The Princeton Report, released a few days prematurely as it was, caught me somewhat off guard upon my arrival back home. My two months on the road were capped by two and a half hours sleep before needing to swing into action to change course from what had been previously planned for the report's release. I've been playing catch up ever since, and haven't even begun to crack into the thousands of unread, unanswered emails. But all in good time... I hope.

Before that, however, I've got Emcee duties tomorrow at SoCalGrassroots.org's big Election Protection event here in Los Angeles. It's to feature Gore Vidal, Maxine Waters, Debra Bowen, Bob Fitrakis, Mimi Kennedy, Lowell Finley and other notables, including myself as resident monkey. If you're in LA, I hope you'll stop by and say hello! Should be a great event! (It's also being sponsored in part by VelvetRevolution.us, as part of our Election Protection Strike Force public events series, just for the record.) The official flier for tomorrow's afternoon event, with all the details, is below the fold.

Lastly, for now and given the continually breaking events, I hope this note will suffice to give my heartfelt thanks to all of those who kept things rolling while I was "gone" over the past two months. Most notably, an enormous amount of gratitude goes to the good Winter Patriot, who we were able to thaw out for this special occassion, the fabulous Agent99 and, of course, the indomitable John Gideon. All served the good cause tirelessly and above and beyond the call of duty!

Additional thanks to all of the other BRAD BLOG Guest Contributors who picked up in my "absence," including (but not limited to) Joy Williams, Emily Levy, Michael Collins, Steve Huff, Joe Cannon, Chris Floyd and anyone else I'm insensitive enough not to have remembered right now.

Thank you all for making it possible for me to get the heck out of Dodge, cause some in-person trouble around the rest of the nation and get an hour or two of much needed peace and quiet in the bargain. I fear you all may be needed again soon, so please don't go too far! And thank you mightily again!

There is, I assure you, much much more to come. And soon.

And now, see below for info on tomorrow's event if you might be able to stop by! I shall endeavor to make it well worth your time if you do...

Just in case you thought Diebold was the only American voting machine company worthy of public mistrust...This just in on ES&S, the nation's largest supplier of electronic voting systems (and the one with the most disastrous record of failing in elections so far this year!)...

More at Ritchie's campaign website...

Noted University of Iowa computer scientist and e-voting expert, Douglas W. Jones, posted a reponse via email this morning to Diebold's official reply to Princeton University's recent report, detailing the ease with which Diebold's AccuVote touch-screen voting machine may have a virus inserted into its system.

Such malicious code, the first-of-its-kind report details, could flip votes, steal an election and replicate itself from one voting machine to the next. The dirty deed could be done by a single individual with about a minute's worth of unsupervised access to a single machine or memory card, and could be designed to be undetectable to either voters or elections officials.

The mainstream media appears to have finally found this issue fit to report, after all our years of covering it here. There has been a good deal of MSM coverage over the last two days, since The BRAD BLOG broke the full story, both here and in shorter form over at Salon; some of it has --- no surprise --- been better than others. We'll have more on that hopefully later this evening.

In the meantime, Diebold released their predictably misleading and disingenuous response late Wednesday evening. To which Jones replied via email this morning. This is his response...

It's incredible (or is it at this point?) but the lawsuit filed by several Colorado voters to ban touch-screen voting machines manufactured by Diebold, ES&S, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia in the state has revealed that the state's appointed "expert" --- responsible for certifying voting systems --- has no actual college training in computer science and failed to do any actual testing of the systems before certifying them!

As reported in an excellent article from Rocky Mountain News news this morning...

The issue was also covered quickly in a Denver Post article last night:

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

If anyone had reason to suspect that representatives of the Bush administration would tell bald-faced lies in order to try to justify a war they had already decided to fight, we might have reason to take the following report from Reuters somewhat seriously. [my emphasis, here and below]

We've been here before, haven't we? And we know what happens next, too. Don't we?

We've long been describing Bob Ney as the "Soon-to-be-Indicted Bob Ney". It looks like that day is finally here.

The New York Times is reporting that Ney, the leader sponsor and author of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) is headed to jail...

We've also long reported on Ney's "good luck" in winning $34,000 at a London casino owned by some good friends...at the exact same moment he owed exactly that much in credit card bills. Says The Times...

With both Ney and former Republican Majority Leader, Tom DeLay (R-TX) now facing indictments, that means there is only one remaining congress member who went on Jack Abramoff's golf junkets to St. Andrews, Scotland who has yet to be served with criminal charges: Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL)

Feeney is currently facing a challenge for his seat by Clint Curtis, the man who has sworn in affidavit, video-taped congressional testimony and polygraph test that Feeney asked him to create vote-rigging software when they both worked at the same computer firm in Florida in 2000 (where Feeney was general counsel and registered lobbyist, even while he was also serving as Speaker of the Florida House).

Anyway, now that Ney is apparently going to jail for his Abramoff-related crimes, can someone other than The BRAD BLOG please look into the hornet's nest surrounding the passage of HAVA, as aided and abetted by Abramoff's old lobbying firm, Greenburg Traurig, and Ney's former chief-of-staff-turned-Diebold-lobbyist, David DeStefano? Pretty please? Here's a nice place to get you started!

John Gideon covered the mess for us as things unfolded last Tuesday. Johns Hopkins computer science professor Avi Rubin was, once again, a poll worker on Election Day during last Tuesday's primary in the state. As BRAD BLOG readers know, Maryland was/is one of Diebold's original "showcase states" along with Georgia.

