Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

We at VotersUnite are thankful for all of our friends in the Election Integrity community. The folks who support our work and who do their own work tirelessly in an attempt to ensure our democratic process is not taken over by corporations whose interest is to make as much money as quickly as possible. We thank all of you for all that you do in your cities, counties and states. Thank you....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Happy Thanksgiving to all. Enjoy the holiday with family and friends.

Advanced Voting Solutions (AVS) which has sold voting machines in three Pennsylvania counties and much of the state of Virginia has finally been notified that if they do not tell the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) their plans for their voting system modifications by next Tuesday they will have all certification testing cancelled by order of the EAC. The modification was to the machines as they are used in PA so it probably won’t affect the Virginia counties. However, at least one of the PA counties, Northampton, has warned the vendor that they will be taking them to court for breach of contract among other charges. Perhaps the other two PA counties will join in this action now that it appears they will be left holding millions of dollars worth of worthless voting machines that have only been used in three elections. This is a clear indication, when teamed with lawsuits against ES&S announced by the state of California and the city of San Francisco that the tables may finally be turning against the arrogance and deceptive practices of the vendors. ...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) is giving thanks that he won't have to testify next Wednesday in the D.C. Madam trial. U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler canceled his testimony today because it was immaterial to the case.

Vitter has admitted he was a customer of Pamela Martin and Associates, the out-call service operated by Deborah Palfrey, the alleged madam in question.

Palfrey's witness list also includes Harlan K. Ulmann, the military strategist who visited the "shock and awe" concept upon the world. Palfrey has said Ulmann was in her records as "Mr. U" --- but that after their dates her female associates referred to him as "Mr. Unpleasant."

Ouch.

For the record, the AP says Judge Kessler was appointed by Pres. Clinton.

May he never again be able to go out in public again without being brought face to face with his eternal shame...

The University of Florida's student paper has details. ThinkProgress has more details. RAW STORY has a previous similar incident for poor poor Gonzo.

He was paid $40,000, out of student tuition, to speak at the University of Florida, where a student was recently tasered after asking John Kerry uncomfortable questions. Nobody was tasered during Gonzales speech.

Video of the incident follows. NOTE: Though not seen in the following video, another protester, dressed in army fatigues and holding a sign which read "HABEUS CORPUS", also took the stage in front of Gonzales, as he again averted his gaze, before being similarly escorted away. Kudos to both of the two courageous patriots, as well as those who protested from the audience...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Yesterday we reported that in an excerpt from his upcoming book on his years as Bush's press spokesman, Scott McClellan wrote that, in 2003, when he exonerated Scooter Libby and Karl Rove of any involvement in the leak of the secret identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, he had unknowingly lied. "And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the President's chief of staff, and the president himself."

Today, predictably, McClellan's publisher is trying neuturalize McClellan's claim that Bush was in on the conspiracy to deceive:

Right. Except that is precisely what he wrote in the excerpt. Here's how Osnos squares the circle:

"[Bush] told him something that wasn’t true," Osnos told Bloomberg News, "but the president didn’t know it wasn’t true," And: "The president told him what he thought to be the case."

Brad Friedman from St. Louis, MO...

Apparently Texas oil tycoon, T. Boone Pickens, who funded the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" propaganda campaign against John Kerry in 2004 to the tune of $3 million, seems, like the group themselves, to have trouble with the definition of the word "truth".

Earlier this month, at a DC dinner celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Rightwing publication American Spectator, Pickens made a very public challenge (not a bet), offering, as the Republicanist blog, American Thinker reported, "a million dollars to anyone who could prove wrong anything the Swiftboat Veterans charged about Kerry."

The similarly Rightwing blog RedState echoed that the challenge was made to anybody who "can prove anything the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth said in 2004 was false."

But it looks like Pickens was lying, as he is now trying to renege on the challenge since Kerry himself decided to take him up on it late last week, writing in a letter to Pickens (posted in full at the end of this article): "While I am prepared to show they lied on allegation after allegation, you have generously offered to pay one million dollars for just one thing that can be proven false. I am prepared to prove the lie beyond any reasonable doubt."

Kerry said that the $1 million should then be given to the Paralyzed Veterans of America, concluding his letter with: "I trust that you are a man of your word, having made a very public challenge at a major Washington dinner, and look forward to taking you up on this challenge."

Pickens, however --- wait for it --- has proven to be less than a man of his word. Who'd have thunk it? Rather than accept Kerry's offer to meet the challenge, he's moved the goal posts and Fox "News" Network stooge, Sean Hannity --- no man of honor either --- is entirely scummy enough to aide and abet Pickens in welching out of the challenge...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

The city of San Francisco filed their lawsuit against ES&S today. The city charges the vendor with a panoply of misdeeds including fraud, breach of contract, negligent misrepresentation and multiple violations of California's Elections Code, False Claims Act and Unfair Competition Law. In a press release concerning this lawsuit the City Attorney, Dennis Herrera, had this to say...

This lawsuit is on top of the suit filed yesterday by the state against ES&S for nearly $15M.

