After months of pressure from state election officials, voting rights groups, veteran’s organizations, members of the US Senate, and citizens, the Dept. of Veterans Affairs has decided that it will be alright for veterans who live in VA facilities or are patients in VA facilities to be visited by non-partisan folks who want to help them register to vote. Unfortunately this decision comes just a month from the voter registration deadlines in most states. Now those groups who have fought hard to get permission to register veterans need to go do the job.

Ohio is becoming a battle ground for voter registrations. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is going to battle against the state legislature over a law that was passed in 2006 that allows counties to remove voters from the rolls if election notices sent by the counties to the voters are returned for any reason. This is a violation of state law and federal law and the US Constitution according to her lawyers. Any voter removed from the rolls must be given due process. ...

• National: V.A. to Allow Voter Signup for Veterans at Facilities
  http://www.nytimes.com/2...=slogin&oref=slogin
• National: Senators Feinstein and Kerry Welcome Changes in Voter Registration Policy at the Department of Veterans Affairs
  http://feinstein.senate....egion_id=&Issue_id=
• National: Helping Veterans Register to Vote
  http://blog.newsweek.com...ns-register-to-vote.aspx

Pima County (Tucson), Arizona Election Integrity advocate and expert John Brakey was arrested last night while performing his job as an election supervisor, on behalf of both the Democratic and Libertarian parties, during a post-election hand-count audit of ballots.

Brakey becomes the latest in a growing string of EI advocates to be arrested and/or barred from observing (Brakey was lucky enough to merit both "honors" apparently) while attempting to assure accuracy, fairness, and transparency in voting and in the reporting of election results on behalf of citizens.

The problem erupted after Brakey had noticed a number of ballot bags being counted in the post-election audit were missing their proper security seals. He began to ask questions about those bags, which eventually led to his arrest at the demand of Pima County's Brad "Election Director Gone Wild" Nelson, a man with whom Brakey has had a number of unfortunate (for Nelson) run-ins over the years.

After news of his arrest, "the county elections building was swarming with television news crews," according to a report by Election Defense Alliance (EDA), of which Brakey is a member. Indeed, KGUN's video report on the incident is very good, as the Tucson media --- given Brakey's success in lawsuits and legislation over the years on behalf of voters --- has come to see him as a reliable source on such matters...

-- Brad Friedman

Last night we offered the quick skinny on the abrupt resignation of Colorado's state Election Director, Holly Lowder, just 60 days out from what promises to be one of the largest and most important --- and potentially closest --- elections in the state's history.

We summarized some of the dizzying background on the exceptionally embarrassing and dysfunctional state of certification, decertification and recertification of e-voting systems in the Centennial State over the last two years, under current Sec. of State, Republican Mike Coffman (who is overseeing his own election for the U.S. House this November), and in previous years under two former Republican SoS' (one of whom was promoted by George W. Bush to do the same lousy job of e-vote testing for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission).

We also suggested, based on information from sources in the states, that the old euphemism about "election officials being in bed with voting vendors" may well become more than just a euphemism when the full explanation for Lowder's sudden departure became known.

And today, as we'd hinted last night, some of that information has now become known...

Readers will recall that as of yesterday Palm Beach Co Florida officials had lost well over 3,000 ballots sometime between the primary election and an election recount. Earlier today there were announcements that over 2700 ballots had been found. Late this afternoon the officials were supposed to meet to announce whether they had found all of the missing ballots and why those ballots went missing in the first place.

Were the ballots run through the high-speed optical scan machines during the recount and did the machines pick-up two or more ballots at a time thus not counting all of the ballots? Or, were the ballots in bins that were never counted?

The media is not clear on this issue yet so we are going to have to wait to find this out. If the machines were, in fact, grabbing two or more ballots at a time jurisdictions around the country need to be made aware of this possibility.

Meanwhile a report from Broward Co of the result of their state-mandated audit is a bit troubling. The county appears to have hand-counted one race on ballots from 16 precincts. The media is reporting that nine of the precincts hand-count matches the machine results. Seven precincts resembled original results by 95 percent or more. That is a huge number and should raise red flags.

Instead one official said, “When you're dealing with people and paper, that's the best you're going to get.” How about agreeing 100% and you keep counting until you are sure that the people and paper are not the problem and then you find out what problem the machines had?...

The news from Palm Beach Co Florida is not getting any better. The official recount is complete as required by the state. By state law they have exactly one week to count ballots, rectify any problems, do any required recounts, and certify that everything is correct. Of course that is all without any court orders and it looks more and more like this election will be going to the courts.

The original election evening count seems to have been 102,523 and the final recount total was 99,045. The only race that was recounted was a race for a judicial seat and the winner flipped from one candidate to another from the original to the final recount. The original difference was 17 votes and the final was 60 votes.

The big question is what happened to over 3,400 ballots. The losing candidate will be going to court to ask that question among others. And now any candidate in any other race who lost by less than 3,400 votes is also being encouraged to go to court and demand a recount or re-election.

