That's from Miriam Raftery's RAW STORY coverage of the Saturday Night events in San Diego at the DemocracyFest. But I was there, and that's what Dean said --- echoing, in part, the DNC Voting Rights Institute statement on the Busby/Bilbray election fiasco issued the day before --- to the appreciative acclaim of thousands at the open air theater concert/event Saturday night. Audience members spotted with "No Sleepovers" signs were picked up on the big video screens next to the stage.

I was just happy the night had cooled and, for me anyway, things had finally calmed down a bit after a non-stop day of speechifying, meeting, educating, rabble-rousing and other exhilirations as the sunshine at San Diego State University must have pushed the mercury towards the 100 mark.

Raftery's got a photo of yours truly at our press conference (more photos of all below) in her article, along with other details that I'm relieved she covered, because I'm still too exhausted and running behind (checking the clock, it's 4:04am right now) and playing catch up to hit everything by myself. I'm hoping we'll be able to get some of the local TV News coverage of the press conference from the local stations posted here, but I've gotta hit the road (I hope!) tomorrow and then do Mike Malloy's show from lord only knows where...I need a break. I'm gonna get one. If it kills me.

Anyway, let's play catch-up a bit. Some notes on the weekend --- that I wasn't able to log on and cover here for BRAD BLOG while I was in the very middle of it all --- including comments from Sen. Debra Bowen, Francine Busby, and other photos and personal thoughts on the last 24 to 72...

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

According to sources in the Cynthia McKinney camp, Georgia voters attempting to vote for her in today's Democratic Primary are seeing their votes flipped to her opponent, Hank Johnson.

McKinney has a well-deserved reputation for speaking truth to power, asking tough questions, and not backing down (see this video, or read this transcript).

Diebold, on the other hand, has a history of touch-screen machines flipping votes from one candidate to another --- commonly called "vote-switching" or "vote-flipping" --- and otherwise failing altogether.

An Exclusive Interview for The BRAD BLOG as Guest Blogged by Joy and Tom Williams...

"The Republican Party, the Republican National Committee, has been using old-fashioned, Jim Crow, apartheid-type maneuvers to steal the last two national elections."
-- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., (bio) , wrote the article: "Was the 2004 Election Stolen" where he examined the election fraud in Ohio that took place during the last Presidential Election. He also has written a book "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush & His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking our Democracy". Mr. Kennedy, along with Mike Papantonio have filed a "qui tam" lawsuit against some of the voting machines companies, in an effort to save our Democracy.

I've long had a deep respect for Robert F. Kennedy for his dedicated work as an environmental advocate. Tom and I enjoyed interviewing him and were moved by his passion and dedication to our country and our Democracy. We spoke to him via phone at his office at Pace University's Environmental Litigation Clinic in White Plains, New York, which he founded, about the election of 2004. This was an experience to remember...

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Steve Viele has sent me a nice email containing his account of Saturday morning at DemocracyFest and a few pics of Brad there. Way cool.

The following is from Steve...

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

It appears that the ballot format was changed in Tennessee in order to accommodate the voting system vendors. In changing the format officials may now be violating state law. / In a next step, after winning against the state of Georgia and their Voter ID law, the ACLU has now announced they are taking action in Missouri / The NEA, one of the nation's largest unions, has come out in support of a voter verified paper ballot and audits ...

(NOTE: RAW STORY is now running an article on Howard Dean's comments at DemFest and our Press Conference there, both on Saturday.)

Have finally made it out of San Diego, back to Los Angeles, where hopefully, I'll be leaving again soon to take whatever form of occassionally working, occassionally vacating vacation that I am able to pull off over the next month while all of these things are going on....

It's been a whirlwind past 48 hours or so, and I've hardly been able to catch my breath, much less log onto the net at all for the most part since 7am on Saturday. So I've got a lot of catchup to do. More notably, I've got a lot to catch you up on from news of a late and last-minute press conference on the latest Busby/Bilbray CA50 stuff that we held Saturday evening at DemocracyFest just prior to the big open air concert event (featuring Al Franken, Howard Dean, Marc Maron, Paul Hackett, Maxine Waters and many others) to various bits and pieces that I hope to share from meetings and conversations and such from the last several days of DemFest and beyond.

I'll share some news and comments from Sen. Debra Bowen (with whom I sat on a panel discussion Saturday in the big room at DemFest) and Francine Busby (with whom I was able to have a number of private conversations) and Howard Dean who spoke about the Busby/Bilbray CA50 voting machine "sleepovers" during that big Saturday night event. And probably more.

Need some time to get caught up over the next few hours, and hope to have comments here soon.

