[This article now cross-published by The Progressive...]

We've discussed, many times over the years, the madness of Internet Voting schemes. Today we've got yet another piece of disturbing evidence that underscores why such a scheme for American democracy would be nothing short of insane.

The BRAD BLOG has highlighted how easily Internet elections can be hacked by all sorts of nefarious folks (perhaps most disturbingly, without the knowledge of election officials); how various experiments in Internet Voting have proved disastrous (Hello, Canada! Hello, Honolulu! Hello, Oscars!); and how it is simply impossible to do a true pilot test of any such Internet Voting schemes in advance, since the most dangerous tactics that bad guys might throw at an Internet-based election in order to game it are actually illegal. Because of that, good guy "white hat hackers" wouldn't be able to use those same techniques to test the security of any Internet Voting scheme before it was actually put into use in a live election.

Moreover --- and perhaps the deal-breaker when it comes to the viability of Internet Voting ever being workable in public elections --- even if the Internet Voting scheme remains secure, there is no way that the citizenry can know that was the case. Any such scheme would require faith and trust in others, which is decidedly not what our system of oversight and checks and balances in public elections is supposed to be built on. Thus, even a secured Internet Voting scheme would seriously undermine the basic tenets of, and overall confidence in, American democracy.

Now, Kim Zetter at Wired's "Threat Level" blog offers yet another reason why the Internet, as it currently exists, is simply unfit to serve as a means for secure online voting. Her recently published article, which doesn't focus on voting, is alarmingly headlined "Someone's Been Siphoning Data Through a Huge Security Hole in the Internet".

And no, in this case, it's not the NSA. At least as far as we know.

Zetter details a "huge security hole" indeed, one which, as she documents, was found to have been used earlier this year to re-route "vast amounts" of U.S. Internet data all the way out to Belarus and Iceland, where it was intercepted in a classic "man-in-the-middle" fashion, before being sent on to its intended receiver. During the hijack attack, the senders and receivers of the Internet data were none the wiser, just as would likely be the case if the same gaping security hole in the Internet's existing architecture was used to hijack votes cast over the Internet, change them, and then send them on to the server of the intended election official recipient...

I'm in the middle of a number of other things, but I wanted to just offer a quick --- and very belated --- note of congrats to longtime citizen Election Integrity advocate Tom Courbat of Riverside County, CA. (Decidedly not to be confused with Pennsylvania's democracy-hating Gov. Tom Corbett.)

Late in the summer, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed AB 831, a short and simple bill, brought to the legislature by Courbat and introduced there by a Republican, requiring elections officials in CA counties to publish the "Statement of Vote" --- the official precinct-by-precinct results --- to their websites "in a downloadable spreadsheet format".

While that doesn't seem extraordinary --- and may even come to a surprise to many who might have presumed all elections officials already do that --- it really is an important and helpful bill for those who understand the difficulty and frustration, in many cases, that citizens may sometimes have in trying to oversee election results. Some of you "election geeks", in particular, may appreciate how difficult it can often be to make sense of questionable election results, or to double-check very close races in places where precinct results are not made available at all, or where they are published only in HTML or PDF formats which are not easily imported into a spreadsheet where numbers can be more carefully examined for inconsistencies, irregularities or simply missing votes.

As Courbat noted after the bill was signed, the new CA state law "will make it much easier for candidates and election integrity advocates to rapidly analyze election results for any anomalies."

"Candidates wishing to request a recount have only five days after publication of the Statement of Vote to file for a recount," he noted. "Since recounts can be quite expensive, this capability to analyze sometimes voluminous data can be the deciding factor in a go/no-go decision by a candidate."

As anyone who followed our harrowing detailed coverage this year of Virginia's still-ongoing November 5th Attorney General's race may recall, it was, in fact, exceedingly close citizen scrutiny of precinct-by-precinct results which discovered some 3,000 missing votes from Election Night results. Those "found" votes may well turn out to have made the difference in that state's closest-ever statewide race (which currently has a 165 vote margin as it heads into VA's version of a "recount" just over a week from now)...

