Yes, we're still working on Election 2014 around here. As we've told you many times, problems in elections often take days, weeks or even months or years to reveal themselves, even after the mainstream media has long since moved on.

Last week we told you about the "recount" that awaits the GMO labeling ballot initiative in the state of Oregon and the amazing appearance of 21 "new" mystery ballots that flipped the results of a state Senate recount in Maine. And now, a "recount" lies ahead for the one remaining "too close to call" U.S. Congressional election in Arizona's 2nd Congressional District.

The state's first-ever "recount" of a Congressional race will be very different from the one that will be carried out for Oregon's Measure 92 and --- as demonstrated via a federal court ruling issued on Thanksgiving Day that disallowed the tally of some 133 provisional and early ballots before today's state certification of the race --- much more controversial. We can only hope no mystery ballots appear, as occurred in the still-unexplained contest in Maine.

The razor-thin contest in AZ-2 is between incumbent Rep. Ron Barber (D) and his challenger Martha McSally (R). Out of some 220,000 votes cast in the AZ-2 race --- in Pima and Cochise Counties --- the paper ballot computer tabulators report a margin of "victory" for McSally over Barber of just 161 votes, according to results posted by the Sec. of State.

The U.S. House seat in Arizona's 2nd District was formerly occupied by Rep. Gabby Giffords (D) until she was critically injured in a 2011 mass shooting that killed six and wounded 13 during a public event in Tucson. After Giffords' resignation following the shooting, she was replaced in a special election by Barber, one of her top staffers who was also shot twice himself during the massacre. Barber then went on to defeat McSally in the 2012 general election by less than one percent.

Prior to today's certification of this year's rematch, there were a number of oddities and controversies during the tabulation period. Among the problems, the reported Election Night failure of the paper ballot optical-scan computer tabulators in Cochise County to read a number of memory cards from the Early Voting period. Those sensitive cards store results of precinct-scanned paper ballots. They had to be flown by helicopter to another county before their contents could be discerned (even though paper ballots existed that could have simply been counted by human beings, rather than relying on electronic tallying systems.)

In addition to the troubling ruling last week by the U.S. District Court and the flawed electronic tabulation of some early ballots, local election integrity experts are also concerned about the state mandated process for "recounting" the ballots, a process which includes using the same flawed electronic scanners once again to determine if the initial scan was carried out accurately...

I had hoped to keep this week's Thanksgiving BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio kinda light, cuz, ya know, it's Thanksgiving. St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch didn't make that easy.

Nonetheless, we ended up with a very lively show, covering one helluva election fraud mystery in Maine; some good election news in Oregon; and exclusive information on why Ferguson and St. Louis County ran out of paper ballots on Election Day.

Then, speaking of bad news, it's Thanksgiving week and, yes, the news is lousy, so what is there to be thankful for in the wake of this week's terrible news in Ferguson and all the bad news of late before it? Some great callers come to the rescue!

My thanks to all of you this Thanksgiving which, as a few callers reminded me, isn't nearly as terrible as it seemed before this week's show...

Download MP3 or listen online here...

UPDATE 12/10/2014: MAINE MYSTERY SOLVED! Full details now here...

An election fraud mystery has emerged in Maine's tiny Town of Long Island. The strange case has not only changed the previously announced "winner" of the election, but the contested results affect the entire state Senate and are now the subject of an investigation demanded by the Maine Democratic Party.

On Election Night this year, Democrat Catherine Breen reportedly won the race for state Senate by a very slim 32 votes in Maine's Senate District 25, according to the then-unofficial tally. However, during a hand recount of the votes last week, 21 previously unaccounted-for ballots were discovered to be in the locked Long Island ballot box. All of the "new" ballots included votes for Cathleen Manchester, the Republican candidate who had requested the recount.

Those 21 "new" ballots were above and beyond the 171 votes counted by hand on Election Night (which proved to be an otherwise perfect count) and the 171 voters listed as having voted on the "voter manifest" at Long Island's only precinct.

The "new" votes, combined with a few other adjustments to the tallies in the 25th District's six other towns, were enough to reverse the results, giving an 11-vote victory to the Republican candidate after the recount, even as neither party is able to explain the appearance of the "phantom ballots" in Long Island...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: NY Gov. Cuomo blames meteorologists for his failure to prep for deadly Buffalo snowstorm; Arrests in Canada protesting another tar sands pipeline; You'll never guess who is now the world leader in deforestation; PLUS: Those lefty treehugger hippies at the World Bank warn extreme weather will be the 'new normal' by 2050 ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Solar and wind energy start to win on price vs. fossil fuels; Giving thanks for climate heroes big and small this thanksgiving; White House threatens to put brakes on alternative biofuels; EPA orders pollution upgrades on big TX coal plants; White evangelicals believe extreme weather disasters caused by End Times, not climate change; Neither rain nor snow nor heat sways views on climate science... PLUS: Leaked: The Oil Lobby's Conspiracy to Kill Off California's Climate Law... and much, MUCH more! ...

