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Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Amy Goodman's introduction to Democracy Now's coverage of "Winter Soldier":

JON MICHAEL TURNER: 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Sequoia Voting seems to be very concerned that scientists in New Jersey might actually discover the truth about Sequoia’s implausible explanations for the recently discovered problems with their Advantage voting machines. Of course Sequoia has blamed poll workers in a scenario that makes no sense at all. Unless the state Attorney General, Ann Milgram, demands that an independent investigation take place, it won’t happen. Why? Sequoia seems to have sent threatening letters to concerned New Jersey counties and to the Princeton computer scientists who were to inspect the machines. Sequoia claims to have hired local counsel and threatens legal action if any inspection, or even report of the behavior of their software, takes place. Unfortunately the counties have decided to back down for the time being. Phone calls and/or email to the Attorney General may help to convince her that action must be taken: Go Here...

-- Brad Friedman

Sequoia Voting Systems' legal threats against Princeton computer science professors and New Jersey election officials, as we reported in exclusive detail last night, have apparently had their intended effect.

The strong-arm email sent to professors Ed Felten and Andrew Appel was apparently accompanied by a two-page letter to Union County, New Jersey, Clerk Joanne Rajoppi, who originally discovered a tally failure in Sequoia's AVC Advantage touch-screen voting machines after the February 5th Super Tuesday election. The same error was subsequently discovered in at least five other counties.

Mercer County Clerk Paula Sollami-Covello tells the New Jersey Times that Sequoia's decision to block an independent analysis of its touch-screen voting machines makes no sense if the firm is confident that they work properly.

"I think it's unfortunate that they're not letting an independent investigation take place," Sollami-Covello tells the paper this morning. "They should have no problem with having a third party investigate the product if they are confident in their product."

Another Mercer County, NJ, official sent a letter to the state Attorney General criticizing Sequoia's bizarre explanation for failures discovered in the systems following state's recent Primary Election, characterizing what he describes as the company's "strange, confusing solution." He said the company's explanation for the problem, which succeeded in blaming voters and poll workers as usual, was based on a "bizarre scenario, with no cited evidence or testimony" to back it up.

While NJ's state clerks association had voted unanimously to recommend that the Attorney General commission an independent study of the machines --- the same ones which will be used across the state of Pennsylvania in next month's key Democratic Primary Election --- Union County's plan to move forward with their own study has been nixed due to the legal threats sent from Sequoia's VP of "Compliance/Quality/Certification" Edwin Smith, according to a number of New Jersey papers today.

Amazingly (or perhaps, not so much at this point), Union County's attorneys folded to the pressure from the company, which claimed that Election Officials in NJ --- who spent millions on the voting systems --- are not legally allowed to examine them independently because "the voting machine software is a Sequoia 'trade secret' and cannot be handed over to any third-party."

Fear of a lawsuit from Sequoia, which will also control the state's elections in an upcoming June primary, as well as the November general election, has led to county attorneys backing down from their plans for the time being, unless the state AG jumps in to take action.

In the threatening email from Smith to the Princeton professors sent last Friday, as posted here in full last night, the company executive threatened legal action if a "non-compliant analysis" of their voting systems was carried out. "We will also take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property," Smith warned.

The Star-Ledger reports the latest, almost mind-numbingly incredible, developments in your democracy, now fully and completely in the hands of privatized corporate America, this morning...

From Washington Post today...

But then again, it's not actually about experience or knowledge, as you know, it's about the image of having any...

And so it goes...

UPDATE: Think Progress has more, including audio of McCain making the same misstatement on right-wing Hugh Hewitt's radio show earlier. So it wasn't an accidental "gaffe". It was a fundamental misunderstanding --- by the man regarded by the mainstream corporate media as having the most foreign policy expertise among all of the major American Presidential candidates --- of a key issue at the very heart of one ongoing war in Iraq, and at the very heart of a possible second one in Iran.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

The Worst Vice President Ever goes to Baghdad and says:

Meanwhile:

-- Brad Friedman

Sequoia Voting Systems has sent a legal threat to Princeton University computer science professors Ed Felten and Andrew Appel warning them of legal action should they proceed with an analysis of New Jersey's touch-screen voting machines as unanimously recommended last week by an association representing election clerks across the state.