After many months of chatting back and forth via email, we were both finally able to work out our schedules so that I could talk with Dr. Michael E. Mann live on air today on the KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast!

Mann, for those who don't know, is the creator of the famous (or infamous, depending on whether you're sponsored and/or duped by the fossil fuel industry or not), "Hockey Stick Graph", which is likely the most controversial graph in history and certainly among the most consequential, as he agreed during our conversation today.

The "Hockey Stick Graph", showing stable and even declining temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the past thousand years, until they suddenly spike upwards over the last hundred (similar in shape to a hockey stick), thrust the physicist and climatologist Mann into a world of global warming and climate change controversy that he told me he could never have imagined. Following its publication over the past decade, while the recipient of many awards and honors, he has also received death threats, had his professional emails stolen (in the pretend "ClimateGate" scandal), and has been the focus of an unprecedented smear campaign by science denialists, including attacks by sitting U.S. Congressmen and (unsuccessful) subpoenas of his private documents and email by woeful Rightwing denialists and tools like (the happily outgoing) Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

Environmental activist and author Bill McKibben, who describes Mann as "a hero", has correctly noted that "very few people have sounded more important alarms about our climate future, and very few people have paid a higher price for doing so."

Mann's latest book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, now in paperback with a new foreword by Bill Nye "The Science Guy", tells the whole story and much more. (Tell Big Fossil Fuel to go to hell by buying a copy!)

My conversation with Mann today ranged from all of that, to the parallel denier tactics employed by both Big Tobacco and Big Fossil Fuel, to whether or not scientists should enter the political realm, to why it is that so many TV weathermen seem to be denialists (though the vast majority actually aren't.)

In the back end of the show, I covered the new uprising by Florida election officials against FL Sec. of State Ken Detzner, new Pope news(!) and much more. Enjoy the show!...

Download MP3 or listen online below [appx 58 mins]...

Election 2013 is but a memory --- good or bad --- for much of the nation. But, in Virginia, election officials, attorneys and partisans will still be busy as elves throughout much of the holiday season, and potentially even beyond, determining final results of the statewide November 5th Attorney General's election this year.

Last week, on the day before Thanksgiving, Virginia's Republican AG candidate Mark Obenshain filed for a recount [PDF] of the incredibly close race at the Richmond Circuit Court. Two days prior, his Democratic challenger Mark Herring had been certified by the state as the winner of the race by just 165 votes out of more than 2.2 million votes cast early last month.

Should those state-certified results hold, Herring would replace Republican Ken Cuccinelli as Virginia's AG. Cuccinelli was unsuccessful in his own run for Governor in November against Democrat Terry McAuliffe. Along with the Democratic win in the Lt. Governor's race as well, a Herring victory would result in the first time since 1969 that Democrats held all three statewide offices, and the first time in twenty years that Virginia will have a Democratic AG.

A "recount", in Virginia, however --- as we've documented previously (see last section of this article) --- amounts to much less than it may seem, given the technology used in the state and some of the ridiculous "recount" laws specified by the Virginia election code [PDF].

As bad as those "recount" statutes are, however, a margin of 165 votes could certainly be reversed, even in a state where most votes are currently recorded (either accurately or inaccurately, who knows?) by 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting systems, and where the rest are tallied (either accurately or inaccurately, who knows?) by paper-ballot optical-scan tabulators that will be used once again to "recount" (either accurately or inaccurately, who knows?) most of the state's paper ballots.

Yes, that's right. Hundreds of thousands of 100% unverifiable electronic votes cast in the closest statewide race in VA state history cannot be "recounted" now in any meaningful way. For those votes, state election code specifies that, during the "recount", election officials will merely recheck the voting machine computer printouts from Election Night to make sure the certified results match. Meanwhile --- and short of a court order --- votes that were cast on paper ballots will simply be run through the same optical-scan computers that tallied them the first time, after they've been reprogrammed to set aside all ballots which the scanner sees as an over vote, an under vote or a write-in vote in the AG's race. Those set aside paper ballots, at least, will then be examined by hand, in public, by actual human beings.

