This just in from poll worker Patti Newton from San Diego, where Registrar Mikel Haas has been sending all of their pre-programmed, election-ready, hackable Diebold touch-screen systems home with poll workers on "sleepovers" since Oct. 16th.

Newton reports the machines have been going to high-school kids who have also been recruited to be in charge of those machines tomorrow! Have we mentioned that San Diego's Mikel Haas is amongst the worst most irresponsible Election Administrator's in the country?! From Newton...

But wait, she followed up with more!

John Aravosis over at AMERICAblog reports the dirty tricks are spreading. Note: The fake robo-calls reported here are distinct from the GOP phone-calls reported here by John Gideon, in New Mexico attempting to disinform Hispanic voters that their polling place had "changed"...

On Friday night, we broke Rebecca Abrahams's exclusive story concerning the long-sought yet never-released complete "Risk Assessment Report" of Diebold's electronic voting systems as commissioned by the state of Maryland from the Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in 2003.

Tonight, The BRAD BLOG is releasing that report exclusively in full as given to us by Abrahams, who says she obtained it from a source described to us as "a patriotic high-level state official." She says the source is "someone very close to this situation" in the Maryland government.

The original, never-before-released SAIC report was nearly 200 pages in all, and details a number of extraordinary security vulnerabilities found in Diebold's AccuVote-TS (touch-screen) voting systems as deployed by the state of Maryland initially in 2002. The version of the SAIC report that was eventually released to the public, after extreme redaction, was a mere 38 pages long.

It was reported by Abrahams that neither the full MD State Board of Elections, nor even the Governor himself, was ever allowed to see the full report.

Regarded by many in the computer science, security, and election integrity community as "The Pentagon Papers of E-Voting," the report as released by MD's State Election Administrator, Linda Lamone, was edited, changed, and, of course, highly redacted by someone.

To this date, it remains unclear whether or not Diebold itself was responsible for the changes, edits, and redactions, but according to several computer scientists and security experts with whom we discussed the matter today, the company currently seems to be the leading candidate responsible for changing and removing information from the independently commissioned SAIC report. Those with whom we spoke questioned the propriety of Diebold having such final control over an independent report concerning its own systems. Systems, we might add, that will be used across the state and indeed across the entire country this November 7th, despite the information withheld from the public in this 2003 report.

Also unclear --- since the state and virtually the entire computer science and security community have been unable to review the complete, original report until now --- is whether or not any of the various 180 or so recommendations for changes contained in the report have ever been addressed and corrected by either Diebold or the state of Maryland.

Myriad independent reports on Diebold systems have shown, over the last several months and years since the SAIC report was completed, that scores of serious security vulnerabilities still remain on Diebold's voting systems --- including their paper-based optical-scan voting machines, touch-screen voting machines, and even their central tabulator software.

Reports of these serious vulnerabilities have now been documented by Finnish computer scientist Harri Hursti, the computer security firm Security Innovation, and BlackBoxVoting.org in both Leon County, FL and then in Emery County, UT; by a team of scientists at UC Berkeley commissioned by the CA Sec. of State; by Princeton University; and even by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (as The BRAD BLOG originally reported in September of 2005 after a tip from a Diebold insider).

Whether or not the vulnerabilities revealed in those subsequent studies --- made mostly over the last year or so, but some, such as the Dept. of Homeland Security's CERT alert came even prior to the 2004 Presidential Election --- were discovered previously in the full 2003 SAIC report has been widely questioned until now.

If, in fact, such vulnerabilities were indeed found in 2003 by SAIC but subsequently kept covered up by Diebold or their allies within the MD State Elections division, such as longtime booster Lamone, the question of accountability --- and even the specter of malicious out-and-out fraud --- has been raised.

During an interview with Abrahams and Stephen Spoonamore, the CEO of computer security firm Cybrinth Inc., on a radio program we co-hosted yesterday, they suggested that an FBI investigation may currently be under way in Maryland concerning several events surrounding the use of Diebold machines in the state.

We've not yet had time to review the entire unredacted report as posted below. However, given the importance of this never-before-released information --- and after close consultation with Abrahams and several others --- The BRAD BLOG feels the national public interest in the information contained in this report requires full and immediate release and disclosure.

The report, therefore, is released here for the first time...

Blogged by John Gideon

UPDATE: See the update at the end of this article describing the injunction now received from a New Mexico judge enjoining the Republican party in the state from making phone calls to non-Republican voters in the wake of what appears to be wide-spread dirty tricks in the state, aimed at Hispanic voters by the GOP.

