With the partisanship heating up in the battle for voting rights in Ohio again this year --- as Republican Sec. of State John Husted actually threatens to fire two Democratic Board of Election officials in Montgomery County for daring to vote in favor of expanded Early Voting hours --- it seemed a good time to check in with the former Sec. of State Jennifer Brunner (D).

All of this comes on the heels of the Obama Administration suing to restore Early Voting for all on the last three days before the election, which Republicans are now allowing only active duty military members in Ohio to do, and after previous rulings by Husted resulted in expanded Early Voting hours in Republican-leaning counties, and no expanded Early Voting hours in the largest Democratic-leaning counties.

Brunner (author of the forthcoming Cupcakes & Courage) joined me on today's BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio here in Los Angeles and offered some inside skinny on what she did in 2008 to help correct the 2004 disasters that plagued the state during that year's Presidential election debacle under her horrible predecessor, J. Kenneth Blackwell (R) --- who also served as co-chair for the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign while serving as the state's chief election official --- and what now seems to be going on under her successor Husted, as he limits Early Voting hours across the entire state, despite the great success it has been up until now for voters there.

She explained the constitutional powers of the Ohio Sec. of State and told me she believes the attempt by Republicans to shorten weekend Early Voting hours --- which were allowed as recently as this year's primary elections in Ohio --- was "clearly aimed at 'Souls to the Polls'," the effort by African-American churches to encourage their congregations to get out and vote on the Sunday before the election.

The result of all of this right now, as the former Secretary of State understated it during our conversation: "A bit of a donnybrook in Ohio."

I asked for her response to the remark by Doug Preisse, Chair of the Franklin County Republican Party and a member of the county's Board of Elections when he said he felt "we shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate the urban --- read African-American --- voter-turnout machine." She said she felt that that --- and his response to Democrats' charge that Republicans are trying to suppress the vote is "bullshit, quote me" --- was all "very unfortunate."

"We're already in a rancorous climate, starting from Congress and the Presidential election on down," she said. "Why stir up the pot and pit voters against each other? Enough of that was done in 2008. There was so much political capital spent in 2008 on whipping up these fake allegations of voter fraud and now four years later, people realize --- what were there, ten cases around the country since 2000? --- this is so unnecessary."

"The bottom line is," she continued, "voting is not a partisan issue. It should never be a partisan issue. Having control of the rules is not political booty. It really should be a place where everyone walks into that room, they drop their partisan cloak, they stand up, they act like grown-ups, and they say 'Let's do what's fair, because our future depends on it.'"

All of that, and more, follows in today's BradCast...

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

No, the Obama Campaign is not attempting to keep military voters from voting, no matter how much the Romney Campaign and their surrogates in the media and on Fox "News" are willing to shamelessly lie about it for ugly partisan purposes at the expense of electoral democracy.

The whole story appears to have begun as little more than another hoax by the Andrew Breitbart scam artists and, as always, the mainstream corporate media have fallen for it, as if it's a legitimate story. So here's what's actually going on, since the MSM seems incapable of explaining to you.

Following the disastrous, partisan and arguably criminal oversight of the 2004 Presidential Election in Ohio by then Republican Sec. of State J. Kenneth Blackwell (in any other era in our nation's history, people would have gone to jail for what happened there), when a wildly and purposefully disparate distribution of voting machines led to Election Day voting lines of anywhere from 2 to 12 hours, mostly in Democratic-leaning jurisdictions, reforms were enacted to make it easier for all voters to cast their legal vote in the Buckeye State.

After the 2004 debacle, the law was changed in 2005 to allow for any voter to vote by absentee ballot, without an excuse, including by "early in-person absentee voting" at polling places in the weeks leading up to Election Day. Hundreds of thousands of Ohio voters took advantage of this new opportunity to cast their vote, helping to radically increase turnout, including during Early and Absentee voting in subsequent years:

In the 2008 election, in the three days prior to Election Day, some 93,000 voters in the state took advantage of their ability to cast a vote over the weekend just before the Tuesday election. Many of those voters, according to a University of Akron study of Early Voting in Ohio [PDF], were voters who might have trouble voting on Election Day, because they were working that day, or were elderly and unable to wait in long lines. African American churches encouraged voters to head to the early polls after church on the Sunday before the election, during a so-called "Souls to the Polls" effort.

