Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is doing some good digging into the Milwaukee connection to the phony "voter fraud" claims used to help push U.S. Attorneys out of their job in the Bush Administration's political purge/disassembly of the now-ironically named Department of Justice.

As well, a recent, and unusual, overturned case in Wisconsin's Seventh Court of Appeals is similarly adding fresh fuel to the insidious GOP "voter fraud" scam at the heart of the outrageous abuse of power by the current Executive Branch. And today, Senators on the hill are asking new questions about it to Alberto Gonzales.

We've covered various elements of the invidious and baseless GOP "voter fraud" scheme in New Mexico (see here, here, here and here, for just a few examples) and touched on Washington State as well. But Bice jumps in with new details on the same scam in Milwaukee, which has now led to an official Congressional letter of inquiry on the matter sent today to Gonzales from Senators Leahy, Schumer, Kohl, Feingold, Feinstein, and Whitehouse.

As Bice reported yesterday...

Read on for more and see the letter from Leahy for more details on the heels of a surprise Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision that issued an order immediately overturning a case brought by Biskupic against Georgia Thompson, an aide to Wisconsin's Democratic governor, Jim Doyle. Just in time for the '06 election we might add. (It didn't help; Doyle won anyway.)

The basis for the unusual appellate court decision was that the evidence used to convict Thompson on charges related to voting irregularities was virtually non-existent --- leading the senators to question what sort of pressure was brought on Biskupic to bring the charges in the first place.

This is your government. On steroids. In the form of the Bush Administration Gone Wild. And it's got to not only be stopped, it needs to be: Pushed. Back. Down.

If serious accountability is not brought (and we mean more than simply pushing out a pawn like Gonzales) the bar will have been forever lowered as far as what sort of outrageous, un-American Executive Branch overreach is tolerable in this country.

I hope to hell that somewhere in the bowels of Congress someone is preparing Articles of Impeachment.

(Hat-tip to BRAD BLOG Commenter "Dredd" for the Leahy letter.)

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Yesterday the Maryland legislature voted unanimously to ban the use of paperless voting machines by 2010. The legislation requires an optically scannable paper ballot marked by hand or with the help of a ballot marking device. This news leaves one questioning the demise of MD's State Board of Elections head Linda Lamone who has sworn that the state would go to paper “over my dead body.”

“Newer isn't always better. The Harrison County [Mississippi] Board of Supervisors has decided the new touch screen voting system isn't worth the hassle, the expense, or the nightmare it would create in a contested election. The board voted Monday to revert back to scanning machines on the recommendation of Circuit Clerk Gayle Parker. There are several reasons why Parker is no fan of the touch screen system. She says she'd rather stick to what works well than sit on the cutting edge of technology under a flawed system.” Among those reasons are that the Diebold TSx DREs are not “user friendly” and the system is “a headache.”

Those, and the other notable voting news stories, all linked below...

Following up Arlen Parsa's BRAD BLOG article from yesterday detailing how the size of Bush's troop surge continues to balloon --- in both troop and budget size --- above and beyond what American's were told originally, today Rep. Ike Skelton (D-MO), the House Armed Service Committee chairman, sends a letter to DefSec Gates asking "Where does this end?" on the heels of yesterday's news that yet another 17,000 troops will be added to the "surged" forces.

RAW STORY has the full letter...

CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen responds to the Santa Cruz Sentinel's silly anti-democracy editorial last week with an op/ed 01of her own that ran in the paper on Sunday.

Please note that the Sentinel was previously owned by former CA SoS McPherson, the one who approved all of these un-secure, un-transparent electronic voting systems for our state in the first place.

It's good to know that Bowen is standing up for the voters, despite the crush of criticism she's received from the anti-voter Elections Officials in CA

Here's how she begins her piece in response:

...And here's how she ends it:

Kudos to Bowen! Again!

Please note that in the same Sunday Sentinel our own occasional BRAD BLOG Guest Blogger, Emily Levy of VelvetRevolution.us, also has an excellent op/ed in response to their original, ridiculous editorial. Kudos to Emily as well!

Speaking out matters!

And on that note, I'll remind you that if you haven't already, please contact PFAW@PFAW.org NOW! See this article for why it's imperative that you do immediately!