The hastily compiled media advisory, sent out in the hectic and heated hours before Saturday's Press Conference is below. Portions of it were, I'm told, carried by San Diego's Channel 9 and 10 --- one of them the local ABC affiliate --- including (I think) some one-on-one comments from yours truly. The local Air America Affiliate, KLSD 1360am also played portions of the conference on Sunday morning. Anyway...pardon my exhaustion, and my inability to communicate much at all until now, and stand by for more when I can get caught up a bit...somehow...

Wherein we see actual video footage of the elusive and legendary Freeway Blogger at work!

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Israel attacks. Lebanon burns (left).

Hezbollah attacks. Haifa burns (right).

On and on it goes.

If this goes on for long enough, people might begin to ask who stands to benefit from endless war.

Meanwhile...

A very disturbing report today from The Scotsman has the Lebanese Information Minister accusing Israel of "using internationally prohibited weapons against civilians".

Is this something the Lebanese Information Minister would say even if it weren't true?

Is this something Israel would do?

How can we ever know the truth about such claims?

Meanwhile...

"We feel the entire world has left us alone to be slaughtered," said Ali al-Amin ...

To me, stuff like this transcends politics. It's either enough to knock you down and make you weep in fury, regardless of the nationality of the source, or else you need a heart transplant. IMVHO.

It's too bad we don't get much coverage like this in the USA. But oh well. No big surprise there. It's not the first time our news media have let us down, and it won't be the last.

My thoughts on the matter run like this:

May God protect the peaceful people of the Middle East, peaceful people of all countries. And may He smite the warmongers with a terrible swift sword.

Can I get an "amen"?

Thank you. Now please consider this an open thread.

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

The Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States is now looking into the purchase of Sequoia by a Venezuelan owned company. / A grand-jury in Clarke Co., Georgia "expressed concern about "the overall security of the voting machines, the handling of the voting results, and the verification process used to detect potential voting fraud." In particular, the presentment said it's possible to tamper with the Diebold voting machines used across Georgia, and criticized the Clarke County Board of Elections employees for losing a CD copy of voting results from the 2004 election." ...

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

ES&S has still not solved their problem with a lack of ability to deliver purchased voting equipment to the counties who have spent their money on those machines. Boone Co. Missouri's machines are a month past due and Williamson Co. Tennessee went into today's start of early voting without promised PEBs. ...

Filed by Brad Friedman from San Diego...

In a harshly worded statement, the DNC's Voting Rights Institute has issued a statement condemning the administration of the recent U.S. House race between Democrat Francine Busby and Republican Brian Bilbray, joining a growing national outcry in calling for "a swift and verifiable 'manual count' of all 150,000 ballots cast in California's 50th District's 'bellwether' June 6th special election."

"This is no longer about whether or not Busby or Bilbray won the election on June 6th," the just-issued statement reads. "This is about the importance of verifying the facts related to election and voting machine irregularities in this race and the need to ensure an accurate count of all votes cast in this election so that the electorate may have confidence in the announced results in future elections."

The long-awaited announcement of a position on the matter by the DNC comes at the end of more than a month of outrage from both national and state election integrity organizations, many of whom have declared "No Confidence" in the reported results of the race held to replace jailed Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham. Bilbray declared himself the winner on election night, and was sworn into office several days later, before all votes had been counted, and nearly three weeks prior to the election being certified by either state or county officials.

Massive security breaches were reported the day after the election, in regard to the deployment of the county's Diebold optical-scan and touch-screen voting machines as directed by San Diego County Registrar of Voters, Mikel Haas. The progammed, election-ready voting machines, poll workers have informed The BRAD BLOG, were stored unsecurely in home garages and cars, which Haas has admitted to us would "not be considered secure" in an earlier interview. Due to the presumed-contamination of the extremely hackable voting systems used in the race --- as allowed via the lengthy, unsupervised "sleepovers" in the days and weeks prior to the election --- nobody, even the Registrar's office, has been able to prove the accuracy of the results as announced by Haas.

CNN's Lou Dobbs, CourtTV's Catherine Crier, Tribune Media's Robert Koehler and the far-right conservative Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, Bilbray supporter and San Diego radio personality Rodger Hedgecock have been amongst the mainstream media figures to report on the debacle, decrying the security breaches in the election.

Hedgecock recently excoriated the way in which the electronic voting machines were used in the election, exclaiming on-air: "We now have allowed a system of counting our votes to be presented to us as a system that does it accurately, when it has manifestly been proven that it can be monkeyed with…and the results tampered!"

Today's statement, posted by Greg Moore, Director of the DNC's Voting Rights Institute --- citing "election irregularities" and several points of "new and disturbing information" concerning the mis-administration of the election --- was issued this morning as DNC Chairman Howard Dean heads down to speak at DemocracyFest!, a grassroots activist gathering being held this weekend in San Diego.

'Very Deep Concerns' About Security and the Administration of the Election...