As ridiculous as the VA "recount" statute is, the "contest" law --- another procedure which the candidate who loses the "recount" may file thereafter --- is even more ridiculous. But, depending on the results of the "recount", that may be the only option Obenshain is left with...and it could result in a GOP "victory", even with fewer recorded popular votes, presuming there are enough heavily partisan Republicans in the VA state legislature...

Sometimes it's a good idea to get a full explanation before these things become fodder in a contentious partisan legal election contest. So that's what we've tried to do. Happily, the General Registrar of Bedford County, VA was more than willing to help.

Last week, and the week before, The BRAD BLOG devoted quite a bit of coverage to the incredibly close Attorney General's race in Virginia. As of last week, the Democratic candidate Mark Herring was certified by the state's local voting jurisdictions (counties and cities), as the "winner" over Republican Mark Obenshain by just 164 votes out of more than 2.2 million cast.

The contest is, for now, in the hands of the State Board of Elections which will issue its own official official certification of results on November 25th, after which the candidate declared the "loser" is almost certain to ask for a "recount" and potentially file an election contest thereafter, depending on the outcome. (See the last section of this article for an explanation as to why we put quotes around the word "recount", especially in Virginia.)

During the week-long roller coaster canvass by jurisdictions across Virginia following the November 5th election, there were a number of minor adjustments to local tallies as county and city election officials checked and double-checked results printed by touch-screen and paper ballot optical-scan tabulation computers from Election Night and then adjudicated provisional ballots for tally and inclusion in the final results. While most of the adjustments made during the week following the election were relatively small, each was of great significance in a race this tight.

But there were three rather large changes to the results during the post-election canvass process --- two were in the Democratic strongholds of Fairfax County and the city of Richmond, and one was in heavily Republican Bedford County. All of the large tabulation adjustments were said to have been caused by various combinations of computer tabulator and human error.

Two of them, the ones which resulted in about 1,300 votes beginning picked up by the Democrat over his Republican rival in both Fairfax and Richmond, were covered and explained in the media in some detail. (See our coverage here of the discovery of the thousands of "missing" Fairfax votes and the eventual explanation the next day. The Richmond additions are described here.) The adjustments made during the canvass by heavily-Republican Bedford County, however, which resulted in a net pick-up of about 500 votes for Obenshain, received considerably less public explanation.

Given that all of these matters may be revisited once again in a "recount" --- and the inevitable legal challenges to go with it --- we thought it might be good to get the explanation for Obenshain's big vote pickup in Bedford County on the written record. Bedford's General Registrar Barbara Gunter was kind enough to reply to our queries last week on that point, offering her explanation for the known details of the computer and/or human errors that led to more than 700 votes in the AG's race being initially misreported on Election Night in Bedford County...

This story is horrific. It struck me even more so this morning, given that I had just been in contact with Virginia state Senator Creigh Deeds (D) last week on several occasions and had asked him to appear as my guest on the KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast.

Deeds is currently said to be in critical condition after being stabbed multiple times today in his own home, "in the head and torso," according to officials. His son Gus was found dead in the same home, the victim of "an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound," the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports, adding the detail that the son "had been released Monday following a mental health evaluation performed under an emergency custody order." Joe St. George of CBS6 reports that Gus had withdrawn last month from William & Mary College.

"The son was evaluated Monday at Bath County hospital," Dennis Cropper, executive director of the Rockbridge County Community Services Board told the Times-Dispatch, "but was released because no psychiatric bed could be located across a wide area of western Virginia."

The best news that can be reported from all of this for now is that officials said at a noon ET news conference today that VA's 2009 Democratic Gubernatorial candidate was able to communicate with state police about the incident before he was airlifted to a medical facility.

I had been in touch with Deeds over the last week or two in the course of our in-depth coverage of the incredibly close VA Attorney General post-election tabulation...

From Brentin Mock of "Facing South", a publication of the non-profit Institute for Southern Studies...