I'm sorry to have to keep banging this drum. I truly am. But it must be done, as People for the American Way (PFAW) continues to not only mislead the public about the Holt Election Reform Bill (HR811) and dangerous, disenfranchising DRE touch-screen voting technology, but they are now apparently also misleading about my position on the issue, by name.

I sent the following via email to PFAW's lead Election Policy attorney, David Becker, today along with CC's to Executive Director Ralph Neas, and a number of other Election Integrity organizations.

I would urge you to read the letter below, and contact PFAW with your own concerns and demand that they immediately stop misleading members of Congress and the public alike about the most important issue of our day.

PFAW's support of the Holt bill is currently the lynchpin, for Congress and a number of powerful organizations, concerning whether or not it will be passed as is, or whether much-needed amendments --- most notably, one that immediately bans the use of dangerous, disenfranchising, unverifiable DRE voting systems, with or without a so-called useless "paper trail" --- will move forward in Congress.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

In his article, “Electric Boogaloo”, Art Levine begins:

That, and today's other notable voting news stories, all linked below...

Guest Blogged by Arlen Parsa

When George W. Bush announced he would execute a "troop surge" to send more American soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan in January 2007, it was billed as an increase of slightly over 20,000 soldiers that would cost less than six billion dollars.

"America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad," Bush announced in a prime-time televised address. "This will require increasing American force levels. So I've committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq."

The "surge," recognized as an escalation by many, was immediately controversial for several reasons --- not the least of which was a concern that the increase of 20,000 American soldiers might turn into a much larger US presence in Iraq, and a much more expensive one, than promised.

Three months after Bush's announcement, those fears have come to fruition.

Let's take a look at the numbers, in both troops and dollars...

Guest Blogged by DES...

Major movement this past week on the Election Integrity front --- Hackin' Harri Hursti traveled all the way from Finland to speak directly to a "Blue Ribbon" commission on hackable electronic voting machines in Riverside County, California. The testimony from Hacking Democracy's hacker of Diebold optical-scan and touch-screen systems, and his subsequent interview with Brad declaring touch-screen systems a no-go and op-scan systems the most secure and transparent, sent Election Integrity advocates and Holt Bill supporter alike scrambling for new cover...

Diebold Whistleblower Stephen Heller traveled all the way across the San Fernando Valley to tell you (and Brad) firsthand what it's like to be targeted for prosecution by a huge corporation with deep pockets, after you've caught them with their grubby, scheming hands in the election cookie jar...

And The BRAD BLOG steps out in front to exhort the nation's biggest Democratic advocacy groups to grasp the imperative of sending democracy-damaging DRE touch-screen voting machine systems to the toxic waste bin now, before HR811 locks them in permanently.

Read on for why we must demand a paper ballot that is actually tabulated for every vote cast in America. It's seems too common-sensical, I know --- but such is the Bizarro world we live in... Head over to PDA's petition if you haven't already, and add your voice to this fight for truly verifiable elections!

Oh, and don't miss the hilariously misguided (and increasingly incoherent) partisan stylings of Corporate Media Wingnuttery, this week's episodes courtesy of Hume (with a slimy nod to BRAD BLOG) and O'Reilly (with a slimy attack both a 29-year vet as well as Geraldo)...It's better than Saturday Night Live!

That and so much more of the under-reported stories developing hard last week, under the radar of the corporate mainstream media, that will affect you and yours for decades to come. Read on to catch up on what you may have missed --- there will be a test!...

Columnist Thomas Elias gets it right again. Today, he begins this way...

He then reports again on the Jeff "1000 to 1" Stone's apparently-aborted "Riverside Hack Challenge," the dangers of voting machine "sleepovers," former CA SoS McPherson's backing out of an invitation to Harri Hursti to hack Diebold systems in the state last year, and, most importantly, CA's current SoS Debra Bowen's important plan to finally properly test all voting systems used in elections.

If we didn't know better --- and that nothing useful to the MSM is ever reported by those crazy, unreliable, "left-wing bloggers" --- we might have even thought that Elias is a regular BRAD BLOG reader or sumpin'

He concludes his column thusly:

Bingo. The full recommended column is here...