In a terse email sent last Friday, obtained today by The BRAD BLOG, Sequoia's Edwin Smith, Vice-President of Compliance/Quality/Certification, warns the university academics that the company has "retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any non-compliant analysis."

"We will also take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property," Smith threatens.

The email from Smith to Felten and Appel is posted in full at the end of this article. Felten has confirmed its authenticity late this afternoon.

The call by state election officials for the independent study of Sequoia's AVC Advantage touch-screen machines comes in the wake of a recent finding that the systems mistallied voter turnout totals across at least six different counties in New Jersey's February 5th Presidential Primary Election. During a post-election canvass, it was found that the number of voters for each party, as reported by the internal printouts on the electronic voting machines, failed to match totals on the internal memory cards inside the same systems in a number of instances across the state.

Sequoia's explanation for the problem, essentially blaming voters and poll workers for pushing a complicated series of buttons, was found lacking by the state election clerks.

The discovery of mistallies followed on previous embarrassment for Sequoia and New Jersey when several machines failed to boot up at all on the morning of the Super Tuesday Election, causing a 45-minute delay for NJ's Governor John Corzine before he was finally able to cast a vote at his polling place in Hoboken.

The very same Sequoia AVC Advantage systems which failed in New Jersey, will be used across Pennsylvania in that state's upcoming --- and rather important --- Primary Election next month.

Sequoia has good reason to be concerned about what may come of an analysis by professors Felten and/or Appel. Both of them have previously detailed major voting machine security flaws, and the ability to easily hack into such systems made by both Sequoia and Diebold Election Systems...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Éirinn go Brách! In testimony before the Committee on House Administration last week, EAC Commissioner Caroline Hunter testified that there were no EAC certified voting systems at this time and that there would be none used in the election in November. The certification process should not become what it was under NASED where they qualified all of the garbage that is presently being used. The long process for certifying voting systems will surely become shorter as the labs and the EAC’s representatives get experience. Unfortunately the long process will surely affect the voters in New Jersey. The state legislature mandated a vvpat printer be added to the Sequoia Advantage machines used by the state by January 2007. The Attorney General has now moved the deadline for the printers twice with support from the legislature and is now asking that it be moved again until after November.

Perhaps it is time for the courts and the legislature to step in and take action to get rid of those machines and force the Attorney General to accept paper ballots for November and beyond.

That, and links to the rest of today's notable voting news stories, follow below as usual...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

So now what?

(Hat-tip BRAD BLOG comic sherpa, Pokey Anderson)

Guest Blogged by Gary Beckwith of Vermonters for Voting Integrity, The Election Justice Center and The Solar Bus...

Yet another independent study by computer security experts has concluded Diebold's Optical-Scan election system is vulnerable to hacking and rigging. This time it's the Voting Technology Research Center, at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Connecticut. Their conclusions will sadden anyone who values democracy. Here are a few quotations from the report titled, "A Case Study in Optical Scan E-Voting":

Click here for the full report.

There are now at least 5 major independent studies like this. It's becoming like "beating a dead horse." But it's not a horse, it's the door of our election officials offices that are being pounded on, and they are simply ignoring the call. We know that our state's election authorities are reading these reports. So the question is, why do they ignore the experts and leave our democracy at risk?

I'm from Vermont, a place you'd think the election officials would do the right thing. But the fact is, that many people have written to Secretary of State Deb Markowitz and Director of Elections Kathy DeWolfe about this. (click here for their contact info if you want to write to them yourself) Many people have asked them, "when are you going to institute random audits on the elections, like all of these studies recommend?"

Their answer is becoming more and more embarrassing...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

It has just been revealed that an investigation is taking place in Franklin Co, Ohio, stemming from problems noticed by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner on her DRE voting machine last Nov. 6. Brunner claims that when she got to a municipal court race a gray banner appeared over one candidate's name to let her know that he had withdrawn from the race. In fact that candidate had withdrawn the day after the machines were programmed. The problem is that her husband voted on a machine next to hers and he had no warning. Voters in other precincts have now reported the same thing to investigators, so it appears that not everyone had the same ballot. Investigators have also found that it appears that ES&S, the county’s vendor, told election workers that it was not necessary to do pre-election testing on every voting machine so only one machine per precinct was tested. They have also found that ES&S instructed the county’s “board programmer” on how to turn off the “audit logs” on the machines while doing any work on them. This act hinders any investigation into what was done with software changes. How will these bad acts by ES&S affect what seems to be a good relationship between Brunner and the vendor?...