"Very deep concerns" are enumerated in the announcement, describing several of the problems found so far in the special election on which The BRAD BLOG has been reporting almost exclusively since June 6th, when we first revealed that the programmed, election-ready Diebold optical-scan and touch-screen voting systems used in the race were inappropriately sent home with poll workers before the election. The security breaches that occurred during those so-called "sleepovers" were in violation of new state and federal rules, laws and provisions issued in the last few months after recent discoveries confirmed dozens of extreme security flaws in the Diebold voting systems, confirming them to be exceptionally vulnerable to tampering.

Upon violation of the new federal and California state emergency security mitigation requirements, as issued in February and March of this year, the voting machines were effectively and immediately decertified and illegal for use in the election, according to provisions spelled out by both authorities.

The vulnerabilities in the particular Diebold systems used in the election, as referenced in the DNC statement, include: on the touch-screen systems, the ability to completely replace the election and operating system software, as well as the computer firmware in less than two minutes time with no password required or authentication by the system; on the optical-scan systems, the ability to hack the memory cards used to store vote tabulation which may result in a complete reversal of election results, as demonstrated by hackers during a mock-election test held at the end of last year in Leon County, Florida. Such a hack on the optical-scan systems could be accomplished without a trace being left behind, save for a manual count of the paper ballots used in the race.

Indeed, in the recent Iowa primary elections, held on the same day as the California CA-50 election, as many as nine Republican races had their results reversed after a manual hand count of optically-scanned ballots revealed that the original machine count had declared the actual winners to have been losers in their races. Only a hand count would have revealed the erroneous totals.

San Diego County Registrar Haas has stymied the effort by citizen election integrity advocates in San Diego to have the ballots in the Busby/Bilbray race counted by hand.

The election was the first federal race to have been run in the country since the new security mitigation requirements were mandated by the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), the body tasked the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission as the federal voting machine certification body.

'A Single Person Can Reverse the Results of An Election'

Further underscoring the dangers of allowing unsupervised physical access to the systems is a landmark report released just weeks ago by NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, detailing more than 120 security threats to e-voting systems. That study, widely reported by mainstream media outlets, led to a recent Washington Post article headlined "Single Person Could Swing an Election." The Brennan Center study picked up, in turn, on another recent study by computer scientist Harri Hursti and Security Innovation in March, revealing vulnerabilities that have been described by several experts as a "major national security risk" and "the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system." Those discoveries occurred during another landmark analysis of Diebold systems conducted by BlackBoxVoting.org in Emery County, Utah just two months prior to the election.

After the results of that examination were released, one of the leading computer scientists on the California Secretary of State's own voting systems technology advisory board, David Jefferson of Livermore National Laboratories, explained during an interview on the PBS News Hour : "You can affect multiple machines from a single attack. That's what makes it so dangerous." Jefferson was part of the team who advised the CA SoS on the new security mitigation requirements, which were then ignored by Registrar Haas' voting machine "sleepovers".

Demands for a Manual Hand Count Stymied by Registrar

Dozens of election integrity organizations, including California Election Protection Network, Progressive Democrats of America, Election Defense Alliance, the Commonweal Institute, VelvetRevolution.us and many others, along with several candidates and journalists have previously called for a hand count of the paper ballots and "paper trails" in the Busby/Bilbray race to ensure accuracy and accountability in the election.

A request to hand count the ballots was filed by CA-50 voter Barbara Gail Jacobson, but was eventually stonewalled by Haas, who refused to commit to the production of chain of custody documents for ballots and voting machines. Haas also set what appeared to be wholly arbitrary charges for the requested hand count, quoting three different estimates to three different inquiries. His final estimate, as given to the hand-count requester, was for as much as $150,000 to count the election. The price of nearly $1 per vote is in contrast to neighboring Orange County, CA who recently charged just .14 cents per vote to hand count an election. Haas has refused to offer any accounting or explanation for the exorbitant and prohibitive pricing.

A public record request from Jacobson for the results of the state mandated 1% manual audit of ballots has also not been supplied. As of this date, we are unaware of anyone having seen the results of that mandated audit.

The Fight for Accountability Continues...

As citizens organizing to fight for accountability in the race are collecting donations towards the effort at VelvetRevolution.us, they are weighing the legal options in consideration of the next step which will certainly be expensive.

After weeks of frustration, waiting for national organizations such as the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) to weigh in on the matter, the DNC's announcement will likely bring encouragement to the election integrity advocates (including The BRAD BLOG. The DCCC, we have learned from several sources, had advised Busby to stay away from discussion of electronic voting machine issues prior to the election, and has still failed to comment publicly on the matter.

This morning's statement by Greg Moore, Director of the DNC's Voting Rights Institute, is posted at the National Democratic Party website, and also posted below in full...