If you'd like to send a thanks for Elias's consistent good work on this issue, he can be reached via email here...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

A few years ago the government of Ireland purchased Liberty voting machines, the same machines that are being marketed, unsuccessfully so far, in New York and other eastern states. After receiving the machines from the vendor Irish computer scientists found that http://www.belfasttelegr...ics/article2430307.ece\">the machines were not secure. Unlike in the US where we continue to use DREs that are insecure, the Irish government put the machines into warehouses. So far the Irish tax-payer has spent 51 million euros for this scheme. Some local jurisdictions have purchased leases of up to 25 years for storage of machines and now the government wants to bring all of the machines in the country together into an unused aerodrome for storage. This means buying out leases and no one knows yet how much all of this is going to cost.

That voting news story, and other notable ones today, all linked below...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Voters of the United States have certain rights as American citizens. Among those rights is the right to vote for people who represent us in the local, state or federal government and to have our vote counted as we cast it. We also have the right to have our vote cast in secret. Presently our rights are in danger due to HAVA and its promoting the use of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines which are not accurate and may not maintain the secrecy of our vote. HR-811 does nothing to safeguard our rights, in fact it helps to remove those rights by allowing the further use of DRE voting machines. Some in the Election Integrity community speak about compromises that would allow the continued use of DREs but with some restrictions. Any compromise of a right is a violation of that right. (With a tip of the hat to Paul Lehto)...

Florida's new Republican Gov. Charlie Crist continues to get far in front of Congressional Democrats concerning issues of Election Reform. Previously, he has called for the Sunshine State to replace all DRE touch-screen voting systems with paper-based optical scan systems (and touch-screen ballot marking devices for the disabled) and today, he succeeded in restoring voting rights for former felons to all but the most violent criminals after they've served their time.

While Democrats in Congress, and their public-advocacy group supporters such as People for the American Way (PFAW), MoveOn, Common Cause, and VoteTrustUSA, continue to dally around the edges of reform vis-a-vis Rep. Rush Holt's Election Reform Bill (HR811) in the House and a forthcoming companion bill from Dianne Feinstein in the Senate, shamefully, it's the Republican Florida Governor --- of all people --- who is proving to be the true Progressive in the fight for real reform.

There's plenty of blame to go around, of course. The GOP Legislature in Florida is hanging on to their own share of shame in fighting Crist's bi-partisan proposals to replace disenfranchising, democracy-stealing DREs. In Maryland, it's the Democrats in the Senate who are killing Election Reform after House Dems had approved it (as tepid as that reform would be in only requiring useless, panacea "paper trails" for the state's paperless Diebold touch-screen systems. LATE UPDATE 3/6/07 5:07pm PT: Stunning turnaround suddenly in MD's Senate, support for a paper ballot bill! Breaking details here...)

New Democratic Secretaries of State Debra Bowen in CA and Jennifer Brunner in OH are meeting their voter mandates and doing their respective best to correct dysfunctional, unverifiable, easily gameable voting systems, but they are also facing challenges from both Republicans and local Elections Officials alike who are fighting to put their own self-interests over those of the voters. As usual.

In the meantime, the currently-flawed federal bills in the U.S. House and Senate are on the verge of getting worse, not better, through the drafting, mark-up, and amendment process, as legislators bend to the demands of henhouse-guarding Elections Officials along with the uncritical support for "Election Reform, any Election Reform, whether it'll bring true Reform or not" by powerful groups such as MoveOn, VoteTrustUSA, Common Cause, and others.

By way of example, MoveOn sent out an email to members yesterday calling for unflinching support of the Holt bill, despite knowing it to be flawed and VoteTrustUSA yesterday sent out an "All-811-All The-Time" newsletter yesterday to members without a single article, from among the mountains available, critical of the bill. That, despite recent testimony to Congress by their own policy director, Warren Stewart, asserting that "the direct electronic recording of votes to computer memory is inimical to democracy." Both the Holt and Feinstein bills currently drafted would allow for exactly such systems, and in fact, institutionalize the practice for years to come.

Both MoveOn and VoteTrustUSA declined to respond to our queries seeking explanation about their mailings yesterday.

So what's going on here?

Legislation that would have been smashing in 2005, but has since been shown to be desperately out of date in 2007 given the mountains of new evidence which revealed itself during the 2006 Election Cycle and beyond, is mired under the weight of bureaucratic deal-making and go-along-to-get-along public advocacy. All of which is by-and-large enabling the Democrats who seem to be fiddling as democracy burns.