The following email has been sent to various listservs by the party who received these phone calls. It is only one complaint from one party but it is probably indicative of phone calls made to hundreds of voters in the state of New Mexico. Everyone needs to be wary of any phone calls alerting them to last minute changes of polling places. Call your county to find out if there are any changes and then call 1-866-OUR-VOTE and report the incident:

Follow-up: The aggrieved party contacted DNC attorneys who got an injunction against the state Republican party to stop them from giving polling location information to non-Republican voters. There is thought that voters with Hispanic surnames were targeted.

The judge who issued the injunction via cell-phone while she was at a basketball game, has scheduled a hearing for tomorrow. The Dems need to have more voters who will step forward and join in the lawsuit.

NOTE: We will follow-up with contact information for the attorneys just as soon as we can get it.

UPDATE BY John Gideon 5:25PM: Any aggrieved New Mexico voter is encouraged to contact attorney John Boyd at 505-842-9960.

UPDATE BY John Gideon 8:45AM: We have just been contacted about the Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) that we reported was issued last evening. In fact that TRO was withdrawn by the judge after the Republican Party of New Mexico called and claimed that the phone calls were just "innocent mistakes". There is no injunction or any other decision at this time. It is being reported that a judge will hold a hearing at 10:30 local time this morning. It is also being reported that the "innocent mistake" was also made with at least six people who have stepped forward.

In an article on this issue from the Santa Fe New Mexican and the Associated Press the following is reported:

What Ms. Kramer fails to explain is who made the two phone calls from the GOP offices that followed the incident she reports. An "innocent mistake" once, but three times it is no longer "innocent" or a "mistake".

Heading over to KTLK am1150, Los Angeles' Progressive Talk, Air America affiliate to co-host today on the Bree Walker Show from 2p-4p PT (5p-7p ET).

We've got a huge guest line-up for the two hour show, including SPENCER OVERTON of Stealing Democracy, REBECCA ABRAHAMS and STEPHEN SPOONAMORE on the secret MD Diebold SAIC Report, TOM COURBAT and RON WATT on Sequoia's "Vote As Much as You Want" Yellow Button, John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and much much more!

Listen up online here!...

We'll be the media on Election Night, reporting the meltdowns with the same kind of attention everyone else will devote to the "horse race" (which we'll cover as well). From 3pm PT to 1am or as events warrant. To be carried on multiple air affiliates and Internet streams. All invited to carry broadcast for free! More details to come as I can keep up. Please spread the word and ask your local station to carry the historic broadcast! Details for now right here...

UPDATE: Some of our air affiliates on board so far (we welcome all who are interested to carry all or any part of the broadcast, see link above for details) include: KRXA in Monterey, KSAC in Sacramento, KGOE in Eureka, KUDO in Anchorage with more hopefully coming soon!

FURTHER UPDATE: Brad and Peter preview the broadcast on last Friday's Peter B. Collins Show! Listen here... [5 minutes, MP3].

And speaking of Velvet Revolution's Election Protection Strike Force, we've just upped the bounty for E-Vote fraudsters to $500k. Pass that around too. Along with the 888-VOTE-TIP hotline to support it.

Gosh...maybe there's a pattern here or something. Is there something to be concerned about here?...Here are just a few of the headlines from the National section (much more in the state-by-states) of today-only's 'Daily Voting News' from John Gideon...

This list is also notable because it contains the very first story ever on e-voting concerns (at least that I could find in a quick search) from the completely useless Los Angeles Times! Waytago, guys! Just in time! You win the BRAD BLOG's "Most Useless and Irresponsible Big City Newspaper in the Country" Award!

Their very first article comes today despite a mountain of problems for years, not to mention the last few months, across California, including the myriad disasters ("sleepovers" and everything else) just down the road in San Diego; a hapless Sec. of State who has approved one hackable, malfunctioning electronic voting machine after another (offering an ersatz blessing for the rest of the states from "the country's largest voting market," as Diebold calls us); and one of the most important Sec. of State races ever, with a real democracy champion, Debra Bowen, running against the inveterate liar and democracyhater, SoS Bruce McPherson.

Add to that list of reasons why the LA Times should be utterly ashamed of themselves is this comment in their own article today from one of the top scientists on McPherson's own team of voting systems advisors:

Of course, Jefferson's been saying that for months. But has the LA Times bothered to report any of it? Little wonder they haven't devoted a single article to this issue until just three days before the election. Nothing to see here at all. Move along. Don't read those headlines above. Everything's still just fine.

