We spent many hours yesterday at a joint legislative hearing, at the California State Ronald Reagan Building downtown, where CA SoS Debra Bowen, former L.A. County Registrar Conny "Condoleezza" McCormack, current acting Registrar Dean Logan, who was "greeted...with boos", and others all testified on the "Double Bubble" Ballot Fiasco. It went on for more than three and a half hours before the actual aggrieved parties (the voters of L.A. County) were allowed to testify for "30 seconds to a minute" each.

Our own Alan Breslauer was also there taping and may have some video here soon (including, perhaps, my quick testimony, and the continuing amusing threats of the Sergeant-at-Arms to throw me out.)

The BRAD BLOG overheard Logan in the hallway, desperately working to be bumped from "acting" to actual Registrar, as he slimed an Election Integrity advocate who had just testified against him. Logan was heard telling the top aide to one of the L.A. Board of Supes that one of the local, volunteer EI advocates was "a pathological liar." That, just minutes after Logan had attempted to take some responsibility for the fiasco --- when the media's cameras were rolling --- during his actual testimony. As we know the EI advocate in question, and know him to be an exceptionally stand-up guy, we informed Logan, and the aide, that he was incredibly out of line, and flat-out wrong. Again.

But it was McCormack who was met with the most derision, by audience and Legislative inquisitors alike, as she dissembled to the panel and attempted to blame Bowen's "Top-to-Bottom Review" of voting systems for her own failure, disingenuously saying the SoS's efforts to do the job she was elected to do was the reason that McCormack couldn't have fixed the problem before it disenfranchised thousands of legal voters again this year...

[Updated Post-Show. Audio now available below...]

During my regular weekly Friday guest appearance on the syndicated Peter B. Collins Show at 5pm PT tonight (that's 6pm in Albuquerque), we were joined by guests...

• Laura MacCallum (now-resigned KKOB reporter who broke the Heather Wilson Vote-Buying stories before they were spiked by her own station after complaints from Wilson)
• Gov. David Cargo (former Republican NM Governor, one of several officials who made the initial allegations)
• David Iglesias (the former US Attorney from NM who was fired in the U.S. Attorney Purge after receiving inappropriate phone-calls from Heather Wilson, and Pete Domenici was not able to make it after all)

As you may have guessed, there continues to be much developing on this story. The trick will be continuing to cover it all as I must head out to the road again beginning tomorrow, for a couple of weeks. As always, I'll do our best, even from there, to continue coverage. Your help is much appreciated! (See bottom of this post for one way you can help us immediately!)

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Was a great hour, I think. Both MacCallum and Cargo did a great job of covering the meat and potatoes of it all, along with the always top-notch PBC. I was on live from the California State Ronald Reagan building downtown where I just finished attending and testifying at a hearing on the L.A. County "Double Bubble" ballot debacle. More on that when I can catch my breath (which you'll see I'm quite out of, at the beginning of the hour).

Here's the full hour, which is actually 42 minutes with commercials removed (courtesy of Green960's podcast archive.) Download MP3, or listen online right here...

"This is why blogging doesn't get any respect," New Mexico blogger Heath Haussamen wrote in his blistering response to the emerging Republican vote-buying allegations in New Mexico. He wrote that the entire matter was a "non-story," based on "rumors," before going on to mercilessly blast reporter Dennis Domrzalski, who broke several key elements in the story, and us, by reference, as "shameful" and "disgraceful" for covering it at all.

About the website of Domrzalski, who says he was not contacted by the indignant Haussamen for comment before the scathing story ran, he wrote "This is not a reputable journalistic site."

Yet, incredibly, Haussamen failed to disclose, in his article on this yesterday, that Rep. Heather Wilson's campaign spokesperson, Whitney Cheshire, wrote a weekly column at his blog site until October of last year, when she stopped to go to work for the Congresswoman.

In fact, it was Cheshire who forwarded Haussamen's article, defending her boss, via email to the News Director at Albuquerque radio station KKOB, after reports had surfaced that they had spiked the vote-buying stories, broken by one of their own news anchors initially, reportedly after pressure from Cheshire herself. That News Director, in turn, forwarded Haussamen's article, sent by Cheshire, to us late last night.

We took pains to include Haussamen's criticism, even of us, quoting it at some length, in the detailed report on the allegations that we posted last night...

KKOB's now-resigned, award-winning news anchor Laura MacCallum offers a full statement, in her own words, in the wake of the station having pulled her stories on allegations of vote-buying by New Mexico's U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson's campaign at a recent GOP Delegate Nominating Convention in the state.