It's all made worse, for the moment, by the largest and most influential of the public-advocacy groups, PFAW, who continues to dominate the debate on many levels. The group, which The BRAD BLOG has come to learn wields great power and proxy throughout a large swath of the civil rights community, is not only currently against a much-needed ban of DRE voting systems, but --- far more disturbingly --- is actually advocating in favor of their use.

We reported recently on that point, but the evidence is perhaps more clear in PFAW's own published analysis [PDF] (pages 2 & 3) of the Holt bill [emphasis ours]:

PFAW's position, as expressed above, is wholly unsupported by scientific evidence, common sense, or anything else as we have learned while investigating the matter over the past several weeks and months.

When a Republican governor from Florida has gotten ahead of Democrats on this issue, it's safe to say that something has gone terribly wrong.

If someone within the Democratic caucus doesn't stand up soon and bring the type of leadership to this issue that Crist has brought to Florida, they risk becoming the owners of a dysfunctional electoral system previously designed-for-disaster, via the Help America Vote Act of 2002, by the now-disgraced, Republican felon, former Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio.

Is there nobody in the U.S. Congress with the leadership skills and courage to stand up and do what is both right and well-supported by scientific evidence in order to make America's broken system of democracy right again?

Is there nobody who will stare down the disingenuous and/or fearful and/or ill-informed and/or self-serving factions standing in the way of restoring America's once-great shining example of democracy to the world?

As the right to vote and to have that vote counted transparently and accurately underpins every other right we have in this country, we'll continue to keep digging, advocating, investigating, reporting, and hoping. The alternatives --- and consequences --- are far too dire to do anything less....

As reported by Democracy Now on Wednesday...

Ah yes, the always reliable GOP "vote fraud" scammers' "ACORN canard" rears it's ugly (and unsubstantiated) head again. The NEWSWEEK article referenced above is here.

ACORN is the "Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now", a group which has successfully run voter registration drives across the country in low-income and minority areas.

As we reported back in December of 2005 --- when high-level GOP operative James Tobin was actually found guilty of jamming Democratic 'Get out the Vote' phone lines in order to keep voters away from the polls in 2002 by "orchestrating an election day phone-jamming plot against New Hampshire Democrats" --- the ACORN nut had already fallen off the Republican's "vote fraud" tree.

ACORN had "been vindicated of the various bogus charges, as virtually all of the frivolous lawsuits and investigations the GOP liars made so much noise about had simply collapsed by then," as we reported at the time in linking to ProjectVote.org's coverage.

And yet, the scam, built deep in the heart of Texas (by Rove and his slimy, democracy-hating operative buddies at the phony ACVR), just kept rolling...

New Mexico attorney John Boyd, who was working with state Dems at the time, had a front-row seat to the bogus 2004 "voter fraud" charges in the state, and wrote about it, in some detail, for BRAD BLOG a few weeks ago.

It's always been about undermining democracy for these jerks. From 2000 on up to 2008, the quest for power trumps the people in the minds of the wretched GOP evil doers.

Wow...Just wow. Bill O'Reilly goes Morton Downey Jr.

The latest phony issue created by O'Reilly is crucifying the mayor and police chief of Virginia Beach for not having previously deported an undocumented immigrant who ended up killing two teens in Virgina Beach in a drunk driving accident. He's mad not because the guy was a drunk driver, apparently, but because he was "an illegal alien." O'Reilly was whacked all morning about it on his radio show, and then flipped his shit on Fox "News" tonight with Geraldo, charging him with "wanting anarchy." Give it a look...

A news conference was held in response to O'Reilly's batshit episode, in which he told the father and sister of one of the dead girls: "The authorities in your town would not obey the law, defied the law of the land and somebody needs to be held accountable sir. I want you to keep in touch with us. We're gonna get the mayor, Oberndorf and the judge, Whitehurst, because they're the villains."

At the news conference, with Mayor Meyera Oberndorf, the father of the other killed girl said: "We need to heal, and to bring immigration, that's disrespectful to a family who's just mourning."

O'Reilly has gone frickin' psycho. And again we ask, as we did after he cut off the mic of a 29-year army veteran two days ago: Why is this guy still on TV? The same reason Morton Downey Jr. was, we guess. Trainwrecks get great ratings.

(Hat-tip Oliver Willis.)