Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

ES&S seems to be failing everywhere. Indiana officials are very concerned; a Pennsylvania county still has no machines; and West Virginia counties have no software so they can prepare for their primary. On top of that Allegheny County Pennsylvania is being sued for selecting ES&S due, in part, to the lack of accessibility of their DREs. The DoJ is sharing part of that lawsuit for threatening the county and forcing them to make a decision before they were ready....

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Yesterday, Senator Barbara Boxer delivered a letter to President George W. Bush demanding that he apologize for his role in using NIE intelligence for political purposes. Boxer's letter begins, "I am writing to request that you apologize to the American people for your role in declassifying information for political reasons and authorizing its dissemination."

Senator Boxer appeared on MSNBC Hardball to explain her reason for writing Bush. Boxer also spoke in support of Senator Feingold's censure resolution.

From the MSNBC transcript:

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

Just announced by KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is the news that a group of citizens and People For The American Way have filed suit against the Secretary of State; Dan Onorato, Allegheny County Chief Executive; James Flynn, County Manager; and senior officials at the federal Department of Justice. The citizen group includes members of the disabilities community who want to make sure the County purchases machines that are accessible to all individuals with disabilities.

KDKA reports:

These machines are sold and serviced by Elections Systems and Software, the same company that has played a major role in failures of memory cards and is a large reason why this nation is headed for a "Train Wreck" in our primary elections and, if no action is taken, in November.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

I will be on the Mike Webb radio program this evening at 9:15PM Pac to discuss "The Train Wreck". You can listen from. I will also be on the Jay Marvin show tomorrow morning at 7:05AM Pac. You can listen at. Today I am beginning a new feature for 'Daily Voting News'. The beginning of the list of articles will now begin with those articles that represent the "Train Wreck" as I described it in my article of a couple days ago. So, for instance, the newly printed and received ballots in Marion County, Indiana have a sequencing error that makes them unreadable by the optical-scan machines; and that dear readers is part of the "Train Wreck"....

That's the oath next to the signature of Ann Coulter, who, on 6/15/05 filled out her Florida Voter Registration Application Form --- as obtained Exclusively by The BRAD BLOG (posted in full at the bottom of this article) --- after purchasing her new $1.8 million house at 242 Seabreeze Ave. in Palm Beach County, Florida in March of 2005. The "Warranty Deed" (also obtained by The BRAD BLOG) for the house was signed over to Coulter on March 30th, 2005 by the previous owners, Eric Stonestrom and his wife, Lucinda Pascale Stonestrom.

In February of this year, Jose Lambiet of the Palm-Beach Post reported that Coulter, the extremist Republican columnist and author, seems to have committed Voter Fraud by registering and then voting in a Palm Beach, Florida precinct in which she does not live. She registered to the vote, for reasons which still remain unclear, at the address of her realtor Suzanne Frisbie.

Coulter has maintained, when asked about the incident during recent public appearances, that the report is a lie and that she doesn't even live in Palm Beach.

Lambiet has since characterized those denials by Coulter as "absolutely a bold-faced lie."

Various information obtained by The BRAD BLOG, however, would seem to back up Lambiet's account which shows that the liar in the matter is, in fact, Coulter.

The radical darling of the GOP speaking/fundraising circuit did, in fact, purchase a house at 242 Seabreeze Dr. in Palm Beach, Florida as reported publicly by the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser's website and confirmed by several different sources including the "Warranty Deed" signed on March 30th, 2005.

Meanwhile, Coulter's official Florida Voter Registration Application Form received from the office of the Palm Beach County Election Supervisor confirms that she specified "999 Indian Rd" as her "Legal Residence" --- despite never having lived there.

The Indian Road address is that of Coulter's Real Estate agent and her husband David.

Coulter's signature on the form is next to an "oath" affirming the information on the form is true, and acknowledging that she understood she could face a third-degree felony conviction, a $5,000 fine and/or five-years imprisonment for providing false information on the form.

"She never lived here," Lambiet reported Frisbie as confirming about the address Coulter used on her registration form. "I'm Ann's Realtor, and she used this address to forward mail when she moved from New York," said Frisbie.

The BRAD BLOG was unable to reach Frisbie for additional comment for this article since obtaining Coulter's actual Voter Registration form. We were told during a call to Frisbie's residence (where Ann Coulter does not live) that the real estate agent was on vacation until April 20th.