Among those on the ballot earlier this month was Mount Gilead's Mayor Patty Almond, who is said to have had the support of the town's African-American community. In 2011, as Mock reports, Almond "lost" the mayoral race by just two votes, until it was discovered that "four black voters were denied ballots when their town residencies were challenged." A new election was eventually ordered by the State Board of Elections. Almond won the new election in 2012, but, thanks to the legal fight, did not take office until December of last year. So Almond served less than a year before her recent re-election contest, held on the same day that the Montgomery County Sheriff's office and four local police departments decided to "swarm" the tiny NC town...

[This article now cross-published by The Progressive...]

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a vigorous Opposition [PDF] to a Motion to Intervene [PDF] filed by the Republican "voter fraud" group calling itself "True the Vote." In its motion, True the Vote seeks to become a party to the DoJ's federal legal challenge to Texas's polling place Photo ID restriction law, SB-14.

The DoJ's opposition is rather straightforward. The right wing-funded True the Vote, they argue, has not established that it is entitled to intervene because it sets forth nothing more than a generalized grievance and because its allegation "that illegal voting might be prevented by enforcement of SB 14 is, at best, speculative."

Anyone familiar with this organization and its history, should appreciate how absurd it is that they should be taken seriously at any time, much less allowed to intervene in a critical lawsuit filed in federal court.

Permissive intervention is inappropriate, according to the DoJ, because True the Vote has failed to establish that its interests would not be adequately represented by the State of Texas. Indeed, its participation in the case, DoJ says, would be unduly burdensome in that the group seeks to divert the court's attention from the legal issues relating to polling place Photo ID restriction laws "to issues concerning True the Vote’s numerous allegations of purported voter registration irregularities."

The DoJ notes that, for identical reasons, True the Vote, whose 2011 list of "Recommendations for Legislation" [PDF] was topped by the desire to enact the polling place Photo ID law at issue, was excluded from participating in the Department's legal challenge to last year's ill-fated effort by Florida's Gov. Rick Scott (R) to purge "potential non-citizens" from the Sunshine State's eligible voter rolls.

True the Vote's deceptive tactics should come as no surprise to long time readers of The BRAD BLOG. The group is essentially the latest pretend "election integrity" arm of the Koch brothers-funded, Paul Weyrich co-founded, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)-fueled GOP effort to enact voter suppression laws across the country.

The nature of their hostile, anti-voter tactics, according to the Houston NAACP, included an alleged attack upon its "volunteer poll monitors for handing out water to voters at Early Vote locations and for assisting Disabled and Elderly voters by standing in line for them or asking younger people in line to let the elderly and disabled go ahead of them in the line to vote."

The group's label, 'True the Vote', is nothing short of Orwellian. As detailed by The BRAD BLOG last year (and by others this year) truth and True the Vote remain perfect strangers...

On this week KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast I was joined by Heather Parton --- much better known as the great blogger "Digby" of Hullabaloo --- to discuss the complete collapse of CBS 60 Minutes' bogus Benghazi exclusive and their pathetic "correction". Moreover, we take a look at what Digby has uncovered about the apparent Rightwing, Fox "News"-like predilections of correspondent Lara Logan and how that (and a few other disturbing Fox "News" connections) resulted in Benghazi hoax disaster at the once-great CBS News.

Next, I bring everyone up to date on the insane roller coaster that has been the last week of the insanely close Virginia Attorney General's race and the surreal pitfalls to come in the likely "recount" and potential election contest thereafter.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report on the Super Typhoon Haiyan disaster in the Philippines, its connection to climate change and the new all-time low for global warming deniers in its wake...

Download MP3 or listen online below (appx 58 mins)...

The last of the votes to be tallied in Virginia, prior to the certification deadline at 11:59pm ET tonight is done. With the Fairfax County provisional ballots optically-scanned and added to the totals, it appears that the Democratic candidate Mark Herring will be declared the "winner" for now, by just 164 votes --- out of more than 2.2 million cast --- over Republican Mark Obenshain.