This, Republicans legislators in Ohio determined, had to be stopped. And so they did. Or tried to, by passing HB 194, shortening the period of early voting for all Buckeye State voters, and adding other restrictions to make it more difficult for legal voters to cast their legal vote and have it counted.

The people of Ohio then rose up against HB 194 by turning in almost 100,000 more signatures than the number required to forestall the implementation of the new voting restrictions and to place the law --- which had passed on party lines by the Republican-controlled legislature before being signed by the state's Republican Governor John Kasich --- onto the November 2012 ballot, where the people could decide whether or not they wanted the new restrictions on voting rights.

But a funny thing happened on the way to that November 2012 Referendum. The state Republicans came up with a bit of a work around, at least for active duty military voters (who, we are told, tend to vote Republican, rather than Democratic). And while the Obama Campaign and fellow Democrats are busy trying to ensure that all voters, not just active duty military voters in Ohio get to enjoy Early Voting in those three days before the Election, the Romney Campaign has continued their extraordinary record of simply lying about everything.

That's not a partisan observation. That's just a fact. And for anyone in the media to suggest otherwise, in regard to this story, amounts to little more than journalistic malpractice at very best, and, more accurately, an insidious act of blatantly cynical partisanship disguised as "journalism" at the expense of the very core of our (small "d") democratic system of governance.

Such insidious acts of blatantly cynical partisanship disguised as "journalism" is, of course, what the folks at the late con-man Andrew Breitbart's website do best...

You're unlikely to hear a peep about this on Fox "News" (unless they happen to have me on), but the California Secretary of State's Election Fraud Division is now reportedly investigating a firm hired by the Sacramento County Republican Party said to have submitted thousands of fraudulent voter registration forms.

According to a report today from Sacramento ABC affiliate News10 [see video posted below], a private, for-profit firm calling itself Momentum Political Services, hired by the local Republican Party "to boost GOP registration ranks in key battleground communities" has turned in more than 3,100 invalid voter registration cards during their recent drive.

[UPDATE 5/7/12: According to Sacramento Bee's 5/5/12 report, the number of bad registration forms is much higher than 3,100. The paper reports that since September, out of some 31,000 cards turned in by Momentum Political Services, "at least one-fourth of them have been thrown out because of inaccuracies," according to the Sacramento Registrar of Voters. That puts the questionable registrations from the GOP's company at more than 7,500.]

Voter registration forms have allegedly been turned in with fake addresses, voter names that don't exist, duplicate Social Security numbers, and party affiliations that seem to have been changed "by someone" to Republican. The head of the firm has admitted she has hired workers with criminal backgrounds, as found via Craigslist.

The charges of serial voter registration fraud sound very similar to those leveled in 2008 against another outfit hired by the California State GOP to register Republican voters before that year's Presidential election. In that case, the head of the firm was arrested, and eventually pleaded guilty to voter registration charges himself.

In 2006, another firm hired by the CA Republican Party turned in thousands of registration forms with fake names and an error rate as high as 60 percent. And in 2004, a firm hired by the GOP was investigated in a number of states for shredding Democratic voter registrations and tossing them into dumpsters. Despite those allegations, the same folks were later hired by the McCain/Palin campaign in 2008 to run voter registration drives before the Presidential election.

Of course, you probably haven't heard of any of those stories, even while you've heard plenty about a handful of ACORN workers --- no actual ACORN officials, mind you, and they were never hired by the Democratic Party, and never led to a fraudulent vote --- turning in fraudulent registration forms in past years.

But nobody who ever worked for the non-profit ACORN has ever been accused of what these Republican firms continue to do on behalf of the Republican officials who hire them, paying them per Republican registration, year after year, as is once again apparent in the allegations surfacing today against Momentum Political Services...

"The best way to enhance freedom in other lands is to demonstrate here that our democratic system is worthy of emulation." - President Jimmy Carter
(Inaugural Address, 1/20/1977)

Oh, well. It was a nice idea at the time.

Nonetheless, happy 87th birthday (yesterday), Mr. President!

[Hat-tip @WestWingReport.]

We don't usually offer much space here to sex scandals, unless, in some cases, they demonstrate, for example, blatantly offensive hypocrisy in regard to everyone else's civil rights (talking to you, disgraced former Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID)) --- or, as in the case of disgraced now-former Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), charges of blatant criminality.

The details out of the bi-partisan, unanimously approved 68-page report released late yesterday by the U.S. Senate Ethics Committee --- which usually does absolutely nothing --- referring the Ensign case to the Dept. of Justice and the FEC for criminal prosecution are stunning, and much worse than previously understood.