Though she wrote it prior to our speaking with her at length yesterday, the full statement was not posted until today. (Many of her comments from that exclusive interview, in which she replies to new explanations by the station's News Director for having pulled her stories, were included in our detailed report last night)

The statement is posted in full on the blog of reporter Dennis Domrzalski, who originally broke the remarkable news of the spiked stories and MacCallum's resignation, last Monday.

A few notable snippets from her full statement --- in which she blasts KKOB, charging "This is not journalism. It is extortion," and "Honesty and guts in journalism, print or broadcast, is becoming a thing of the past." --- are posted below...

[Story Summary: Via extensive BRAD BLOG interviews, New Mexico's former Republican Governor repeats and adds fresh details to his allegations of Republican vote-buying by Congresswoman Heather Willson, tells us that the AG and SoS offices are now investigating the charges, and says he recently confronted Wilson, in person, about the allegations and was "stunned" by her response. KKOB's News Director Pat Allen offers a new reason as to why he spiked reporter Laura MacCallum's stories on the scandal and she dismisses the argument as being without merit. We also post the scripts of radio station KKOB's yanked stories, which led to MacCallum's resignation from the station last week.]

32-year award-winning news veteran and New Mexico's ABC field producer, Laura MacCallum, quit her job as afternoon anchor at Albuquerque's 50,000-watt blowtorch KKOB-AM 770, after she read an email from her News Director, Pat Allen, which said, among other things, "if there was anything to it the bloggers would have picked this up, let alone other news agencies."

Allen was referring to MacCallum's on-air investigative reports covering allegations of a vote-buying scheme by New Mexico's U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson at a recent Republican Delegate Convention. The 1st Congressional District Congresswoman is vying for her party's nomination to run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated this year by outgoing Pete Domenici. MacCallum ran the stories about the charges on KKOB several times, in several different variations --- including several different interviews and sound bites from both the former Republican Governor of New Mexico, David Cargo, an eye-witness to the story, and a current spokesman for the state GOP, Scott Darnell.

The stories ran, five different versions in all, over a two day period before they were spiked by station management allegedly after pressure from Wilson's office. The BRAD BLOG has obtained the scripts of those original spiked reports (posted at the end of this article), though the complete audio is said to have been "dump[ed]...to make room for new stuff," according to Allen tonight.

In the email to MacCallum, sent last week by the News Director after he'd received several phone calls from Wilson campaign spokesperson, Whitney Cheshire, he informed his afternoon drive news anchor that he'd "pulled" the stories from the station's on-air news rotation. After reading the email from Allen, MacCallum told us she became livid. "I probably had flames coming out of my ears," she explained this afternoon during a long phone call. She immediately resigned in protest.

The BRAD BLOG has now spoken at length to Allen, MacCallum, and NM's former Gov. Cargo, as well as several others involved with the story and/or looking into it for further details. Suffice it to say, contrary to Allen's memo, "the bloggers" have now picked this up, and, according to MacCallum and other sources, so have several of those "other news agencies" that Allen referenced in his email.

Moreover, Cargo tells us today that the charges of felony vote-buying are now under investigation by both the Secretary of State's office as well as the state Attorney General. Further, he told us of his confrontation with Wilson about the allegations some weeks ago. Her response to the charges left the former Governor "stunned"...

Reporter Dennis Domrzalski's terrific scoop deserves to be read in full, so I won't quote much of it here.

The short version, however: New Mexico's ABC field producer and KKOB afternoon drive news reporter, Laura MacCallum, a 32-year news veteran, has quit her job after her stories on an alleged vote-buying scheme by Republican Rep. Heather Wilson at the recent delegate nominating convention in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, were scrubbed from her station's website hourly news cycle by the News Director, after alleged pressure from Rep. Wilson.

The sitting Congresswoman is angling for an upgrade, as she hopes to be the state's Republican nominee to fill the Senate seat being vacated by outgoing Republican Pete Domenici. MacCallum's report, sourced by at least three different people, including herself, said that voters showed up to the delegate convention and claimed they were being "paid $35-an-hour (for two hours)" by Wilson's senate campaign and the congressional campaign of Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White, "and that the campaigns had also paid their $30 registration fees."

I just spoke with Domrzalski, and he underscored again, as he did in his story, that "Wilson's spokeswoman flat out refused to answer the question" when asked if he asked her if the reports were true.