"Seasons Greetings"? No "Merry Christmas"?! Fox "News" is gonna be furious.

P.S. A few selected thoughts of mine on the events in Ferguson this evening, from throughout the night on Twitter, follow below...

The November 4, 2014 elections are not over in several parts of the country. One of those places is Oregon, where progressive candidates and ballot measures were largely successful in bucking the rightward trend of election results produced by much of the rest of the nation. Nonetheless, a GMO-related ballot measure requiring the labeling of genetically modified foods appeared to have failed on Election Night in the wake of a record amount of campaign cash spent by food manufacturers to defeat it.

The measure, however, now appears headed toward a statewide "recount" as the official computer-reported results have greatly narrowed in the weeks following Election Day, with the race now regarded as "too close to call" by some. The "No" margin decreased to less than 1,500 votes as of late last week, after the Yes on 92 campaign was said to have been "reaching out to 13,000 voters whose ballots had signature problems and weren't counted," according to Oregon's KPTV.

[Note: The BRAD BLOG tends to use quotes around the word "recount", since most ballots in the U.S., even hand-marked paper ballots, are never actually counted by human beings in the first place, with most jurisdictions relying only on easily-manipulated and sometimes wildly inaccurate computer tabulators which tally ballots either correctly or incorrectly. Without an actual hand-count by human beings, its impossible to know either way.]

For the first time this year, the state publicly released the names of voters whose ballots had signature problems. That transparency allowed Measure 92's supporters to attempt to notify those voters to request they contact election officials to work out any discrepancies in order to have their ballots tallied.

As of Monday afternoon, numbers posted on the Oregon Sec. of State's results page show the margin having narrowed even further, with just 809 "No" votes outpacing "Yes" votes, out of more than 1.5 million ballots cast across the state. Finalized results are due from all counties by 5pm today...

It's investigative Election Integrity muckraking in East Coast/West Coast stereo!

My thanks to Thom for inviting me for this week's longer-than-usual panel conversation on his Big Picture TV show, and to Palast for being the inimitably indefatigable Greg Palast!

Lively discussion includes everything from the secret GOP Crosscheck program to Greg's assertion that it cost Democrats several key U.S. Senate races to the U.S. now ranked 26th in electoral integrity among world democracies (last among Western nations) to the Republicans' long hard fight to return to Jim Crowism in TX and beyond...

[Thanks to Palast's office for stitching both segments together in one easy-to-watch clip! I've replaced the original embed with that version above.]

Well, I've been remiss over the years since 2012 in covering the BENGHAZI!!! "scandal" on these pages.

So allow me to make up for some of that lost time today, with this article just out from AP tonight:

The article continues describing the findings of the House Intel Committee report which its Republican chair Rep. Mike Rogers (MI) and Democratic ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (MD) announced today. Among those findings, in response to the epic reports of a "stand down order" said to have been issued by the CIA or the State Dept. or the White House, AP reports: "None of that is true, according to the House Intelligence Committee report."

You get the idea.

Nonetheless, as AP notes, "the eighth Benghazi investigation is being carried out by a House Select Committee appointed in May." That special select committee, convened by Congressional "conservatives", is set to cost tax payers some $4 million. How very "conservative" of them.

It's a pretty cut and dry case here. Satan is totes busted...

As of Friday, November 21, the video above, posted on November 9, has received 7,082,535 views. If that's not further proof of Satan, I don't know what is.

[P.S. Speaking of the devil...Heading in to the studio to do a "Bigger Picture Panel" segment on election issues along with Greg Palast on Thom Hartmann's Big Picture TV show shortly. Watch live on RT America at 7p ET (it repeats at 10p ET), or check for other viewing options here. It also streams live online here.]

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Record-breaking extreme winter storm breaks Buffalo, NY; It's official: October 2014 hottest October on record; Sorry, Republicans: China will cap coal use by 2020; PLUS: Obama doubles down on climate foreign policy... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): NASA video: a year in C02; Senate climate hawks introduce 'carbon fee & dividend' legislation; Keystone XL PR company plans dirty tricks campaign; Criminal charges for illegal toxic mine dumping in Alaska; World must 'mind the carbon emissions gap' to avoid dangerous climate change; Why are US farmers getting billions in aid amid record crop yields? ... PLUS: San Diego to use recycled wastewater for new drinking water supply ... and much, MUCH more! ...

Buffalo, New York...