In their letter to the DoJ [PDF] the Committee's Chair and Vice-Chair, Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) respectively, refer the matter...

But even that damning summary of wrong-doing fails to adequately describe the offensive squalor at the heart of this mess, as you'll see below.

Moreover, another reason worth mentioning the whole scandal here: there may be at least one scofflaw still on the loose in regards this matter, still serving in the U.S. Senate --- namely, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), one of the very few involved in this extraordinarily ugly, sad and shameful scandal to have, so far, gotten off largely scot-free despite his apparent role in attempting to cover it all up for his friend Ensign.

Finally, there is still one more reason to mention all of this: to highlight the fact that Ensign has now been replaced in the U.S. Senate by the scofflaw, and lying, former NV Secretary of State Dean Heller. Be sure to read on below for details on him and how he too has been allowed to avoid accountability for years despite having, in 2004, illegally certified the 100% unverifiable e-voting systems now used across the state of Nevada (and also used to elect him to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006.)

Rachel Maddow did a fine job of summarizing the remarkable Senate Ethics Committee report on Ensign on Thursday night, so we'll happily allow her to do so again below, as we're buried in several other stories ourselves at the moment...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning with Brad Friedman

"This was a decisive election about judicial independence," WI Supreme Court Justice David Prosser said at a press conference in Madison last Monday, declaring victory and explaining his opposition to a recount of the April 5th Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

"The people realized that judges should be much more than partisan politicians who wear black robes. Judges should be impartial in theory and in fact. They should faithfully apply the law without fear, and without favor," he told the assembled media.

However, as an investigation by The BRAD BLOG reveals, there is a stunning gap between the lofty ideals of "independence" espoused by the incumbent Justice as quoted above, and the sordid reality of his own personal record as a hard-Right partisan official in Wisconsin, with the state's GOP caucus, and even during his role as a justice on the state's highest court.

It is a reality, well-documented through court records and other sources, finding Prosser and his former Republican colleagues in the WI Assembly enmeshed in a criminal scheme to utilize state employees and resources at taxpayer expense in order to finance and organize WI GOP political campaigns. A reality which includes an astounding legal filing by this same sitting Supreme Court Justice in which he not only acted as an advocate for the accused, but even confessed to his own participation in the alleged crime.

In short, it's a reality which led The BRAD BLOG to wonder whether Prosser was truly better characterized as an 'independent' jurist, as per his self-description, or a partisan criminal in a robe...

Waukesha County, Wisconsin's County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus was already known, for some time, to be among the nation's worst elections official. And that's saying quite a bit. But new information being discovered over the past several days suggests she may be even worse than previously known --- which is also saying quite a bit.

We noted last Friday that the stunning 14,000+ "new" votes she announced as having discovered in the state's Supreme Court election from the city of Brookfield last Thursday actually weren't "new" at all. In fact, they were independently reported late on Election Night by Lisa Sink of the Brookfield Patch, exactly as they were eventually included in Nickolaus' final canvass report [XLS].

If anything, as we indicated in the same article, it is perhaps more troubling that the city of Brookfield's numbers didn't change at all from Election Night, suggesting that the ballots have never been examined by any human beings in order to assure the accuracy of the oft-failed, easily-manipulated optical-scanners used to tabulate the paper ballots in Waukesha (and across most of the state.)

That's just one reason why a complete public hand-count of all paper ballots should be carried out in Waukesha right now, presuming the chain of custody for those ballots can be demonstrated as having been secure since Election Night. Given the razor-thin margin of the still unofficial final results in the race between Justice David Prosser (a partisan Republican and avowed Gov. Scott Walker supporter) and the independent Asst. Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg, a similarly public hand-count of all paper ballots across the entire state should be a no-brainer at this point in order to achieve some form of confidence in the results of the, reportedly, incredibly close contest.

The "Protect Our Elections" campaign of VelvetRevolution.us has now publicly called for exactly that --- a public hand-count of all paper ballots across the entire state. [DISCLOSURE: The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder of VR.]