Diebold’s memory card failures have happened in Connecticut as well as in Florida. How many more states will have the same problems?

Those stories, and many more, all linked below...

Blogged by Brad from St. Louis, MO...

"San Francisco's experience with ES&S raises extremely troubling questions, not simply about the integrity of this company's technology, but about the integrity of this company itself," San Francisco's City Attorney Dennis Herrera said today in announcing his new lawsuit against Elections Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S).

"There can be no more important duty in a representative democracy than to conduct elections, and it is a travesty to see that duty so flagrantly undermined by the fraudulent conduct of an election systems vendor," he added.

Well, no kidding! To quote from It's a Wonderful Life, "'Bout time one of you lunkheads said it!"

The suit filed today against ES&S, the "world's largest", comes on the heels of yesterday's announcement that California Secretary of State Debra Bowen was filing her own suit, to the tune of some $15 million, against the company for their illegal and undeclared use of uncertified touch-screen voting systems in several counties across the state, as well as their having lied about it to the state.

The Fog City Journal's coverage of the SF lawsuit begins this way...

We've been calling for some time for states and counties to hold the voting machine companies accountable for their horrendous, out and out fraudulent business practices. Looks like the floodgates may finally be starting to open.

So who's next? Make no mistake, there will be more. Perhaps many. Stay tuned...

Brad Friedman, from St. Louis, MO...

If you've followed our recent blockbusters about FBI translator-turned-whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds (the latest, in which legendary 1970's whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg describes her case as "far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers," is here), but remain unclear on the heart of what she has to expose --- if she's ever able to expose it --- our friend Lukery at Let Sibel Edmonds Speak, offers a good summation today, as culled from his near-encyclopedic knowledge of the case. If you're unclear on things, and it's easy to be, given the scope of her allegations, please read his piece today.

You may also wish to see our handy bullet-point version of the breadth of cover-ups that she is ready to risk prison in order to disclose in full by defying her absurd five-year long "gag order" by the DoJ.

Lukery points us to Philip Giraldi's column on Edmonds from the American Conservative (yes, the American Conservative), which Edmonds has described as "the most accurate summary of my case". According to Giraldi...

The Giraldi piece is short and to the point, and described by Edmonds as "100% right", so we recommend you give it a quick read.

As Luke further explains in his helpful summation:

He also offers a few contacts for some of the media outlets we mentioned in our exclusive yesterday, as having so far failed to take up Edmonds' couragous offer to hand them one helluva blockbuster interview. We're happy to repost those contacts here for you, as without noise from the public (that would be you!), the American corporate media will continue to avoid the issue like the plague, and the bad guys will simply keep smiling from the shadows...

CBS...
EMAIL: 60m@cbsnews.com
PHONE: (212) 975-3247

ABC...
Email contacts

MSNBC & NBC...
Email contacts

Guest Blogged by Dori Smith of Talk Nation Radio

Failures in optical-scan voting systems made by Diebold Inc., as recently revealed in the state of Florida, might have occurred elsewhere across the country. In fact, any state where Diebold's optical-scan voting machines are in use might be having the problem, and they may not have been made aware of it --- either by the company, or the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) which is mandated by law to be a "clearinghouse" for such information.

A faulty connector-pin on Florida's Diebold optical-scan systems --- affecting some 4.5% of the state's machines, and as many as "one in 10 during the November 2006 election" in some Florida counties, according to a recent investigative report by the Daytona Beach News-Journal --- has been identified by the company as a "J40 connector".

It now appears that Connecticut's voting machines, made by the same company, are being affected by the same problem.

“This is Connecticut, not Volusia County," President of LHS Associates, Connecticut’s vendor for Diebold AccuVote OS machines, told me during a recent, bizarre late-night phone call. I felt pretty certain he was right, though his call came in to my home at 1:30 in the morning, so I was still a bit groggy.

LHS's John Silvestro had picked a strange time to return my call from a week earlier. We’d been following LHS’s role in addressing memory card failures during Connecticut elections since 2006 on Talk Nation Radio, and I wanted to know how many memory cards LHS had to replace before, during, and after the 2007 election.

At that hour, I declined his offer to "do the interview anyway," though we did touch on the basics of my inquiry. Did Registrars contact LHS to request replacements for "blown" memory cards as pre-election tests were being run? If so, a study currently underway at the University of Connecticut might not have been given the correct data to determine the true number of failing cards.

Silvestro asked me, "What would you say if I said Connecticut's failure rate was less than one percent?"

Perplexed, I told him I would say "OK" and we agreed to discuss the matter at a later time when he might have access to his records, as he had said he didn't have numbers in front of him at that late hour.

He wouldn't be the first LHS official to exhibit bizarre behavior. After jarringly inappropriate comments left at The BRAD BLOG several months ago, one such official was told he was no longer welcome to work in the state of Connecticut.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

The title of former Bush flak Scott McClellan's new book, "What Happened" brings to mind the title of O.J. Simpson's recent allegedly fictional memoir, "If I Did It."