If Herring can maintain his extraordinarily slim lead throughout the almost-certain "recount", he will become Virginia's first Democratic Attorney General in twenty years, and his party will have swept all three top-ticket races in the state this year --- Governor, Lt. Governor and AG.

The final provisional tallies in Democratic-leaning Fairfax County resulted in 160 votes for Herring and 103 for Obenshain, a net 57 vote pickup. Barring any surprises in the next hour (there have been plenty of twists and turns in this nail-biter over the past week since the election - see related coverage below), the final tally before the full state certification process begins as of Midnight Tuesday night will be Herring: 1,103,777 - Obenshain: 1,103,613, according to the State Board of Elections (SBE) now-updated website.

Herring and state Democrats are declaring themselves the winner of the contest. For his part, the Obenshain campaign has issued the following statement...

The tally of the last of the provisional votes in Fairfax County, VA is now completed. See the blow-by-blow details below. Or see this breaking story for the final results before the certification deadline at midnight tonight.

Earlier...

I'm testing out Twitter's new "Custom Timeline" feature below, while following the tallies of the provisional ballots in Fairfax County, VA...

For the first time since the bulk of votes were tallied in Virginia on Election Night last Tuesday, the Democratic candidate for Attorney General, state Sen. Mark Herring appears to now have taken the lead over Republican state Sen. Mark Obenshain in the razor-thin results of more than 2.2 million votes cast.

Herring just barely leap-frogged Obenshain's totals on Monday afternoon after tallies from a voting machine in the city of Richmond --- the results of which had been previously missing from official tallies since Election Night --- were added to the running totals. The addition of 190 votes from electronic voting machine #3791, plus a few other votes from seven other precincts re-reviewed by Richmond City's Electoral Board on Monday, resulted in what now appears to be a 115 vote lead for Herring over Obenshain.

While the results posted by State Board of Elections (SBE) do not yet reflect that change in the state tally (showing, instead, a 17 vote lead for Obenshain for now), a number of election experts following and closely documenting the post-election canvassing and correction of vote tallies from across the state have confirmed Herring's new lead. Those experts have been consistently and accurately ahead of the SBE in reporting results in many cases over the past week.

[Update, 9:50pm ET: The SBE website now shows Herring up by 117, as predicted. The extra two votes were from provisional ballots added to the tally in Montgomery County.]

Ironically, the review of the poll tapes printed out by the tabulation computers from eight different precincts in very-heavily Democratic-leaning Richmond City today, came at the request of the Republican Party...

As of late Saturday, just 55 votes separated the Democratic candidate from the Republican in the Virginia Attorney General's race, according to the State Board of Elections (SBE) website. 55 votes out of more than 2.2 million cast after four days of canvassing, double-checking and processing a number of provisional ballots cast across the state during last Tuesday's election.

The state's 55 vote spread, however, is still larger than the margin cited by the election geeks who have been following this race on a county-by-county and often precinct-by-precinct (even ballot-by-ballot) level. And they have been consistently and correctly ahead of the SBE-posted numbers. One of them, Virginia political expert and self-identified "vicious campaign insultant," Ben Tribbett declared just a 15 vote margin earlier Saturday, after the spread had been just several hundred over the last few days. Late tonight, after a few more provisionals were tallied in the City of Richmond, Tribbett adjusted his tally to a 44 vote margin.

Another one of those geeks, Dave Wasserman of the non-partisan Cook Political Report, predicted Friday night on Twitter that, after all provisional ballots are added in, "this thing could be single digits." It looks like he wasn't kidding.

For what it's worth, it's the Republican state Sen. Mark Obenshain currently leading the Democratic state Sen. Mark Herring by either 55 votes or 15 votes or somewhere in between right now. But there still remain between 400 and 500 provisional ballots to be adjudicated and possibly added to the totals in heavily Democratic-leaning Fairfax County as of Saturday night, according to Michael McDonald, a specialist in American elections at George Mason University in Fairfax.

Indeed, it was a surprise edict concerning provisional ballots, as issued by the Republican State Board of Elections, that stopped the Fairfax County Electoral Board dead in their tracks on Saturday before they were able to adjudicate all of the county's provisionals as previously planned.