Last week, The BRAD BLOG also detailed some of Nickolaus' horrific record as County Clerk, and just a few of the embarrassments she's caused for her county, including her practice of keeping election results only on a circa 1995 personal computer in her office; using the same user ID and password for all of the employees allowed to access it; and refusing to release city-by-city, much less ward-by-ward election results on Election Night. (The latter is one of the reasons the "missing" 14,000+ votes weren't noticed by anyone in the media or citizenry earlier.) Those were just a few of the troubling concerns highlighted in an independent audit carried out on behalf of the County Board of Executives last year after they'd discovered many serious deficiencies and security concerns in Nickolaus' election procedures.

But now, thanks to some great citizen oversight --- to be sure, not easy to do in Nickolaus' county, as she makes it as absolutely as difficult as possible for citizens to oversee their own elections --- from a blogger at the Daily Kos, we learn still more troubling facts about elections and their administration in the very Republican-leaning Waukesha, including evidence suggesting 20,000 more votes than "ballots cast" were tallied by Nickolaus in the county's 2006 general election, and a remarkable 97.63% voter turnout there in the 2004 Presidential election.

We've been trying to get to the bottom of these anomalies since they were first discovered a few days ago, and we've been going back and forth with Nickolaus to try and clear them up. Here's what we've been able to figure out...

Once again proving the well-worn axiom IOKIYAR ("It's okay if you're a Republican"), disgraced former U.S. Attorney, Karl Rove protege and the Republican Party's 2004 vote cager, Tim Griffin has not only been elected as a Representative to the U.S. House from Arkansas' 2nd district, he's also been assigned to a leadership position as deputy whip and has been given a seat on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, of all places. Guess they had to replace the previously disgraced anti-democracy champion Rep. Tom Feeney (FL-24) with someone, eh?

As Talking Points Memo notes...

TPM has more on that aspect of Griffin's "rap sheet", but as The BRAD BLOG has detailed over the years, Griffin was also at the center of a dirty scheme to peel thousands of legitimate voters off the roles in Ohio in 2004, as revealed by his own "vote caging" emails sent to fellow George W. Bush/RNC campaign officials at the time...

I hope you'll join me as I guest-host the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show again for a few days this week. I'll be on duty tonight (Tuesday), as well as Wednesday & Friday.

We'll be BradCasting LIVE from L.A.'s KTLK am1150 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT) as usual. Please join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! The LIVE chat room will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG during the show as ever, so come on by while you're listening! (The Chat Room will open at the bottom of this item a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

So far scheduled for tonight's show...

• OH SEC OF STATE JENNIFER BRUNNER. Now that Ohio has again elected a Republican Governor and Sec. of State, will the 2012 Presidential Election look like the 2004 disaster in the Buckeye State? We'll talk about that and much more with the state's outgoing Democratic SoS.
• TIMOTHY KARR of FreePress.net and MediaCitizen joins us to discuss the uncertain future for Net Neutrality and, oh, whatever became of that whole Fairness Doctrine thing, and that horrific Telecommunications Act that is now destroying the country?
• PLUS: A whole whole bunch more from today's news, your calls at 877-520-1150 and tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates around the country and also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

Click here to jump into our LIVE Chat Room during the show. Or just see below!...

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Fighting with a cold all night, I think we still had a helluva good show! But you'll tell me. The commercial-free --- and yes, UNCENSORED! Hear what got dumped from the air! --- audio archives are now posted below. See if you can spot the wingnut troll before I did in the final hour! (And the chat room archive is below as well, if you like.) See ya tomorrow night!...

- Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG

After a week of hand-counting paper write-in ballots in Alaska's three-way U.S. Senate race between incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski (who ran as an independent write-in candidate), Republican candidate Joe Miller and Democratic candidate Scott McAdams, the Associate Press called the race this afternoon for Murkowski.

Trailing by some 10,000 votes behind Murkowski, however, and with several lawsuits concerning the tabulation of ballots still pending, Miller is suggesting it's likely that his campaign will call for a "hand count" of all of the ballots cast in the race, not just those in contention during the counting of write-in ballots over the last week.

Given Alaska's years-long record of often-inexplicable election results, going back at least as far as the 2004 Presidential Election (and the first election as Senator for Murkowski who had previously been named by her father to replace him in the U.S. Senate when he became Governor in 2002); the repeated failure and insecurity of the state's Diebold election system; and the AK Division of Elections' truly remarkable history of blocking citizen oversight of election results --- much of which has been documented at The BRAD BLOG since late 2005 --- a thorough reconciliation of results by the Miller team would be both appropriate and helpful for all future elections in the state (and even for other states, where similar nearly-impossible-to-oversee optical-scan ballot systems are similarly used.)

