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Arrest in VA: GOP Voter Reg Scandal Widens
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The Secret Koch Brothers Tapes...

By Jon Ponder on 8/23/2008 6:27am PT  

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

The 3 a.m. call:

Sen. Barack Obama has selected Delaware Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate, according to his official Web site and a text message the campaign sent to supporters on Saturday.

"Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee," the text message, sent at around 3 a.m. ET, said.

"Joe and I will appear for the first time as running mates this afternoon in Springfield, Illinois --- the same place this campaign began more than 19 months ago," Obama said in an e-mail sent to supporters Saturday morning.

"I'm excited about hitting the campaign trail with Joe, but the two of us can't do this alone," he wrote. " We need your help to keep building this movement for change."

Vice presidential candidates are often called on to be the aggressors in the campaign. A comment Biden made earlier this year may have resonated with Obama:

“I refuse to sit back like we did in 2000 and 2004. This administration is the worst administration in American foreign policy in modern history — maybe ever. The idea that they are competent to continue to conduct our foreign policy, to make us more secure and make Israel secure, is preposterous. ... Every single thing they’ve touched has been a near-disaster.”



By John Gideon on 8/22/2008 4:26pm PT  

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

So far this year your kind donations to VotersUnite.Org have allowed us to keep providing ‘Daily Voting News’ at least 6 days a week except for a couple weeks of vacation or conferences. We have also been able to spend over four weeks of long hours to research, write and edit a report that has been discussed by media around the nation and was featured on Lou Dobbs earlier this week. In the upcoming months, as election day grows nearer, our work load will grow and then as voters begin going to the polls and problems are announced we will be passing on the information to all of you via DVN and our website. We know money is tight right now but your help is needed to allow us to keep doing our work. Please help us out with a tax-deductible donation. ...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




Democratic Appointee Wants Fewer Safe Guards, Even as Diebold Admits Their Tabulator Software --- Used All Across the Country --- Loses Votes...
By Ellen Theisen on 8/22/2008 8:00am PT  

Guest Blogged by Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org

Many jurisdictions are realizing their voting systems are horribly flawed and they want to get them fixed before November. But the new systems currently under test by the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) have so many defects that the manufacturers have to keep repairing them before testing can continue. Consequently the EAC has not certified anything yet.

Kudos to the EAC for this!

But Gracia Hillman, one of the EAC Commissioners, recommends a way around this “roadblock” for the jurisdictions using systems that are no good. She suggests a contingency plan that would allow the jurisdictions to use new and different systems that are no good, but at least they would comply with their state laws. Her ideas:

1) Emergency Certification of Voting System Modifications;

2) Waiver of EAC Certification;

Unbelievable.

The systems are so bad they can’t meet the federal standards, so to get around this “roadblock,” Commissioner Hillman proposes to bypass the testing process.

She wants the EAC to bless new, defective systems for the vendors to sell to replace the old, defective systems that are currently in use.

But that’s what NASED (National Association of State Election Directors) did when it oversaw the voting system testing process, and the decade-long, widespread use of Premier/Diebold’s vote-losing software is one of the results.

After ten years of use in election after election, all across the country, Premier/Diebold’s vote-dropping software flaw has finally come to light — thanks to Butler County, Ohio’s Elections Director Betty L. McGary and Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




Justin Elliot of Mother Jones and Talking Points Memo Takes the Easy Way Out in His 'Review' of 'Uncounted'...
By Mary Mancini on 8/22/2008 6:35am PT  

Guest Blogged by Mary Mancini of the Uncounted Blog

Everyone has different tastes, and hey, if you aren’t moved after watching Uncounted that’s your prerogative. But an uniformed and half-assed review that tries to nail the 80-minute movie on one ten-second factoid - like the one delivered to Mother Jones readers by former MJ Senior Online Fellow and current TPM Media News Editor, Justin Elliott - is inexcusable.

In the review, Elliot references the following that briefly appears on screen: “Two voting machine companies --- ES&S and Diebold --- electronically counted 80 percent of the votes in the 2004 presidential election. Both companies have extensive ties to the Republican party.” He then runs the 80% number by Kimberly Brace, “a respected voting expert with the consulting firm Election Data Services” who calls it “totally wrong.” And that’s it. Proof by assertion. No follow up. End of review.