Perhaps it's because both books seek to exonerate their authors from much deserved guilty verdicts --- both in the court of public opinion and in courts of law, certainly in O.J.'s case, and maybe even for Scotty too.

Here's an excerpt from Scotty's book:

And this was not just run of the mill political spin. Rove, Libby, Ari Fleischer and others, including Colin Powell's righthand man Richard Armitage, leaked the secret identity of a CIA agent whose specialty was tracking WMD. And they did it at the behest of the vice president who eagerly jeopardized state secrets for the tawdriest of purposes: to do political damage to the agent's husband, Joe Wilson, because he had dared to expose a lie told by the president in his 2003 State of the Union speech about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger.

The CIA, of course, can't reveal how many illegal weapons were successfully transported into the Middle East or how many foreigners acting as U.S. agents were permanently sidelined --- or captured or killed --- as a result the treasonous act of outing Agent Plame by George Bush, Dick Cheney and their henchmen.

Only Armitage has expressed regret about the leak.

Scott McClellan shredded his credibility for Bush, Cheney and the rest. Surely he can't expect anyone to believe he is telling the truth now when he claims he was misled by these same people. He is either the most gullible person to walk the planet, or he thinks the rest of us are fools.

Cross-posted at Pensito Review.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

After Blackwater guards opened fire and killed 17 Iraqis in the Nisoor Square section of Baghdad on Sept. 17, in true Bushie fashion, the State Dept. unilaterally conferred limited immunity on the Blackwater personnel who were on the scene --- including apparently the guards who opened fire --- in exchange for their statements detailing the events.

According to an ABC report, of the 17 Blackwater guards at the scene of the incident, only five fired their weapons. And an investigation by the FBI reportedly has turned up evidence that only three of the 17 people shot had been involved in attacking the Blackwater detail.

Now comes word that a federal grand jury has been impaneled to investigate the shootings:

The limited immunity given to the Blackwater personnel presents another question: Would it prevent justice from being served if the grand jury finds evidence that the killing of the 14 apparently innocent Iraqis was unprovoked?

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Today California SoS Debra Bowen announced that she is suing ES&S for nearly $15M for selling uncertified voting machines to counties in the state. The total includes $9.72M for selling the 972 machines and $5M to reimburse the counties. This is the second suit announced in the past three weeks against ES&S and the third lawsuit to be announced against a voting machine vendor in that time period.

“How much does it cost to fix an election?” VotersUnite.Org has just received copies of a great new novel by Mark Coggins, mystery writer and Shamus and Barry award-nominated author of the August Riordan series. We were honored to have been asked to review the book a few months ago and our review included the following opinion; “What could be better than a fun fiction about the real dangers of electronic voting? Coggins shows us that elections can be hacked and the cover-up can be murder.” The book is gripping and laugh-out-loud funny in places and it is another example of the fact that election integrity is no longer conspiracy theory from “tin-foil hats”. Read more about the book at VotersUnite.Org and help us out with a $50 or more donation and get a copy of the book as a premium. You help VotersUnite continue our valuable work and you get a great book. [Note: VotersUnite! is in affiliation with International Humanities Center, a nonprofit public charity exempt from federal income tax under Section 501[c](3) of the Internal Revenue Code.] ...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

In the latest CNN/WMUR poll of likely voters in the New Hampshire primary, Fred Thompson has dropped to sixth place behind both Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee.

Thompson has lagged behind the frontrunners since he entered the race in September. But in this latest poll, his support in New Hampshire dropped from 13 percent in the September poll to 4 percent now.

Ron Paul has doubled his support from 4 percent to 8 percent since September. Mike Huckabee has 5 percent.

Mitt Romney, who was governor of next-door Massachusetts, is in the lead with 33 percent, up from 25 percent in September. John McCain's 18 percent support is unchanged. Rudolph Giuliani is in third place with 16 percent --- an eight percentage point drop since September.

Blogged by Brad (quickly) from the road...

California Sec. of State Debra Bowen has announced a $15 million lawsuit against voting machine company ES&S for their use of uncertified AutoMARK voting systems in the state.

The BRAD BLOG initially reported on the likelihood of such a suit, in some detail, after Bowen's initial announcement of ES&S's violations of state law last August.

“ES&S ignored the law over and over and over again, and it got caught,” said Bowen in a press release just issued this evening. “California law is very clear on this issue. I am not going to stand on the sidelines and watch a voting system vendor come into this state, ignore the laws, and make millions of dollars from California’s taxpayers in the process.”

According to the release, ES&S seems to have simply lied about their use of the uncertified voting systems in the state of California. "The Secretary of State’s office held a public hearing on the matter on October 15, 2007. At that hearing, ES&S asserted the Secretary of State was notified about changes to the AutoMARK. However, ES&S provided no evidence before, during, or after the hearing to substantiate its claim."

Such deceptive practices are not uncommon for ES&S, as well as the other major e-voting machine companies. Diebold's touch-screen voting systems were decertified in the state in 2004, after it had been found that they had similarly deployed uncertified hardware and sofware, in violation of state law, in a number of counties in the state.

The complete press release from CA Sec. of State Debra Bowen's office follows below...