We have no particular dog in this race, as our coverage of issues of Election Integrity is, as always, non-partisan. Our only concern is for the voters, that they get to vote if they wish, that their votes are counted accurately if they do, and that the counts are performed transparently so that all citizens can know that the results are, indeed, accurate.

To that end, though we haven't consulted directly with any of the campaigns in the Alaska race, we have been following the tabulation closely since Election Day two weeks ago, and have been speaking with a number of sources in the state who have, we're told, been sharing various thoughts we've offered with both the McAdams and Miller campaigns. The advise we've offered --- as we would to anyone who asked, including Murkowski's campaign --- appears to have been taken to heart by the Miller team, at least if one of their lawsuits, and a number of their public statements given over the last week are any indication.

As mentioned, Alaska's history of election results that seem to defy mathematical explanation, along with (understating the problem here) less than transparent processes and a failure to make recommended changes to their election system and procedures, leads to a case where a full, manual, reconciliation of all ballots cast and counted --- as called for by the Miller camp, or any other --- would provide a valuable service to the state and all of its voters...

[Note: This piece was originally written for and published by Truthout earlier this week, prior to escalated, and often breathless, allegations now being made from the Right of "voter fraud!" and "election theft!" by the Reid campaign in NV. Many of those claims are baseless and evidence-free at this time, though some have roots, at least, in legitimacy. The article which follows offers evidence for the legitimacy of some of their claims. But I will try, if time allows, to post another piece soon, separating important fact from irresponsible and even sometimes silly fiction in many of GOP/Fox/Drudge/Breitbart-fueled allegations in NV. - BF]

Sharron Angle should start filing the lawsuits right now. Then again, so should Harry Reid. However, it might be a bit more difficult politically for the Senate majority leader, given the undeserved support Reid has shown in the past for Nevada's 100 percent unverifiable, error-prone, hackable, illegally-certified, electronic voting systems the state forces all voters to use at the polling place.

Given that the Angle/Reid contest in Nevada is likely to be among the closest - and most closely-watched - races for the US Senate this November 2, both parties would be wise to get to court and file for an order to ensure all of the hard drives, flash memory chips and memory cartridges to be used in their electronic voting machines during both early voting and on Election Day are securely retained for 22 months after the election.

The federal law requiring as much, Retention of Voting Documentation (42 USC. 1974 through 1974e), has, however, never been followed in any state to my knowledge, at least in regard to the sensitive memory cards and hard drives from electronic voting systems. Those devices hold both ballot programming and the way the computers have recorded - accurately or not - the way voters have voted. They might also hold the only evidence of any system malfunction or malfeasance. Nonetheless, officials routinely scrub those materials not long after the polls have closed. Key evidence - perhaps the only actual evidence - of how voters had hoped to vote and of any obstruction to that intent, is thereby lost forever.

The voting machine still used across the Silver State - the horrible, hackable, failure-prone Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen voting machines with VeriVote "paper trail" printer add-on - has a storied history. There is also a recent history of very close elections in Nevada. Consequently, both candidates would be wise to bring on experienced Election Integrity experts to advise them in what can and will go wrong with those voting systems this year.

Unfortunately, while Reid seems to have long been in denial about the unverifiability and outright failure of the systems used in his state, Angle has likely been duped into buying into her own party's propaganda about "voter fraud," when the real problem is election fraud ... or just plain failure. Particularly in Nevada ...

And, also speaking of the long-waged Republican War on Democracy, it's nice to see a bit of in-depth coverage of issues that actually matter from local news reporters for a change. Here's Melissa Sims of KARK 4 News in Arkansas last night, on the vote caging of Tim Griffin, the Karl Rove protege installed as U.S. Attorney without Senate confirmation by the Bush Administration during their infamous U.S. Attorney purge.

Griffin, notoriously, was discovered to have sent caging emails to RNC colleagues during the 2004 election in Ohio. He denies any wrong-doing, though BBC investigative journalist and author [and occasional BRAD BLOG guest blogger] Greg Palast who first reported on the caging emails in Griffin's name, believes otherwise. Several other independent reporters similarly confirmed his involvement in the scheme. Griffin has never been held legally accountable, in any case, despite being forced to tearfully resign as USA during the Attorney Purge investigation. He is now, incredibly, the GOP's nominee for Arkansas' 2nd District U.S. Congressional seat, proving --- yet again --- that IOKIYR.

