voting machines in 2000, as testified to by former Republican software programmer Clint Curtis in a sworn affidavit, sworn testimony to congress, and a successful polygraph test --- went on Fox "News" this week to decry unsubstantiated charges of "voter fraud" by the low-income voter registration community organization ACORN.

(And if you're done laughing...)

Feeney --- the man who, as Speaker of the FL House in 2000, also promised to award all of the state's electoral votes to George W. Bush no matter what the ballots and Supreme Court had to say about it --- then went on to compare ACORN to the KKK...

After failing to count votes accurately in a number of recent elections in FL, NJ, and D.C., a report has now been released by the D.C. Board of Elections noting that, as it turns out, Michelle Shafer, official mouthpiece for both Sequoia Voting Systems and the election industry's PR outfit, Election Technology Council (ETC), has once again been misleading the public about Sequoia's bad voting equipment --- both touch-screen and paper ballot systems --- and the fact that they don't work.

The D.C. Board released its report on its investigation into an incident from last month's primary where some 1,500 phantom votes were recorded on Sequoias tabulator after being uploaded from a paper ballot system. There should have been just over 300 votes, instead of thousands, from Precinct 141.

Shafer had originally claimed (as usual) human error and static electricity were to blame. When the incident was first discovered in September, Shafer told the Washington Post: "There's absolutely no problem with the machines in the polling places. No. No."

Turns out, Shafer lied. Again. As the D.C. report notes Sequoia was "too quick to exonerate itself and the equipment used in the tabulation process" and that "the evidence appears to indicate that there was a problem both in equipment (the server) and in the software"...