All of this, before a likely "recount" --- of 100% unverifiable touch-screen votes in most VA counties and, barring a court order, no more than a computer re-scan of most of the paper ballots in the others --- that is almost certain to be requested by whichever state Senator named Mark finds himself "the loser" of the final canvassed tally as of midnight, Tuesday, November 12th, the deadline for certification of the election...

On Thursday night, we explained as much as we could figure out about thousands of seemingly "missing" votes suddenly "discovered" in the incredibly close Attorney General's race in Virginia between Mark Obenshain (R) and Mark Herring (D).

Some 2.2 million votes were cast on Tuesday in the contest, yet just a few hundred (depending on what time of day one checked, as tallies were being canvassed and double-checked and corrected from around the state) separated the two on Thursday. Obenshain was said to be in the lead, according to the State Board of Elections (SBE) website, by a few more than 700 votes at night's end.

That's when several election porn geeks --- like Dave Wasserman of Cook Political Report and Ben Tribbett --- who had been combing over the results for the past several days, confirmed with elections officials an unusually low rate of absentee votes in Congressional District 8 in Fairfax County, VA. If accurate, it would have been the lowest return rate for absentees in the state, and it was considerably lower than adjacent districts in the same county. Fairfax leans heavily Democratic and, if absentee ballots were cast at the same rate there as other districts in the county, Wasserman and Tribbett concluded, there were about 3,000 votes unaccounted for in the SBE tallies. Those "missing" votes, if tallied, would be enough to give Herring the lead and, potentially, the first AG victory for a Democrat in the state in twenty years.

So what happened to those 3,000 or so absentee votes? Why were they seemingly 'missing' from the tally? By late Thursday, one of the Republican officials on the Electoral Board, Brian Schoeneman, said he was "convinced now too that there is an issue" and promised to "figure this out". Late late Thursday night, Wasserman had received an email from Fairfax County General Registrar Cameron Quinn acknowledging that VA08 totals were "in error" and that she suspected "machine totals that either didn't print tapes, or didn't show full tallies on the tapes." She said that the Electoral Board would "make figuring out what happened the first order of business in the morning" on Friday.

Unlike much of the state, which votes on 100% unverifiable touch-screen systems, Fairfax, the largest single voting jurisdiction in the state, uses paper ballot optical-scan systems made by Diebold. Those same systems --- as we described last night --- have a long history of failure, including dropping entire stacks of votes from the totals without notice to the system administrator. Could that be what happened?

Well, there were a few more twists and turns today, as the Fairfax County Electoral Board attempted to figure out what had gone wrong with their tallies, and as other counties wrapped up their canvass of the election. The Board plans to meet tomorrow to offer their official findings (their full statement below), but the only thing we know conclusively for the moment, is that one of Wasserman's tweets this afternoon was absolutely correct:

"Folks, I've been neck deep in MS Excel for 3+ days & I'm ready to make a projection," he said. "The next Virginia AG will be...Mark"...

We reported yesterday on the incredibly close race for Attorney General in Virginia. With more than 2.2 million votes cast, the margin between Mark Obenshain (R) and Mark Herring (D) has been within a few hundred votes since Election Night on Tuesday.

Within the last few hours, an unexplained discrepancy has been discovered by those combing over the reported numbers in Fairfax County. The county leans heavily Democratic and, unlike much of the rest of the state which uses 100% unverifiable touch-screen, Fairfax uses optically-scanned paper ballots for its main vote tabulation system.

After Democrats reportedly won both the Governor and Lt. Governor races, only the AG's remains undecided at the top of the ticket. For the last 24 hours or so, the Republican Obenshain has been leading during the canvassing of ballots by about 700 votes, as absentee and provisionals are tallied and doubled-checked.

But now, thanks to some smart detective work by both a Democratic political team in Fairfax County and by Dave Wasserman of the non-partisan Cook Political Report, the fortunes for the Democrat candidate Herring may just have taken a big turn, even as a new mystery is added to the equation...