KARK's Simas took the time to cover the matter in some detail --- a 7-minute report is extraordinary for local news --- even as it's been largely ignored by...well, just about everybody, certainly in Arkansas, until now...

Note: Simas' written report published on KARK's ArkansasMatters.com website along with the video report, is very good as well.

[Much thanks to RAW REPLAY'S David Edwards for the video embed!]

UPDATE 10/20/10: Palast picks up on this same story and writes over at Truthout that attorney Robert Kennedy Jr., having looked at the Griffin caging emails, believes that what the SarahPAC-endorsed candidate Griffin did "was absolutely illegal and he should be in jail."

I'm no good at raising money for The BRAD BLOG - so let's see if I have any better luck helping out progressive filmmaker John Wellington Ennis to complete his newest documentary, Pay 2 Play: Democracy's High Stakes, covering the Supreme Court's Citizens United disaster and other related bastardizations of our democracy by the highest corporate bidder.

As his website describes the new film: "The cost of running for office makes candidates beg, borrow, and steal. PAY 2 PLAY shows how our elections encourage extortion, and how to stop it."

John is also the director of 2008's high-lariously informative Free For All: One Dude's Quest to Save Democracy (which features yours truly, but is brilliant nonetheless!)

Unfortunately, progressives are not shoveled barrels of free money as partisan scammers Andrew Breitbart, James O'Keefe, and the other liars and snake-oil salesmen on the Right are. Progressives actually have to beg for funds and then produce actual, truthful material in the bargain! That takes time, effort, and funding. So it's gonna take money to get money out of our politics once and for all! Please help. Ennis is doing his part, big time, so please help him out to finish the film if you can afford to toss in a few dollars!

If you need any more convincing, here's a slightly shortened version of an appearance I made at one of his fundraisers in Santa Monica last week [apologies for the echoey sound, it gets easier to see and hear as it goes forward!]...

The Connecticut State Election Commission announced this morning in Hartford that "it cannot make a full and fair determination of the allegations" against Ann Coulter who was alleged to have committed voter fraud twice in the state by voting illegally from her residence in New York City while being registered at her parents home in the Nutmeg State.

After a nearly inexplicable 20-month investigation, the Commission found "insufficient evidence in the present matter to substantiate the Complainant's claims."

However, The BRAD BLOG can report that, based on the Commission's five-page "Findings and Conclusions", it appears the Connecticut board either overlooked or ignored key evidence, including specific documentation of Coulter's illegal voting history in the state of Florida (they were only off by more than a year!), as well as her own incriminating admissions on the Fox "News" Channel about living in New York City......

Will Ann Coulter finally be held accountable for having committed voter fraud? We may find out on October 14th when the matter will come up at a public hearing by Connecticut's State Elections Commission after an extraordinarily long two-year delay since the complaints about her allegedly illegal absentee votes in 2002 and 2004 were filed.

As The BRAD BLOG spent years documenting beyond a shadow of a doubt concerning her voter registration fraud and voter fraud in a different state, Florida, Ann Coulter committed third degree felony voter registration fraud, along with a first degree voter fraud misdemeanor, when she lied about her residency and then knowingly voted at the wrong polling place in Palm Beach County, FL, in 2005.

Years of lying to the media, as well as election and law enforcement officials, and a last-minute, inappropriate intervention by a former boyfriend in the FBI, helped run out the clock on those charges. Her offenses in the Sunshine State were eventually found to be beyond the statute of limitations by the Florida State Election Commission (FSEC). The stalling by other friendly Florida agencies took so long that the FSEC didn't receive the case until years after it had been originally reported to law enforcement by the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections. So she got off the hook and was never held accountable for easily documented crimes in Florida. [After years of reporting that part of the story in pieces as it developed, we told the entire sordid tale in one fell swoop in Hustler magazine. That April 2008 exposé can be read in full here.]

However, in Connecticut, where official complaints were filed in 2009 --- by a conservative activist --- that she also committed absentee voter fraud in the years prior to moving to Florida, when she allegedly voted illegally from her residence in New York, there is no such statute of limitations for voter fraud. [See UPDATE at bottom of story for someone who disagrees with that point.]

After a 20-month delay, Coulter's case is finally coming up for a vote at a public hearing before CT's State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) on October 14th at 9:00am, 20 Trinity St. in Hartford CT, according to an email from the commission's MaryAnn Stratton and confirmation from the commission's director of communication...