There is a lot wrong with this situation. The state is wrong in forcing a quick handling of the ballots. No wonder mistakes are made and more seem to be made in Florida than most other states. A complete investigation must be held inside the county to figure out what happened and why it happened. Was it administration issues or the voting system? And why did members of the county canvassing board sign an official document that had no final numbers on it? The voters need to know that and they need to know before November....

• Featured - FL: Palm Beach County - Election officials stumped by about 3,400 missing ballots
  http://www.palmbeachpost...8/09/02/recount0903.html
--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---

-- Brad Friedman, from Denver, CO...

16,632 votes are unaccounted for in a Palm Beach County election recount following last Tuesday's state primary, according to Ellen H. Brodsky, non-partisan candidate for Supervisor of Elections in Broward County and a long-time Election Integrity advocate.

The machine recount was completed early Saturday morning in the Circuit Court race between Judge Richard Wennet and challenger William Abramson, Brodsky reports via email. The machine recount was completed at 4:30am, in the race in which Wennet and Abramson were separated by just 18 votes in the initial machine tally. Palm Beach County recently changed voting systems again, moving from faulty touch-screen voting systems to --- apparently --- faulty optical-scan paper-ballot systems made by Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc. [PDF].

The still-unexplained "disappearance" of votes in the machine recount "has severe repercussions," Brodsky wrote in an email alert this afternoon describing the re-scan of some 90,000 ballots.

"With 16,632 less votes on summary report," she writes, it "portends dire consequences for the November election and all elections."

The question remains as to how many votes were lost in other races on the same ballot which were not included in last night's re-tally. Florida state law disallows hand-counting of paper ballots which have already been counted by machine, other than in special circumstances. We'll see if this ends up being one of those circumstances. Theoretically, a hand-count would determine the correct totals for the race, where the machine-count has misreported totals. [UPDATE: Palm Beach Post reports the machine recount was close enough to allow for a hand-count of over votes and undervotes. See more in the update at end of this article.]

Sequoia's voting machines have seen notorious failures of late, including lost votes and other problems, around the country...

Today Premier/Diebold has again had to accept the blame for voting machine failures. This time the optical scan machines that had tallied absentee ballots in Sarasota County would not upload the totals to the main server and refused to post elections in Hillsborough County. Election officials in Sarasota ended up having to count 10,000 ballots by hand. It is a good thing they had the paper ballots to count by hand or those votes would have been lost....

Blogged by Brad Friedman from Boulder, CO...

Just as I went off the grid late last week, this news came in, so some of you may be ahead of me on this one. In either case, it's still worth noting that GOP/DoJ vote suppressor, Hans von Spakovsky was secretly hired by Bush's bad joke of a "Commission on Civil Rights" to oversee the '08 elections, as reported by TPMMuckraker's Kate Klonick late last week.

While the story is mindblowing, it's not all together surprising given the CCR's embarrassing track record under Bush. See the amazing flashback video of the CCR's Peter Kirsanow testifying to Congress in 2007, as posted below after Klonick's lede, and everything will likely make "sense"...

Blogged by Brad Friedman from Boulder, CO...

If you didn't happen to pay close enough attention to Ellen Theisen's guest blog on Friday, now that I'm back on the grid (after a few blissful days in the mountains with family friends on the way to Denver here), let me re-iterate the main points of her article quite directly: Diebold has admitted that their tabulator software, known as GEMS, and used all across the country, in at least 34 states, does not count votes correctly.

In fact, it actually loses votes, by not counting them at all, yet gives the system administrator no indication that the votes were not counted. Instead, it tells them that all votes have been counted correctly. This bug has been in Diebold's software --- where it remains to this day-- for years. Diebold has only admitted it now that it's been found by someone else (a number of counties in Ohio, of all places) and with the 2008 Presidential election less than 80 days away. Washington Post's coverage here.

Coinciding with that startling admission, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC)'s Gracia Hillman, one of the two Democratic-recommended appointees, has gone on public record stating that the federal certification testing process is too stringent.

While all of that was made clear in Ellen's blog item, I found both of the above points so remarkable that I wanted to underscore them now that I've finally made it to Denver (or at least Boulder, for the moment), since I was simply stunned to read it myself after getting back on the grid.

Is anybody there? Does anybody care?

UPDATE: CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight covered the stunning admission by Diebold on their show Friday. Here it is (thanks to Alan Breslauer, as usual!) ...

UPDATE 8:43pm PT: McClatchy's Greg Gordon picks up the ball, and advances it a bit, noting the failure in oversight by the feds which allowed for the failure, as we've been trying to get across here for years. He begins this way...

Guest Blogged by Mary Mancini of the Uncounted Blog

Everyone has different tastes, and hey, if you aren’t moved after watching Uncounted that’s your prerogative. But an uniformed and half-assed review that tries to nail the 80-minute movie on one ten-second factoid - like the one delivered to Mother Jones readers by former MJ Senior Online Fellow and current TPM Media News Editor, Justin Elliott - is inexcusable.