By Brad Friedman from Phoenix, AZ...

With more than 3,000 counties in the United States of America, only heavily Republican Warren County, Ohio --- one of the last to report election results in the Buckeye State that night --- took action on Election Night 2004 to lock out members of the public and the media from their tabulation room.

The president of the county's Board of Commissioners claimed at the time that during a "face-to-face meeting between the FBI and our director of emergency services we were informed that on a scale from one to 10...Warren County in particular was rated at 10, 10 being the top highest risk."

Nobody, however, in Warren County has ever named the supposed FBI official who gave the warning, and to this day, the director of the county's Department of Emergency Services, Frank R. Young, will not reveal the name of the official with whom he claims he spoke, even as the FBI maintains "there was no information given to Warren County of an imminent terrorist threat to that county or to Southern Ohio," and that "None of our agents...advised of any type of any terrorist threat or anything like that."

Additionally, no one has ever been held accountable for what happened.

During The BRAD BLOG's exclusive interview last December with Ohio's new Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, she was asked about the infamous Warren County Lockdown and encouraged to investigate the matter to ensure something similar would not be allowed to occur during the 2008 election. She noted that she was still "troubled" by the '04 incident and "[couldn't] find any justification for it."

"We'll look again at that situation and see what the best course of action is to prevent it from happening in the future," she promised at the time.

The Cincinnati Enquirer picked up on that section of our interview at the time, and now, going on four years since the Lockdown occurred --- first reported by The BRAD BLOG on November 8, 2004 --- a mainstream corporate media outlet has finally taken the issue seriously enough to devote some resources to a legitimate investigation.

Jon Craig's investigative report in Sunday's Cincinnati Enquirer notes: "Among those locked out were an Enquirer reporter, a TV reporter, and a stringer from the Associated Press." He goes on to report that "(t)he AP had stringers at all 88 boards of elections, and only in Warren County were they not allowed in."

Despite a misleading summary early in Craig's article, asserting the paper has "learned...A casual conversation about terrorism between the county emergency services director and a friendly FBI agent in a parking lot may have been the final trigger for the lockdown," what's clear is that to this day, no one from the FBI has ever come forward to substantiate Young's claims. Even today, while Young is taking responsibility for recommending the lockdown, he's sticking to his story that it was his conversation with an FBI official --- whom he still refuses to name --- that led him to his decision.

Both the FBI and the Warren County Sheriff tell Craig that Young's claims, essentially, are complete bullshit...

Blogged by Brad from Phoenix, AZ...

"Alegre", a longtime Daily Kos diarist, has called for a writers' strike at the world's largest supposedly-Progressive blog site, due to what she says has become a "hostile environment" for pro-Clinton supporters.

She writes that the place has become "little more than an echo chamber with an attitude that harkens back to the early days of Dubbya’s administration - yer either with us or yer a’gin us, heh!"

We don't know whether that's the case or not, since we haven't much followed what goes on at dKos for years for our own personal, if not necessarily unrelated, reasons.

If you really want to get the attention of a blog owner, however, we'd suggest a readers' strike is far more likely to accomplish that goal, since the business model for such operations relies on reader traffic to help set ad prices.

Want to make sure the folks running dKos take notice of your concerns? Stop hitting those pages in big numbers --- yes, even checking for new comments counts as a new page view for advertisers --- and believe us, they'll notice. That is, if you believe getting at their bottom line is useful towards getting them to behave more responsibly --- and more progressively --- over there.

[Full Disclosure...since we believe in such things, even if the owner and front-pagers at dKos do not...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

It has been pointed out to me that many states allow you to check your voter registration on-line. Here is a list of those states with links. Again we encourage all voters to ensure they are still registered to vote and that their registrations are correct in all regards.

It appears that Colorado is getting closer and closer to a paper-ballot election this November. One of the driving forces is a concern that the state will, again, face a law suit from the voters if they don’t change to paper ballots. The Governor is concerned enough about making the change that he has doubled the amount of funds that can be spent to make the conversion in the state....