Filed by Brad Friedman in San Diego...

As I standby in a hotel room in San Diego, near the DemcoracyFest! venue, to hopefully post some big breaking news momentarily, Al Franken is broadcasting his show from the site.

In a discussion moments ago with reporter Ruben Navarette, the previously quiet crowd gathered at the live broadcast broke into boos and disapproving shouts when the interview, led by Franken, implied that "Busby had lost" the recent special U.S. House Election in California's 50th district due to a "gaffe" made prior to the election.

Audience members erupted in applause when it was mentioned that "some believe the election was not run cleanly." Franken and his guest regarded the election as legitimate, which led to boos and protests from the crowd who became unruly during the discussion, rejecting the announced results that "Bilbray won the election."

Navarette was also booed when he implied that George W. Bush "beat" Al Gore in 2000. Event organizers had encouraged Franken to invite me to speak during today's live broadcast, taking place smack dab in the middle of the country's largest election controversy prior to the November general election right here in San Diego. Franken, instead chose to have Navarette to discuss Election Integrity in Mexico and elsewhere, along with a rep from Common Cause New Mexico to discuss other election issues.

UPDATE: As Franken was going off the air, the DNC issued a statement calling for a manual count in the Busby/Bilbray race due to the security breaches via voting machine "sleepovers" and other "election irregularities". That BREAKING STORY IS HERE...

CORRECTION: Franken's guest during the segment described above was apparently Ruben Navarette of the Washington Post/San Diego Tribune, as opposed to a guest from Common Cause New Mexico as we had originally reported. The guest from Common Cause was on the show after Navarette.

UPDATE AND IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION 7/15/06 12:50am PT: ...

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Elsewhere at The BRAD BLOG we've had a very interesting discussion. Its subject matter has been all over the place (as things often are here) but in essence the discussion revolves around the traditional BRAD BLOG approach to comments (where everything is considered more or less on-topic, more or less all the time) and the question of whether this approach is still suitable for a blog which has become more and more --- some would say "entirely" --- dedicated to a single issue. It's a serious question, and at this point it seems there's no easy answer.

In the (hopefully-not-too-distant) future, The BRAD BLOG hopes to evolve into a multi-page blog, where our material can be arranged in a meaningful way (election-related news on the front page and everything else someplace else, for instance, maybe, we'll see...) but at the moment we are stuck with what we have. One page. Chronological order. All kinds of stuff. What to do?

As you know by now, Brad has hit the road for his trip to DemocracyFest, and following the traditional BRAD BLOG approach to road trips, he's left the keys to the blog with his lowly and nearly frozen friend...

... who has been thinking about the question alluded to above, and scratching his head so hard it started to bleed. But then he had a really wild idea: a totally original thought that has surely never occurred to anyone else in the entire history of blogging:

What if we had an OPEN THREAD? What if we had a place where it was decidedly OK to talk about non-election-related topics? That might even give us a chance to stay on-topic on the election-related threads. It's a truly novel idea, is it not?

It's lucky I thought of it before I bled to death! But then again I had some help.

Hat tip to Prup (aka Jim Benton), who broke a few eggs but might have started an omelette.

Heading to DemocracyFest! in San Diego! Was supposed to have left hours ago, but as you might guess, lots and lots going on. Which I hope I'll be able to share soon. Even from the road. Nothing like a three hour midnight drive, I guess...

I'll be speaking at the Fest on the Election Integrity panel, Day 2, Saturday, July 15 at 9:30am in the big room (800 seats) along with Debra Bowen, Alan Dechert of Open Voting Consortium and Rob Cohen, co-director, co-producer of the VoterGate documentary. I think I'm also on a panel of bloggers on Sunday and will otherwise be around down there throughout the weekend to say hello to my good friends Howard Dean, Francine Busby, Al Franken (who will be broadcasting live from there, but not speaking with me it seems) along with many others who also can't wait to see me! Seriously, tons of great people will be there. Check out the schedule and folks coming.

If you would like to say hello to me, and are anywhere near, please come on down! Looks like tons of great stuff planned out there for the next three days and nights!

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

Tennessee law says "no voter who is voting without assistance may remain in a voting machine booth or occupy a voting compartment for more than five (5) minutes if other voters are waiting or more than ten (10) minutes in any event." Voters with disabilities now get to vote (supposedly) without assistance. The Tennessee ballot will be very long this year. 5 min.? 10 min.? / Utah continues to brag about how their recounts are proving their DREs are accurate. Of course the recount only compares the machines results against the machines results. / Voters in Georgia have filed a lawsuit to stop unverifiable voting / A federal "qui tam" lawsuit has been filed by RFK Jr. and others / "The designers of video games have built far more sophisticated security into their systems than have the manufacturers of voting machines," said Lowell Finley, co-director of Voter Action...