You can, of course, read the rest for yourself at MotherJones.com, where you can also read the comments of some very smart MoJo readers who recognize not only Elliott’s shoddy work but also the importance of the bigger issue - that our democracy is at stake because of bad electoral practices.

You’ll also find Uncounted's filmmaker, David Earnhardt's response, which I am also printing in its entirety...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




By John Gideon on 8/21/2008 4:20pm PT  

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

This past March, a Butler Co Ohio election official was examining the database from the just held primary. The official found a problem he was not looking for. It seems that two memory cards had not been downloaded even though the system had reported that it was. 150 votes were affected. That revelation led to an inspection of the system and a pronouncement by Premier/Diebold that there was a problem with the interactivity between the GEMS software and anti-virus software. This problem has led to a lawsuit and counter-suit. Recently SoS staff and Premier/Diebold staff went to Butler Co to look closer at the software in question. Today it was announced that Premier has admitted that their GEMS software has a programming error and that this error goes back over ten years worth of software. Of course, they make the highly implausible claim that no votes were lost during all that time. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner also has said that no votes were lost in Ohio. However, Brunner ignores the fact that the problem has been on the machines for years and just because they found the problem in March does not mean the problem did not affect elections in previous years....

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




By Brad Friedman on 8/21/2008 10:30am PT  

With a hat-tip for the title-variation on my pal, Art Levine's landmark piece on "The Republican War on Voting" in The Prospect, my column this week at the UK's Guardian focuses on the latest in the Republican "voter fraud" scam, intended only to keep Democratic-leaning voters from being able to cast a legal vote this year.

The launching point for the column: conservative "founding father" Paul Weyrich's remarkable comments to 15,000 preachers in Dallas in 1980, as seen in the video at right, featuring this Rosetta Stone phrase:

"Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome - good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Yes, that's what he actually said. Out loud. And the GOP has been working to make Weyrich's anti-democracy dreams a reality, at no small cost, ever since. My complete Guardian column is here...




SoS Brunner's Directive Contains Specifications for Proper Storage of Election System Components, Outlawing Overnight Stays with Pollworkers
But Flaws Still Exist in the New Orders for Machine Deployment...
By Steve Heller on 8/21/2008 9:40am PT  

Guest blogged by Steve Heller of Velvet Revolution

Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's Secretary of State, has issued Directive 2008-68 [PDF] entitled Voting Machine Delivery Requirements. The directive contains storage specifications regarding temperature, humidity, dust, fire protection, and proximity of liquids. It also makes it clear that there are to be no more election component "sleepovers" in which poll workers take home voting equipment days or even weeks before an election for so-called safekeeping. In actuality, the "sleepovers" are an invitation to tampering and hacking.

The BRAD BLOG was the first to report on these sleepovers, truly a menace to election security, back in 2006, and coined the phrase "sleepover," which seems to have made its way into the national lexicon. AP themselves used the phrase in their coverage this week of Brunner's new directive.

As Lou Dobbs Tonight noted in 2006 following The BRAD BLOG's original exposé of the practice, the sleepover procedure is still used in many states and counties. But now, at least, Ohio's Brunner has taken a step in the right direction by ordering an end to the practice. It remains to be seen whether all of Ohio's local election officials will comply.

However, while we applaud this latest initiative by Brunner, it looks as if it may not go far enough in at least one very important aspect...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




By Brad Friedman on 8/20/2008 10:34pm PT  

Blogged by Brad Friedman on the road to Denver...

Congrats to our friend Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org for both her tremendous report on private vendors undermining our public elections (about which she guest blogged here yesterday) and her long-overdue appearance on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight on Wednesday to discuss it (appx 3 mins, video courtesy of Alan Breslauer)...


Great to see Ellen finally recognized for all the tremendous work that she and BRAD BLOG stalwart John Gideon have been doing for so long at the non-partisan election watchdog Voters Unite!

That said, two minor-ish complaints about the Dobbs segment above...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




Spends Thousands on Robocalls On Behalf of Clint Curtis in Hopes of Defeating the Vote-Rigging Whistleblower's Primary Opponent...
By Brad Friedman on 8/20/2008 7:35pm PT  

Blogged quickly from the road by Brad Friedman...