In the review, Elliot references the following that briefly appears on screen: “Two voting machine companies --- ES&S and Diebold --- electronically counted 80 percent of the votes in the 2004 presidential election. Both companies have extensive ties to the Republican party.” He then runs the 80% number by Kimberly Brace, “a respected voting expert with the consulting firm Election Data Services” who calls it “totally wrong.” And that’s it. Proof by assertion. No follow up. End of review.

You can, of course, read the rest for yourself at MotherJones.com, where you can also read the comments of some very smart MoJo readers who recognize not only Elliott’s shoddy work but also the importance of the bigger issue - that our democracy is at stake because of bad electoral practices.

You’ll also find Uncounted's filmmaker, David Earnhardt's response, which I am also printing in its entirety...

With a hat-tip for the title-variation on my pal, Art Levine's landmark piece on "The Republican War on Voting" in The Prospect, my column this week at the UK's Guardian focuses on the latest in the Republican "voter fraud" scam, intended only to keep Democratic-leaning voters from being able to cast a legal vote this year.

The launching point for the column: conservative "founding father" Paul Weyrich's remarkable comments to 15,000 preachers in Dallas in 1980, as seen in the video at right, featuring this Rosetta Stone phrase:

Yes, that's what he actually said. Out loud. And the GOP has been working to make Weyrich's anti-democracy dreams a reality, at no small cost, ever since. My complete Guardian column is here...

Guest blogged by Steve Heller of Velvet Revolution

Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's Secretary of State, has issued Directive 2008-68 [PDF] entitled Voting Machine Delivery Requirements. The directive contains storage specifications regarding temperature, humidity, dust, fire protection, and proximity of liquids. It also makes it clear that there are to be no more election component "sleepovers" in which poll workers take home voting equipment days or even weeks before an election for so-called safekeeping. In actuality, the "sleepovers" are an invitation to tampering and hacking.

The BRAD BLOG was the first to report on these sleepovers, truly a menace to election security, back in 2006, and coined the phrase "sleepover," which seems to have made its way into the national lexicon. AP themselves used the phrase in their coverage this week of Brunner's new directive.

As Lou Dobbs Tonight noted in 2006 following The BRAD BLOG's original exposé of the practice, the sleepover procedure is still used in many states and counties. But now, at least, Ohio's Brunner has taken a step in the right direction by ordering an end to the practice. It remains to be seen whether all of Ohio's local election officials will comply.

However, while we applaud this latest initiative by Brunner, it looks as if it may not go far enough in at least one very important aspect...

Blogged by Brad Friedman on the road to Denver...

Congrats to our friend Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org for both her tremendous report on private vendors undermining our public elections (about which she guest blogged here yesterday) and her long-overdue appearance on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight on Wednesday to discuss it (appx 3 mins, video courtesy of Alan Breslauer)...

Great to see Ellen finally recognized for all the tremendous work that she and BRAD BLOG stalwart John Gideon have been doing for so long at the non-partisan election watchdog Voters Unite!

That said, two minor-ish complaints about the Dobbs segment above...

Blogged quickly from the road by Brad Friedman...

If folks in Florida's 24th Congressional district don't dump this sleaze bucket (presuming he's not tossed in jail first for his involvement with Jack Abramoff, for which he's under FBI investigation), I can't even imagine what they'd be thinking,

Orlando Sentinel details the robocalls the slimy Rep. Tom Feeney is now making in favor of Democrat Clint Curtis, the software programmer who has sworn on video to a congressional panel, via affidavit, and polygraph test, that Feeney asked him to create vote-rigging software in 2000. Curtis is running against the Democratic party's hand-picked wealthy millionaire Suzanne Kosmas --- whom Curtis regards as "Republican light" --- in next week's primary in Florida.

Here's most of the 30-second robocall, as posted by the Sentinel, in which a Feeney volunteer endorses Curtis on behalf of Feeney's filthy campaign...

Just when you think he's hit rock-bottom, it turns out there is no dirty trick too unseemly for Feeney. Can there be any more question about Curtis' claims about him? What wouldn't Feeney do to try and gain an advantage in an election? Gaming the system again. As ever. (As he also did when Curtis ran against him in '06). What an appalling little --- very little --- figure of a man.

Those conspiracy theorists over at Scientific American just refuse to move on and get over it.

Here's the latest headline from those whackos: "Planning to E-Vote? Read This First", subtitled "With less than three months before the presidential election, the hotly contested state, Ohio, along with others, continue to have problems with E-voting technology."

The tin-foil hatters over there (so-called scientists) have the temerity to report stuff like this:

What next? Aliens sending anthrax letters?

Addendum: To those who didn't get it, yes, my comments above about "conspiracy theorists" were, in fact, satirical. The SA article is right on target, a must-read, and concurs with virtually everything we've been trying to get across here on The BRAD BLOG for about 4 years straight. Even as we, ironically, were tarred by the democracy-haters as "conspiracy theorists". Hope that clarifies.