Meanwhile...As reported long ago, the GOP is planning to declare fraud after next Tuesday's election. As initially linked by DRUDGE (which should tell you almost all you need to know) earlier today, the GOP is laying the groundwork:

The situation is not "lack of oversight and control" of these smart cards. It's lack of oversight and control of our electoral system such that we've come to a place where there are so many access points to the system, it's virtually impossible, with this equipment, to have any kind of security that could ensure a legitimate vote.

You'll also note this unsubstantiated allegation from the AP coverage of the claims in TN:

Looks like the GOP is in good shape in Tennesse at this point. If they lose, they can make whatever claims they like: Fraud by Electronic Voting, or Voter Fraud by those nasty double-voting Dems.

Take your pick. And where is the DNC? Asleep at the wheel, apparently, as we've been trying to point out for months.

Carter Evans, of GoTVNetworks.com, a cell phone video content provider, has put together a very good and incisive series of news reports on America's E-Voting Meltdown. You'll see some familiar faces --- ours included --- in his four part series of short reports. In Part I, posted below, you'll also see Diebold whistleblower Chris Hood (a long time source of The BRAD BLOG's) for the first time on camera. He's tremendous.

Evans promises an interesting run-in with voting officials down in Florida in upcoming reports. Here's Part I of his report (about 3.5 minutes)...

-- Streaming Flash version...

UPDATE: GoTV now has all 4 parts up. Good, quick, easily digestible stuff. All segments now viewable right here.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Kitty Pilgrim covers a myriad of e-voting problems pouring in from across the country during early voting. Sequoia gets the lion's share of the coverage with the newly discovered large yellow button that, when pressed, allows voters to vote as many times as they want. Dobbs: "I keep expecting the country to just sort of go into a group scream over these e-voting machines."

The text-transcript of Thursday's segment on Lou Dobbs Tonight follows in full...

Special to The BRAD BLOG by Guest Blogger and Freelance Network News Producer, Rebecca Abrahams

In September, 2003 Linda Lamone, the Administrator of Maryland's State Board of Elections and President of the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) hands over a critical study on the security of the Diebold Election Systems machines that count all of Maryland's votes.

Between the time that the State of Maryland commissioned the highly respected Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to evaluate the effectiveness and security of their electronic voting machines and the time that the study is made public, critical pieces of information have been edited, omitted and, in some cases, words added, to fundamentally alter the original meaning of the report's conclusions.

The original SAIC report, coming in at nearly 200 pages, was reduced, redacted and altered such that the only version the public --- or even state officials including the Governor and the full State Board of Elections --- would ever be allowed to see was a wholly sanitized 38-page version of the report.

Until now.

For the first time, we've been able to review the complete, much sought-after, unredacted version of the SAIC report which has been kept at bay from Maryland state officials…as well as the computer science and security community…as well as the election integrity community and public at large since it was originally completed in 2003.

It has been called "The Pentagon Papers of Electronic Voting Systems" by some members of the computer science and security community.

Our EXCLUSIVE access to that document --- which we will be releasing in full shortly --- was made possible by a patriot whistleblower. The information, some of which is detailed below, could be explosive in the final days before the Midterm Elections.

UPDATE: The complete, unredacted SAIC Report is now available here for downloading.

As well, a transcript of an EXCLUSIVE unaired network interview that I carried out with Lamone --- in which she tore off her microphone and cut off the interview after I dared to confront her on some of these issues --- will follow below as well…

Blogged by John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org

A Press Release, which is copied in full on the other side of the fold, was just received from Steven Hertzberg, the Project Director of Election Science Institute that exposes the fact that in September election workers in Cuyahoga County, Ohio put every Diebold memory card into laptop computers in order to archive election information. These laptops were found laying around the office and, in some cases, were even brought from home. There is no way to know how many viruses may have now been transferred from these laptops to the memory cards. Luckily this incident was caught on video tape.

This failure on the part of county election officials is exactly the type of failure that Diebold has claimed over and over again cannot happen. In the new release, Prof. Edward Felton of Princeton University and the recent Diebold TS hack, says:

The press release from Princeton and the Election Science Institute is posted in full below...

"Just push the yellow button and you can vote as many times as you want," Tom Courbat, an Election Integrity advocate from Riverside County, California informed The BRAD BLOG tonight. Not that we're in any mood to report more such stories, but this seems to be a big one. A very big one.

It seems there's a little yellow button on the back of every touch-screen computer made by Sequoia Voting Systems, that allows any voter, or poll worker, or precinct inspector to set the system into "Manual Mode" allowing them to cast as many votes as they want.