If folks in Florida's 24th Congressional district don't dump this sleaze bucket (presuming he's not tossed in jail first for his involvement with Jack Abramoff, for which he's under FBI investigation), I can't even imagine what they'd be thinking,

Orlando Sentinel details the robocalls the slimy Rep. Tom Feeney is now making in favor of Democrat Clint Curtis, the software programmer who has sworn on video to a congressional panel, via affidavit, and polygraph test, that Feeney asked him to create vote-rigging software in 2000. Curtis is running against the Democratic party's hand-picked wealthy millionaire Suzanne Kosmas --- whom Curtis regards as "Republican light" --- in next week's primary in Florida.

Here's most of the 30-second robocall, as posted by the Sentinel, in which a Feeney volunteer endorses Curtis on behalf of Feeney's filthy campaign...

Just when you think he's hit rock-bottom, it turns out there is no dirty trick too unseemly for Feeney. Can there be any more question about Curtis' claims about him? What wouldn't Feeney do to try and gain an advantage in an election? Gaming the system again. As ever. (As he also did when Curtis ran against him in '06). What an appalling little --- very little --- figure of a man.

For more info on The BRAD BLOG's continuing investigative series on The Clint Curtis/Tom Feeney/Yang Enterprises Vote-Rigging Scandal series, please see:
- A Quick Summary of the story so far.
- An Index of all the Key Articles & Evidence in the series so far.
- Curtis is hoping to run against Feeney for U.S. Congress again in 2008.
For more info, see: www.ClintCurtis.com



By John Gideon on 8/20/2008 5:00pm PT  

Tonight’s Featured article discusses the report from VotersUnite.Org that we discussed in this space on Monday. The report does not just tell what is wrong; it also tells about what states and local jurisdictions can do that is right. “Researchers then offer solutions by highlighting the story in Luzerne County, Pa., where election director Leonard Piazza in 2006 refused to allow ES&S to service its voting machines. Instead, Piazza and his staff perform most maintenance functions and ballot design programming without letting vendor representatives upgrade the machines or come near county precincts during an election. It's not too late, Theisen said, for more public officials to take election administration into their own hands come November.”...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




By Brad Friedman on 8/20/2008 3:27pm PT  


Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, 1949 - 2008

The Associated Press is reporting that Ohio Congresswoman Rep. Tubbs Jones died today at 6:12 p.m., in Cleveland.

She stood up for America in 2004, by courageously challenging the seating of Ohio's electors in the U.S. House of Representatives. She will be greatly missed.

UPDATE: Friend of The BRAD BLOG Matthew Segal of the Student Association of Voter Empowerment (SAVE) was among those students at Kenyon College in Knox County, OH, where the last vote was not cast in 2004 until well after 2am. He sent us a video of an Election Integrity event that both he and Tubbs Jones spoke at just weeks ago in Ohio, and noted, "Her discussion of the Ohio election (and electoral vote certification) was riveting." The clip is longer than the YouTube-allowed 10 mins, but we'll try to get it posted somewhere.

With the video, he emailed the following personal thoughts this afternoon while we were on the road, and as the Congresswoman was still clinging to life...

Stephanie Tubbs Jones is not only my political hero but has also been both a friend and mentor to me. I met her back in 2004 after the disastrous voting situation in Ohio. Her office called me and asked me to speak at a rally in Cleveland to endorse her "Count Every Vote" legislation with Senator Clinton. From there, we have kept in touch closely and she has gone out of her way to support the efforts of SAVE and to help empower young voters through legislation. She is a giant in the election reform movement and has fought courageously for a more accessible, transparent and participatory democracy. I have the deepest respect for her.

Matthew Segal
Executive Director
Student Association for Voter Empowerment

[UPDATE: Matthew now has more at HuffPo...]

She was a hero. Congress (and America) could use another 534 like her.




Suffered Aneurysm While Driving in Cleveland
By Jon Ponder on 8/20/2008 12:40pm PT  

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Early reports that Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones had died were incorrect, however her condition appears to be very serious.

Cleveland Plain Dealer at about 1:30 p.m. EDT:

Democratic U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, the first black woman to represent Ohio in Congress, had a brain hemorrhage and was in critical condition with limited brain function, a doctor said Wednesday.