While Republicans have been going to great efforts since the 2004 Election to suggest there is some sort of Voter Fraud epidemic in this country (as distinct from Election Fraud via electronic machines, registration database purges, corrupt Secretaries of State in Ohio, etc.,) very few such cases of Voter Fraud are actually known or documented. Nonetheless, phony GOP-run front groups, such as the tax-exempt "American Center for Voting Rights", have been distributing propaganda around the country to suggest such an epidemic in order to force state legislation to require Photo ID at the polls. As well as to smoke-screen from the very real problem of Election Fraud which has succeeded in disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters in recent elections. Critics have charged that the type of Photo ID legislation being pushed through statehouses around the country, at the behest of the national GOP, would disproportionately disenfranchise millions of Democratic-leaning voters and --- as a two Federal courts and the majority of the U.S. Dept. of Justice's Voting Rights Act unit have recently affirmed concerning such a law in the state of Georgia --- would amount to little more than a modern-day poll tax.

White House political operative Karl Rove played along with the misleading meme of a Voter Fraud epidemic over the weekend by lauding Republican attorneys for their "work on clean elections" in 2000, 2002 and 2004. He charged that "We have...an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today," in reference to "ballot integrity" --- a code word used to suggest a problem with Voter Fraud in the country.

We certainly do have "an enormous and growing problem" with our elections, but, as John Gideon discussed in a must-read BRAD BLOG Guest Editorial on Sunday, it's not due to Voter Fraud. Nonetheless, that hasn't apparently stopped Coulter from committing same, or anti-democracy GOP operatives across the country from reportedly running Voter Registration schemes where Democratic voter registrations are changed to Republican or destroyed all together or simply never turned in to county officials. The state of California announced one such investigation into GOP Voter Registration Fraud late last week. Also, three GOP officials have been indicted so far in a "phone-jamming scandal" to hamper DNC get-out-the-vote efforts in 2002, and that investigation now seems to be reaching into the White House as reported by AP yesterday.

But back to Coulter who was recently given 30 days by the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, Arthur Anderson, to explain her reasons for committing an apparent third-degree Vote Fraud felony. If a satisfactory explanation is not given, Anderson has said the case will be referred to the state attorney for possible prosecution.

Clint Curtis, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Congress in Florida's 24th District is no stranger to the matter of Voting Fraud in the Sunshine State. As originally reported by The BRAD BLOG in December of 2004, Curtis has alleged his opponent, Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL), asked him to create vote-rigging software in 2000 when they both worked for a software firm in Oviedo, Florida while Feeney was also speaker of the Florida House.

In a statement released recently, Curtis commended Supervisor Anderson for taking action in the Coulter matter. Curtis noted the irony of the situation that "many Floridians...still recall Ms. Coulter calling our elderly voters 'hapless' and our statutory recount process 'a subterfuge for fraud, error and outright theft' during the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election."

The Palm Beach County appraiser's record shows that Coulter purchased her swanky Palm Beach crib in March of 2005 and then filled out her Florida Voter Registration Application shortly thereafter. The form is dated "6/15/05" next to the signature and is stamped as having been "RECEIVED JUN 23 2005."

It should also be noted that according to the Connecticut Voter Registration records available via Lexis/Nexis, Coulter's voter registration in that state, where she has previously lived, is still listed as "Active". The "Voting History" section of that listing, however, shows that she last voted in CT in 1996. Both the CT and FL voter registrations list her birthdate as 12/8/1961.

Here is Ann Coulter's complete Florida Voter Registration Application Form in full, along with her Palm Beach County "Voter History" record, as received from the office of Palm Beach County Election Supervisor Arthur Anderson via a public records request...

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Yesterday, The President said that he "declassified the NIE" because he wanted people "to see the truth" about intelligence used to bolster the case for war on Iraq.

The corporate media dutifully reported The President's misleading remarks without correcting his misinformation. The Bush Administration is built on lies and, yesterday, Bush added another lie.

MSNBC's Countdown correctly points out that only specific parts of the NIE were leaked to a few sympathetic reporters. The leaked information provided a defense for statements the President made that exaggerated Iraq's desire to acquire nuclear weapons. Other parts of the same NIE that was not given to reporters, show that the leaked information was false.

In fact, the President had been informed multiple times that the information leaked from the NIE to defend his statements about Iraq's nuclear ambitions were "baseless". In short, the President knew that false information was being used to discredit Joe Wilson.

Yesterday, Bush knew that he was misleading Americans by saying that he released the discredited NIE intel because he wanted people "to see the truth." The same lie is being told over and over again and the corporate media refuses to call the President on it.

In this video, Keith Olbermann, Joe Wilson and David Shuster do not hesitate to point out the twisted intelligence, misinformation and outright lies of the Bush Administration. Playing time is about 10 minutes.