Such a scheme, if true, would be a fourth-degree felony, according to New Mexico law. But as remarkable as those charges are, even if having the ring of truth, given what we already know about Wilson, the response, including the memo sent from KKOB News Director Pat Allen to MacCallum, is almost as remarkable...

The ever-necessary caveat: Most problems and failures with election systems don't fully begin to reveal themselves until the night of, and, more often, the days and weeks following the elections.

That said, this from RAW STORY's compilation article of various reports of trouble so far today, coming out of Ohio...

On the other hand, for some good news --- at least for now --- Cuyahoga County (Cleveland)'s new Election Director Jane Platten reports that things were going well there so far today, in the county which has been the center of much controversy for a number of reasons, not the least of which was its recent switch from Diebold touch-screen machines to paper ballots to be scanned at the county by ES&S machines. As of noon today, Platten said things were going "exceptionally good" and that all precincts had been able to open on time. For a change.

In Dayton's Montgomery County, where the report of Diebold touch-screen machine failures above comes from, things are not going quite as well...

As we wait for the next round of thousands of disenfranchised voters to emerge from OH, TX, VT, RI, or beyond, Los Angeles County has finally finished counting its infamously disastrous "Double Bubble" ballots from the Feb. 5th Super Tuesday Primary in California.

The final numbers, in just in time to meet today's local certification deadline, are supposed to hearten us because the county Registrar's office chose to not count only some 12,000 valid, legally cast votes in the state's open Democratic Primary.

What a victory! It's kinda like celebrating the great success of the troop "surge" in Iraq where "coalition" fatalities have plummeted from pre-surge levels of 2.39 dead troops per day all the way down to 2.37 dead troops per day.

As we predicted, many of the districts counted resulted in very lopsided results. That was likely due to the horrible, unfair counting scheme the Registrar's office decided to use. The scheme disproportionately, and almost randomly, tossed out thousands of votes for some candidates, but tallied all of those for others --- even when they were all cast in the very same precinct, by the very exact same method. According to the results of this "supplemental count," as posted at the Registrar's website [PDF], it looks like our fears have come to pass in that department as well.

But there is a bit of actual good news in all of this, small comfort though it may be. Our concerns about the newly discovered uncounted provisional "Double Bubble" ballots, that we reported on Friday, were heard, even if our other concerns --- as attributed to us by name in today's Whittier Daily News coverage of the final tabulation --- were summarily dismissed by acting Registrar Dean Logan for unspecified "legal" reasons, according to that news report...

Hannity & Colmes' guest lineup tonight, there to give us the inside skinny on tomorrow's "do or die" Democratic Primaries in Ohio and Texas on "America's Election HQ"...

Yup. Rove, Coulter, Morris, and Luntz. Guess they're needed to add balance to the Democratic powerhouse that is Alan Colmes?

BRAD BLOG FLASHBACK: Long time readers may remember the guest lineup announced for H&C's 2004 Presidential Election Eve show, as we reported at the time...

We ran an email campaign back then, haranguing them to add at least something resembling balance, which they eventually did by dumping Weld and adding Terry McAuliffe. Even though the clever little liars at Fox "News" still managed to figure out how to tilt it Right anyway.

Perhaps we're missing something here?

Our friends at BuzzFlash have their top screaming headline set currently as...

...which links over to a quick report over at the Texas blog Burnt Orange Report (also good folks, as much as we know about them.)

"Ominously"?

The quick BOR article by Glenn Smith is headlined "Clinton Caucus Disruption/Vote Suppression" and appears to be at the end of a chain of increasingly panicked blog items which began with a report from Dallas Morning News, quoted as follows by Smith...

Prices for Diebold stock shares are soaring out of the 7-year basement this morning, where they have been sitting for the past several months since a coordinated insider sell-off by a dozen or so officers on the very same day last August, when the stock had been near its 52-week high at $53.04/share. Within days after the sell-off, the company renamed its humiliated Diebold Elections Division to Premier Election Solutions, and the stock has been falling, some 50% in total, ever since. Until today.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported a take-over attempt of the entire company by defense contractor conglomerate United Technologies Corp. (UTC). The initial $3 billion hostile bid to buy Diebold at $40/share is "a 66 percent premium over Diebold's Friday closing price of $24.12," according to the Times' report.

As of 2pm ET today, Diebold's share price has soared some 60% to more than $38/share.

Diebold's board had unanimously rejected a similar offer from UTC two years ago, and the company once again rebuffed a private offer in February, requesting that United Technologies "refrain from contacting any of its directors." Over the weekend, UTC went public with its offer, which has both Wall Street and Election Integrity advocates abuzz.

