The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) was signed into law in Oct. 2002. Amongst other things HAVA required the formation of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and provided some mandates, in Title III of the law, for federal elections including some standards for voting systems. Those standards include, but are not limited to, accessibility for voters with disabilities and accuracy in the vote count. Testing by experts in accessibility has shown that none of the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting systems presently in use meet the requirements for accessibility for disabled voters. Failures in testing and vote counting in real elections have also proven that, at times, the voting systems presently being used across the country do not meet the federally mandated requirements for accuracy.

So what guidance has been provided by the EAC to the states with regards to Title III? Well, actually none. In fact even though voting systems presently in use do not meet federal law the EAC is just now getting around to issuing guidance to state and local election officials and, according to the draft of the plan ‘featured’ below, it is going to take another two years before the EAC can complete the guidance.

Why can’t they just tell the vendors and the states that the law is clear and, if they fail to follow that law, violations will be referred to the DoJ? The fact that the vendors misrepresent their products as being accessible is a clear violation of the law. It is time they are held responsible and it doesn’t take two years of studying Title III of HAVA to make that clear....

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

It's interesting that voter turnout in California last month topped both of former Gov. Ronald Reagan's presidential elections, as well as all other elections going back to 1972 when Richard Nixon, another Californian, trounced George McGovern:

Here is the news for the day. ...

Here's your chance to offer helpful thoughts, advice and concerns to the federal commission tasked with overseeing U.S. election administration, testing and certification of voting machines and (theoretically) serving as a national "clearinghouse" for problems with such machines.

High-ranking sources within both the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and Obama transition team have indicated to The BRAD BLOG that changes are likely afoot for the executive branch commission as the new administration begins to take control of it. Now is likely a very good moment for you to speak up to them about it.

From an EAC press release just issued today...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

George W. Bush's trashing of America is not quite complete...

Guest blogged by Brad Jacobson of MediaBloodhound

From the aftermath of the 2003 "shock and awe" bombing campaign all the way through Thanksgiving Day 2008, major US news outlets have nearly uniformly blacked out or downplayed reports of the Iraqi death toll. But a recent Associated Press article reveals the depths to which these outlets are still willing to delve to censor this information.

In the November 27 article "Iraqi Parliament OKs US Troops for 3 More Years," by Christopher Torchia and Qassim Abdul-Zahra, AP editors approved the following characterization of Iraqi deaths suffered since the US invasion:

How's that for a statistically rigorous accounting? With the exactitude of a third-grader's book report cribbed from a novel's dust jacket copy, the AP --- America's #1 wire news service --- blankets US news outlets with a quantification of Iraqi casualties that would've made Stalin proud.

Other than a report of problems in one Georgia county with their electronic voter database the news has been quiet. Results of this election should be known this evening and reports of counting problems, if there are any, will dribble out over the next couple days.

The recount in Minnesota is still ongoing. One county found 171 previously uncounted ballots. Reports are that the vote count is getting closer.

It appears that the battle over House District 105 and the Dallas Co. Texas recount has been joined as the county has hired a law firm to represent their interest against the Democratic party in court....

In truth, the worst of it isn't Rightwing Radio and other such outlets which we expect to be GOP shills. Far more insidious --- as we discussed recently on the Gregory Mantell Show --- is the lazy, enabling, complicit, rightwing slant of actual news outlets, such as AP, WaPo, NYTimes, etc., which are generally believed by the public to be credible, down the middle, unbiased, and legitimate. They aren't. As proven time and again over the last eight years. And they're still at it, even in the waning days of Bush. They're now helping him to prop up a phony legacy as phony as the last eight years of the phony illusions of "success" they helped him invent in the first place.

Greg Sargent elucidates the latest round of corporate mainstream media misreporting which, conveniently, helps both Bush and --- perhaps more to the point --- themselves by justifying their own failure to report the story of the unnecessary War on Iraq accurately, as they did, straight from the jump...

Take note, America. This is how it's done...

(Hat-tip Steve Heller of VelvetRevolution.us)

Guest Blogged by Jill C. of Brilliant at Breakfast

Sometimes a Firesign Theatre reference is necessary just to get through the day.

Funny how the black helicopter crowd (which is sure to crawl back out from the rocks under which they've been hiding during the entire time George W. Bush has eviscerated the Constitution), never mind the "less government" pseudo-libertarian crowd, is utterly silent about this alarming report...

The Minnesota recount is still on-going. Tomorrow the polls open for election day in Georgia for the re-vote for their Senate race. There was also a TRO sought by the Democratic Party in the recount of the Texas House District 105 race as part of a federal voting rights lawsuit. That lawsuit was filed today. Also, Washington DC city council member, Mary Cheh, announced today that she will be asking her council colleagues to pass a resolution to enforce subpoenas on Sequoia Voting Systems. She wants the source code and other Sequoia records and wants a judge to force compliance....

This article in Milwaukee Magazine was published last week, but I only had the chance to read it today. It was written by Dan Shelley, the former news director/program manager at one of Milwaukee's largest and most powerful radio stations, WTMJ. The article offers a lot of inside skinny on how Rightwing Radio chooses its slanted topics, marches in lockstep with GOP talking points, sets up its "conservative" listeners as victims, and shuts out all but the most artfully selected opposing viewpoints.

Shelley points to the popular Charlie Sykes, who hosts one of the shows he'd produced for years at WTMJ, and some others by way of examples of how the scam works.

"There is no way to win a disagreement with Charlie Sykes," writes Shelley. "Calls from listeners who disagree with him don’t get on the air if the show’s producer, who generally does the screening, fears they might make Charlie look bad. I witnessed several occasions when Sen. Russ Feingold, former Mayor John Norquist, Mayor Tom Barrett or others would call in, but wouldn’t be allowed on the air."

I'll take this moment to mention, yet again, that this is all being done on the publicly owned airwaves, which we grant license to out of the kindness of our public hearts, and which the wingnuts enjoy as public welfare queens to bludgeon Americans into voting against their own self-interest.

There's a reason guys like Hannity, Limbaugh and O'Reilly are so frightened of some form of restoration of the Fairness Doctrine. It's not because it would remove them from the air, as they like to lie about to their listeners, but because it would actually require them to be fair by carrying opposing viewpoints. Ya know, that balance thing you've heard so much about on Fox "News" where they're just kidding about it. If they weren't kidding about it, why would they be so terrified about restoring what Reagan did away with in 1987, which then allowed for the Hannitys, Limbaughs and O'Reillys to go on air, on virtually every single station, in every single market, to freely lie to the public via its own airwaves?...