Read this if you're not up to date on the story so far. More coming on Tuesday...

In the meantime, we're happy to point to Clint Curtis' recent statement lauding Palm Beach County Florida Supervisor of Elections Arthur Anderson for taking action so far in this matter. Said Curtis, noting the irony of it all, "many Floridians...still recall Ms. Coulter calling our elderly voters 'hapless' and our statutory recount process 'a subterfuge for fraud, error and outright theft' during the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election."

(And if you're not up to date on the Clint Curtis story either...where have you been? Please read this. Thank you.)

UPDATE: Complete Exclusive, including Ann Coulter's Florida Voter Registration Application --- on which she lied about her "Legal Residence" is now here...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Today we got the surprise news that EAC Commissioner Ray Martinez has resigned his position. This just two days following his appearance, in Washington DC, at a conference of voting activists from around the country. Also, another county (Wood Co., WV) joins the growing list of ES&S customers who have received less than adequate service....

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Wolf Blitzer interviewed former Ambassador Joe Wilson this afternoon during CNN's Situation Room. Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, have been victims of a Bush Administration effort to stop the American people from learning that intelligence was twisted and misused to lead the country to war on Iraq.

Bush ordered that parts of the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) be used to rebut a New York Times op-ed written by Joe Wilson. Wilson charged that the administration had had purposefully used baseless intelligence to inflate Iraq's nuclear ambitions.

Today, during a Q&A session with students, Bush said that he had released information from the NIE because he wanted people "to see the truth". In this interview, Joe Wilson sets the record straight by pointing out that the President only released part of the NIE to rebut Wilson's charge. If The President had wanted the people "to see the truth" then he would have also released other parts of the NIE which expressed serious doubts about the information Bush used to rebut Wilson's charge. In fact, by releasing more information which he knew to be faulty, George Bush just fed Americans another lie.

This video contains Wolf Blitzers' complete interview with Joe Wilson. It runs about 10 minutes. Wilson does a great job explaining some of the nuances of the case. He talks fast so you might want to watch it twice.

More on the Phone-Jamming charges against (so-far) Republican officials. The matter now seems to be reaching into the White House as reported by AP:

Read the full story for many more details, but it should be noted that the White House hired Tobin to work their North-Eastern regional campaign in 2004 even after they already knew he was under investigation for the 2002 charges. He was only asked to leave his '04 post once the reports of the '02 investigation became public knowledge.

(Hat tip to RAW STORY.)

Working on several items, so we'll defer to RAW STORY's coverage of the story.

Suffice to say, Karl Rove spoke to Republican lawyers this weekend (carried on C-SPAN) and thanked them for their work ensuring "clean elections" in 2000 and 2004.

He singled out Mark F. "Thor" Hearne by name. Hearne was the National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. who, along with RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, created the so-called non-partisan "American Center for Voting Rights" (ACVR) just three days before being called to testify before Rep. Bob Ney's (R-OH) U.S. House Administrative Committee hearing in March of 2005 on the Ohio Election. The front group, which declared tax-exempt 501(c)3 status, has still failed, to our knowledge, to disclose any information of it's funders or proof of their 501(c)3 non-profit, non-partisan status. They operate out of a PO Box in Houston, TX, though neither of their founders live in Texas.

ACVR was the only "Voting Rights" group called by Ney to testify at the hearings, and identified himself only as a "longtime advocate of voter rights" in his testimony. He failed to mention his connections to Bush/Cheney '04 Inc.

Hearne and ACVR have done little more since they opened shop beyond creating propaganda reports to suggest that their is an epidemic of Democratic voter fraud in the country to encourage state legislatures around the country to implement Democratic voter disenfranchising "Photo ID requirements" at the polls. Their charges of a voter fraud epidemic has been roundly disproven in various court cases around the country. (Though it does appear that at least one voter, Ann Coulter, seems to have engaged in voter fraud lately.)

The "non-partisan" Dyke went on to work for the White House to flak for John Roberts during his Supreme Court nomination, and now works out Dick Cheney's office.

Ney, who pushed the so-called "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA) through Congress in 2002 --- the bill which urges all States and Counties in the country to impliment hackable electronic voting machines by 2006 --- recently stepped down from his chairmanship of the House Admin Committee after being named in the on-going Jack Abramoff investigations. His former chief of staff, David DiStefano is Diebold's main lobbyist in congress, as BRAD BLOG reported in January, and Diebold has made thousands of dollars in so-far unexplained payments to Abramoff's old firm, Greeburg Traurig.