Tubbs Jones, 58, suffered the hemorrhage while driving her car in Cleveland Heights on Tuesday, said Dr. Gus Kious, president of Huron Hospital in East Cleveland. The congresswoman had been driving erratically and her vehicle crossed lanes of traffic before coming to a stop, police said.

The hemorrhage was in an inaccessible part of the congresswoman's brain, Kious said during a news conference. A team of doctors who evaluated her determined she has limited brain function.

Update 4:31 p.m. PDT: The Associated Press and C-SPAN are reporting that Rep. Tubbs Jones died at 6:12 p.m. EDT today, in Cleveland. Our thoughts are with her family.




By Brad Friedman on 8/20/2008 10:30am PT  

All in all, we'd rather be in St. Paul. But then again, nobody involved with the Republican National Convention (which we suspect will be much more fun) invited us to speak in Minnesota. We will, however, be speaking on a panel about "Clean, Fair and Transparent Elections" at a forum sponsored by The Nation magazine and the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) in Denver, so we're now on our way. Whether we like it or not.

We're also told that press credentials to the big show have been secured for The BRAD BLOG, so who knows what may happen? In truth, we have no idea what we'll find in Denver worth reporting, if anything, but many are the days we often awaken with no clue at all what nightmares and/or hilarity await us, requiring light and focus that sometimes only we seem to be able to help bring. It's with that same sense of wonderment and a not-bad-nose-for-news-found-nowhere-else that we head towards the Rockies.

While we're en route, and even while we're on the ground in Denver, the good Guest Bloggers of The BRAD BLOG will be joining us to keep things lively while your occasionally-humble eponymous blogger-in-chief strolls the grounds either with or without net access.

If you're in the mood to support our DNC efforts, whatever they may be, we'd not turn down a few dollars for a tank of gas or three to help get there and back safely. Donations may be left online here. If you're able to drop $50 or more in that tip jar, we'll be happy to send you a collectors' edition DVD of Uncounted, signed by filmmaker David Earnhardt, as a small thanks. (Our snail mail, for those who asked: Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594, Los Angeles, CA 90028.)

Wish us luck. We'll do our best to stay away from the water cannons...




A VotersUnite report on the current situation and how to reclaim elections --- in 2008 and beyond.
By Ellen Theisen on 8/20/2008 8:50am PT  

Guest Blogged by Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org

[Ed Note: Ellen appeared on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight this evening to discuss this report. The video is now posted here.]

As we approach the 2008 general election, the structure of elections in the United States — once reliant on local representatives accountable to the public — has become almost wholly dependent on large corporations, which are not accountable to the public. Most local officials charged with running elections are now unable to administer elections without the equipment, services, and trade-secret software of a small number of corporations (primarily Election Systems and Software (ES&S), Hart InterCivic, Sequoia Voting Systems, and Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold), though a few other corporations have a very small share of the market).

If the vendors withdrew their support for elections now, our election structure would collapse.

However, some states and localities are recognizing the threat that vendor dependency poses to elections. They are using ingenuity and determination to begin reversing the direction.

This week, VotersUnite.Org released a report [PDF] that examines the situation, how we got here, and steps we can take to limit corporate control of our elections in 2008 and reduce it even further in the future.

Case studies presented in our report give examples of the pervasive control voting system vendors now have over election administration in almost every state, and the consequences some jurisdictions are already experiencing. We discovered that such dependency has allowed vendors to...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




In Fact, He Criticized the Bill As 'Too Generous' To Troops - And Did Not Even Show Up for the Vote...
By Jon Ponder on 8/20/2008 5:50am PT  


Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Events in the campaign this week offer a case study in how Fox "News" assists the right wing --- in this case, the McCain campaign --- to disseminate disinformation:

Monday: Speaking before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, John McCain falsely claimed credit for supporting the 21st Century GI Bill, which was sponsored by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.):

As a political proposition, it would have much easier for me to have just signed on to what I considered flawed legislation. But the people of Arizona, and of all America, expect more from their representatives than that, and instead I sought a better bill. I'm proud to say that the result is a law that better serves our military, better serves military families, and better serves the interests of our country.

In reality, the bill McCain "sought" was not Webb-Hagel, which he opposed because its tuition benefits were "too generous" to the troops. The version he sought was a different bill that he co-sponsored, and which "in no way resembles" the bill which was ultimately passed, as noted by ThinkProgress...

--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---




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