NY Daily News reports, "there's more on the way" after the first wave which fell in about 24-36 hours [emphasis added]:

One other problem: temps are expected to rise in Buffalo over the weekend after the next monster volley of snow. They will be pushing 60 degrees by Monday. Got flood insurance?

Not that scientists have been predicting this sort of thing for years now. Well, maybe they have. But what do "scientists" know about science?!

UPDATE: For more on why this record breaking storm is another result of global warming, listen to our latest Green News Report...

A report [PDF] by researchers at Harvard and the University of Sydney finds the U.S. ranks just 26th on a global index of election integrity. That finding places the U.S. in the category of nations with "Moderate" election integrity, ranking the country one notch above Mexico and one notch below Micronesia, according to the findings tracking elections in 66 countries.

The report, compiled earlier this year and published last month in the American Political Science Association's PS: Political Science and Politics journal, "aims to evaluate the quality of elections held around the world." It is the first of a planned annual series from the Electoral Integrity Project. The organization describes itself as "an independent non-profit scholarly research project based at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and the University of Sydney's Department of Government and International Relations, funded by the Australian Research Council and other research bodies."

The group aims to document "why elections fail and what we can do about it."

This year's assessments by 855 election experts around the world are indexed and included in the survey which covers "all national parliamentary and presidential elections held in independent nation-states (with a population of more than 100,000) over an eighteen month period from 1 July 2012 to 31 December 2013."

"Based on a survey collecting the views of election experts, the research aims to provide independent and reliable evidence to compare whether countries meet international standards of electoral integrity," the report's introduction explains. "The study collects 49 indicators to compare elections and countries around the globe."

While the researchers found even worse problems in the elections of many younger countries, some of those nations still managed to out-perform the U.S. on the overall ranking, as we brought up the tail end of Western democratic nations, according to the experts' analysis, as described in one of bullet-points summarizing the report's findings [emphasis in original]...

Well, this seems a very good omen...

The word, according to the Oxford editors, was only added to OxfordDictionaries.com in August of this year. A bit slow there, chaps.

All in all though, very good news --- no matter how much the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries (and their acolytes) try to undermine progress towards a vastly healthier world. Vape on.

On Friday, one day after the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) filed a 43-page, four-count Criminal Indictment [PDF] against infamous, long-time West Virginia coal boss Donald L. Blankenship, U.S. District Court Judge Irene C. Berger issued a gag order in the case in an effort to secure a federal jury in West Virginia that could "be fair and impartial and whose verdict [will be] based only upon evidence presented during trial."

That will be no easy feat.

Blankenship, whom Rolling Stone described in 2010 as "the Dark Lord of Coal Country," is the former CEO and Chairman of the Board of Massey Energy Co. An extraordinarily rapacious capitalist, Blankenship is credited with transforming coal into an "aggressive, partisan industry" where the goal was to extract coal "as fast and as cheap as possible."

Blankenship is a principle force behind the environmentally destructive "mountaintop removal" --- a practice that "has destroyed 2,000 miles of streams and damaged more than a million acres of forest," according to Jeff Goodell at Rolling Stone. Under Blankenship's leadership, the magazine reports, Massey also "injected toxic coal slurry," a biproduct of washing coal before its used for burning, "near underground aquifers" resulting in contamination of drinking water. (Where, elsewhere in the U.S., heart disease is the top killer, in Appalachia cancer is the number one cause of death.)

Last week's federal indictment, however, relates to "the Dark Lord's" role in the massive April 5, 2010 explosion at the Massey-owned Upper Big Branch mine ("UBB") that resulted in the deaths of 29 Massey employees. It was the nation's worst mine disaster in the past 40 years.

The indictment alleges that "Blankenship...conspired to commit and cause routine violations of mandatory federal mine safety standards," including "ventilation" regulations designed to prevent explosions, in order to maximize profits; that he "conspired to defraud the United States by impeding the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration ("MSHA") in carrying out its duties at UBB," and that Blankenship made "materially false statements...to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission" essentially to protect the value of Massey stock.

If convicted, Blankenship could wind up serving 31 years in federal prison. If convicted. Therein lies the rub....

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: US Senate floor fight fails to pass Keystone XL pipeline; Can Congress override the President next year?; Native Americans say KXL is 'an act of war' and vow to fight the pipeline on their land; PLUS: Finally! Accountability for the 'Dark Lord of Coal': Don Blankenship indicted on criminal charges... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Injuries and violations continue at coal mines that owe millions in fines; Scientists think they know why starfish are melting; PR firms' astroturf documents expose oil industry attacks; G20 issues climate change statement after 'trench warfare'; Soap ingredient triclosan triggers liver cancer in mice; Federal pipeline regulator issues first-ever warning; GMO pest resistance rising... PLUS: Peru prepares to host climate talks as indigenous forest defenders die ... and much, MUCH more! ...