Concerns about the flaw were first reported some thirty days ago to California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson's office by Ron Watt, a Tehama County, CA precinct inspector who has been a poll worker in the county for the last fifteen years. And yet, as recently as a radio interview last Tuesday, McPherson --- who has been crowing about having the country's most stringent security process for voting systems --- denied he was aware of any security issues with Sequoia systems.

"They didn't care about it," Watt told us tonight about his "late September or early October" discussion with McPherson's voting systems chief Bruce McDannold. "He said he didn't think it was an important issue. He said I don't believe this is really a vulnerability."

Watt and Courbat disagreed and placed another phone call to the SoS' office on Friday after Watt received a copy of Sequoia's "Poll Workers Guide, Booklet #5: Troubleshooting" via a public records request in Tehama. On pages 19 through 22 of the booklet --- which is marked as "Confidential and Proprietary" --- he confirmed the simple manual override to the system. He'd learned about it years earlier and the new manuals confirmed that button was still in place. Even in the latest models of the Sequoia Edge voting systems (both models 1 and 2).

The complete sequence to override the system and enter manual voting mode, along with the Sequoia booklet received via Watt's public records request, is now posted here at BlackBoxVoting.org.

Watt had been taught to be a poll worker trainer by De La Rue, the former parent company of Sequoia, years ago when the systems were first brought into the county. The two men placed a conference call with McDannold last Friday after receiving the booklet. McDannold again reportedly downplayed the concerns, but said "he'd look into it," according to Courbat.

He called Courbat back on Monday afternoon to say Sequoia technicians had been in the SoS office and had confirmed the vulnerability. (A complete transcript of McDannold's Monday phone message left on Courbat's cell phone, confirming the security issue and describing the actions --- or lack thereof --- being taken, is at end of this article.)

Sequoia's voting machines are perhaps the most widely used in California, in some 19 different counties, including both Tehama and Riverside, which is known as the "Home of E-Voting" as it was the first county in the nation to deploy such systems. But identical Sequoia machines are also used in dozens of other states around the country including Florida, Illinois and elsewhere.

Thanks to the diligence of Watt and Courbat, it is now confirmed that all such systems are completely vulnerable to virtually anyone who wishes to cast as many votes as they please.

"I can do it in 18 seconds," says Watt. "I can train you to do it in 3 minutes. Just push the yellow button, wait 3 seconds and it chimes. Push the yellow button again, wait 3 seconds and it chimes again. Then it's all on the screen prompts. You're asked 'Do you want to enter manual mode?' and you push 'Yes'...And then you're on your way."

"You can then vote as many times as you want. You won't ever have to stop until someone physically restrains you from voting," he explained.

"But wouldn't someone hear the chime?" we asked...

We've had some documents from Coulter's attorney concerning the below for some time, but we haven't been able to find a second to run them. Just too much going on. So for now, I'll let AP pick up the ball for the moment. Besides, it's embarrassing for them that I keep beating them to so many stories!

A search for "Ann Coulter Voter Fraud" (yes, voter fraud, the kind the Republicans say is rampant, despite evidence suggesting that it's election fraud that's the real problem) here at The BRAD BLOG will yield loads of previous coverage on this story, including an actual copy of Coulter's fraudulent felonious voter registration forms, the original complaint from the polling place where she illegally tried to vote, attorney letters, and much more more...

From AP...

My article/review of HBO's Hacking Democracy (begins airing tomorrow, Thursday, Nov 2. @ 9pm) has now been posted over at ComputerWorld. I haven't read their final edit yet, as tech probs (yes, tech probs at ComputerWorld! And we're using these machines for voting?!) held up publication until just moments ago. But I trust it resembles something along the lines of what I orginally wrote for them. You can read my take on the landmark documentary in my ComputerWorld feature article now posted here...

As well, HBO has been kind enough to send us a trailer which, thanks to BRAD BLOG video-ace Alan Breslauer, is now online. EXCLUSIVE VIDEO PREVIEW posted right here...

And, just in case you missed it, see late last night's post on Diebold's pathetic (yet hilarious!) last-minute attempt to stop HBO from running this film. Catch that late-breaking news right here...

UPDATE: ComputerWorld has now posted a complete package on E-Voting issues compiled and edited by CW's Security Section editor, Angela Gunn. Tons of stuff available that I haven't even begun to comb through, but thought you might want to know about what appears to be an excellent new resource. It's all available from right here...