As The BRAD BLOG has covered in detail over the years, Diebold, the 150-year old company and second largest American manufacturer of faulty, hackable, error-prone voting systems, faces myriad financial and legal problems.

It is currently under investigation by the SEC, under investigation by the DoJ, is facing a Securities Fraud Class Action suit, was recently forced to restate earnings to admit that it had overstated its election business in 2007 by some 300% in the wake of report after report showing its voting systems to be failures, leading a number of states to decertify many of their voting machines. Last month the firm announced planned layoffs of 5% of its workforce, some 800 employees, as its share price continued to dive. As well, the company may be facing still more fraud suits and liabilities in the future in the wake of problems and failures with its voting machines found with alarming consistency in state after state.

The UTC offer seems like a difficult one for Diebold's board to justify turning down, at least to shareholders who have lost so much of their investment value in the company over the past six months, even though it has alarmed Election Integrity advocates, who are troubled to see yet another defense contractor encroach on the business of America's public electoral system...

PBS' Bill Moyers Journal takes a baby step --- a very baby step --- into the Sibel Edmonds story. Reporter Rick Karr offers a video "Web Exclusive" report (presumably meaning it won't even air on Moyers' actual show) on "Government Secrecy." He covers the cases of the Bush Administration's assault on the NY Times report, James Risen's coverage of warrantless domestic wiretapping, as well as the "retroactive classification" of Sibel Edmonds' testimony before Congress back in 2002.

While it's nice to see the basics of the Edmonds case mentioned, out loud, by a mainstream U.S. broadcast journalist, Karr still manages to offer his colleagues in the U.S. corporate mainstream media --- and even himself, for that matter --- a get out of jail free card in his report, for their inexcusable lack of coverage of the former FBI translator's startling allegations concerning the sale of nuclear secrets to the foreign black market by high-ranking U.S. officials.

"U.S. journalists have found it nearly impossible to look into her claims," Karr alleges, due to the DoJ's retroactive classification of virtually everything having to do with her case, including even a 2002 60 Minutes segment which covered her story back before they had been effectively neutered entirely.

Funny, but the UK's Sunday Times doesn't seem to have "found it impossible to look into her claims." Though that may be because they actually bothered to do so. Three times, so far, with another chapter, we're told, still to come in the weeks ahead.

Indeed, Karr seems to have found it so "impossible to look into her claims" that he was even unable to find out that her name is actually "Sih-BELL," rather than "SIH-bul." But perhaps we're just being petty and our standards for accuracy are higher than PBS'.

For links to all three UK Times stories, The BRAD BLOG exclusive in which Edmonds offered her story in full to news organizations like Moyers', and the rest of our years-long coverage featuring detailed, not-impossible-to-report articles and exclusives on the Edmonds case, please peruse the stories at https://bradblog.com/SibelEdmonds.

On Friday, USA TODAY's Richard Wolfe ran a not terrible article about the growing nationwide trend to move away from electronic voting machines to more transparent and secure paper ballot based systems. His otherwise decent article included this curious graf [emphasis added]...

So I'm just curious. Which of the myriad, scientifically demonstrated problems with the security and transparency of electronic voting are the "perceived" ones, versus the "real" ones? Or are there some other "perceived" problems which have prompted the trend?

If your own personal house has never been robbed, yet you turn on an alarm system and/or lock the doors when you leave it, is that due to a perceived concern or a real one?

I'd really love to know Wolfe's answer.

I spent most of yesterday and today on the phone with attorneys and officials trying to sort out the continuing, disastrous mess concerning the "Double Bubble" ballot fiasco from Los Angeles County's February 5th Democratic Primary.

That, despite what we see as this week's premature declaration of "Victory!" on Tuesday from our friends at the Courage Campaign, followed by their "We won!" email on Wednesday, as they celebrated after the county's acting Registrar announced his plan to count some (though by no means all) of the 50,000 or so still-uncounted ballots cast by Non-Partisan (NP) voters who had attempted to vote in the open Democratic Primary on "Super Tuesday."

During a late-night phone call from a local Election Integrity advocate last night, however, I was told that situation is even worse than previously reported or even known --- even by the county's elections officials --- to date, as another set of thousands of legal ballots may go uncounted, even under a new tabulating scheme being implemented by county officials...

Bad news and/or good news, depending on how you wish to look at it...

First this...

Followed by this reassuring(?) update to the same article, posted 57 minutes later...

Why must it always come down to Ohio?