See RAW's story for Rove's comments about Hearne and the other "non-partisan" GOP attorneys over the weekend.

For more information on the "non-partisan" tax-exempt ACVR scam and the snakeoil salesmen who invented it, Bush/Cheney '04 National General Counsel Mark F. "Thor" Hearne and RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, please see BRAD BLOG's full Special Coverage of the "American Center for Voting Rights" at https://BradBlog.com/ACVR.

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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On April 7th, Wired News first reported on a class action lawsuit filed against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). AT&T is accused of allowing the NSA to monitor phone and internet communications without a warrant.

An AT&T whistleblower, Mark Klein, has come forward with testimony and documentation. Klein provides specific details about how the spying program intercepted AT&T customer communications. The NSA installed "secret rooms" in AT&T switching centers throughout the country. Live communications signals are split off into the secret room. Powerful data-mining computers installed in the room can sift through the millions of live signals.

CNN put together this short video report including comments by an EFF attorney.

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Today after giving another Iraq/War-on-Terror PR speech at Johns Hopkins International Studies School, President Bush took questions from students in the audience. When compared with recent Q&A sessions, the President appeared to be relaxed to the point of laughing off the some of the tougher questions.

Bush may have offered a little bit more information about his role in using the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) for political retribution. He was asked how future intelligence employees could trust the Executive Office in light of the Plame Wilson case. Bush responded that he had declassified the NIE "for a reason" but refused to say much more.

This video has about 8 minutes of clips from The President's Q&A session.

By John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Normally this space is taken with my ideas of what are the "Top 5" voting news stories for the week. Today I am going to use this space to talk about what I see as the beginning of a disaster in the making with our elections. This isn't the election fraud that some point to when they talk about the vendors and some elections officials. It's not about recounts or audits. This is a real, get your hands around it, happening problem that will disrupt our election process if we do not do something about it now. While we have been involved in all of our issues about Direct Recording Electronic (DRE or "touch-screen") voting machines or paper ballots the electronic voting machine vendors have been wreaking complete havoc across the country.

So far this year two states have conducted primary elections. In Texas there is at least one candidate who has stepped forward and has challenged the election because of anomalies in vote counts and known voting machine failures. One county's machines counted some votes up to 6 times which resulted in approximately 100,000 more votes being counted than were cast. Though the vendor, Hart Intercivic, initially blamed the problem on human error, they finally had to admit that it was a programming error and not poll workers or voters who had erred. In Illinois some county officials are threatening to withhold final payment of funds on contracts with Sequoia Voting Systems because of failures with their machines that ended with results in the primary not being known for over a week after the voters went to the polls. In both states the involved vendors were very successful in the media with deflecting the blame from their machines to "human errors" or "glitches". However, when you listen to people who were there and who saw and worked through the problems you get a very different picture...

We haven't been able to cover it at all until now with so much going on, but the latest ad by VelvetRevolution.us which ran a couple of weeks ago in the Op/Ed section of WaPo hit such a chord we were able to raise the money to run a similar version of the ad in last week's NY Times.

(DISCLOSURE: The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder of VR)

The ad, which focuses on Bush's recent drumbeating and chest thumping for a War on Iran in light of his plummeting poll ratings (haven't we seen this bad movie before?), brought still more interesting reaction in it's second incarnation. More on that in a second.

We're kind of tired, at VR, of being out in front of so many of these issues (Election Reform, Media Reform, Downing Street Memos, getting Out of Iraq, Accountability for Bush/Cheney) before the media and the politicians figure it out. But now it seems that's where we are again. For an example, see Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article just out, which reports the Bush Administration "has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack."

As if that's not disturbing enough, Hersh's article, as well as another report today from WaPo points out such an air attack is being planned to include the use of tactical nuclear weapons! Hello?!

Rather than waiting until after it's a done deal, as with Iraq, the time to push back is now. Especially since Fox "News", as David Edwards reported this morning, is already back in their reliable embedded position for the Bush Administration and this morning were all too happy to smear Hersch on the air.

Most of the reaction to VR's ads on Iran have been extremely supportive. And then there was this postcard we received late last week...

FRONT:

BACK:

Oh, well. Can't please 'em all. (And we're still trying to figure out that "ADL ISLAMIC" comment which seems a tad oxymoronic to us, but what do we know about Christianity?)

If you'd like to piss off other good "Christians" like our big fan above, please donate generously to VR so we can continuing spreading the love --- and getting the word out to the public about what's really going on here! --- through more such campaigns in the future.