Rubin's post, detailing his experiences at his one polling place alone last Tuesday, gives a crystal clear picture of what a fucking mess we've got on our hands. A. Fucking. Mess.

Train wreck ahead. Big time. Please don't say you weren't warned.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

According to a report from the BBC,

Quite correct! Once there was a very strong voice from London ... but not anymore!

Blogged by John Gideon

Today the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that vote totals in three-quarters of the cities 314 wards are suspect.

The paper reports:

The state is blamming the bogus vote totals on programming problems but they seem to be only concerned with the total number of ballots reported and not the total number of votes given to any particular candidate.

Apparently this is nothing new for the city and county of Milwaukee as they have been in trouble with the Wisconsin state legislature for not following state canvassing statues for over 5 years.

Maybe this time the city and county will do the right thing and figure out what the problem is finally. It's past due that they do something.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

Tonight Lou reported on the complete failure of the Maryland primary. Thousands of voters were forced to vote on 'provisional' ballots instead of the state's vaunted Diebold Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines. At least those voters have a paper trail of their votes, but will they actually be counted? What a failure and it should all be laid at the feet of state Director of Elections Linda Lamone and Governor Ehrlich who both share responsibility for this failure.

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

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

Sarasota Alliance for Fair Elections (SAFE) has just announced that a Sarasota County Judge has found in their favor and against the county voting officials and the Florida Secretary of State.

SAFE had been proposing a ballot initiative that would require voter verified paper ballots and independent random audits of election results in Sarasota County. The County Commissioner chose to go to court instead of allowing the legal petition to move forward.

The press release from SAFE says:

This is a big announcement from a hard-working group of activists who still have an uphill battle to force their county to use a voter verified, auditable voting system.

Guest blogged by Joy Williams

According to CNN, Ann Richards, the former Governor of Texas, has passed on due to esophogeal cancer. She was a straight talker, a truth teller, and an intelligent and fiery woman. She will be missed.

As a former Texan, I found in Ann Richards a salt-of-the-earth kind of person who had an incredible amount of compassion, and is one of those gems that you find amongst those tumbling tumbleweeds. You could trust her. You could rely on her. You knew she cared.

Her spirit and energy were phenomenal. She would have made a tremendous President.

In 1988, she gave the Democratic National Convention Keynote Address. Though it's a different George Bush, much of what she said then applies remarkably well now. The Bushes have NEVER changed their agenda. Please read her address.

We love you, Ann!

-- Brad Friedman, EXCLUSIVE
-- (Salon.com has posted a shortened version of the following report right here:
"Hack the vote? No problem")

A vote for George Washington could easily be converted to a vote for Benedict Arnold on an electronic voting machine and neither the voter, nor the election officials administering the election would ever know what happened. It wouldn't require a "conspiracy theory" or a "conspiracy" at all. It could be done by a single person with just a few moments of access to the voting systems.

Those new findings are detailed, and illustrated on video-tape, in a new first-of-its-kind study released today by computer scientists and security experts at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.

(The version of the video demo at the Princeton website is being hit hard, and thus, slow to download and view currently. We've got a quick flash version available here for your convenience, courtesy of David Edwards.)

The scientific study has revealed, for the first time, that a computer virus can be easily implanted on an electronic voting machine which could, in turn, result in votes flipped for opposing candidates. The virus, as well, could be written to then spread itself from one machine to the next resulting in a stolen election. The malfeasance would likely never be discovered, the scientists have said.

Though the concept of stolen votes via electronic voting systems has been widely regarded as theoretically possible by experts up until now, a top-secret four-month long hands-on study of an actual touch-screen voting system, by the scientists at Princeton, has confirmed the worst nightmares of elections officials and American voters"¦not to mention a voting machine company known as Diebold.

The BRAD BLOG has had exclusive access to the scientists and information being tested as the team's various hack attempts have been designed and carried out over the course of the study.

Working directly with a Diebold AccuVote TS touch-screen voting system, the computer scientists have been able to implant a nearly-undetectable virus onto a touch-screen voting system, managing to successfully alter a voter's ballot --- after it's already been confirmed and cast --- in order to flip the vote so that it is recorded for a candidate other than the one the voter had intended.

According to the study's team leader, Edward W. Felten, a professor at Princeton's Department of Computer Science, the report confirms "“ and records in a video-taped demonstration "“ that such a malicious virus could be easily inserted onto a Diebold touch-screen voting system by a single individual "with just one or two minutes of unsupervised access to either the voting machine or the memory card" used with the system to store ballot definitions and vote tabulations.

The virus, as programmed by the Princeton team, could then spread from one voting system to the next depending on the way the machine in use is configured, or the way in which votes are tabulated in any particular jurisdication.

(NOTE: This story was set to break on Sunday, with a release of the study on Monday morning. I had written an exclusive story for The Nation to be released Sunday night along with exclusive coverage that was being scheduled with ABC World News Tonight. The scientists of the study, unfortunately, jumped the gun in releasing it this morning without warning me. Currently scrambling to get a version of my previously prepared report up on Salon.com to be followed by a more complete report here at BRAD BLOG shortly.)

UPDATE:
-- My full exclusive report is now posted here.
-- Salon is now running a shortened version of that full report. (Requires subscription, or viewing of a short ad.)

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

by David Horsey, from the September 3rd Seattle Post-Intelligencer, via Bartcop, via my science advisor (who loves Bartcop!!)

Please consider this an OPEN THREAD!