By Michael Richardson and Brad Friedman

While revelations surrounding the mysterious 18,000 "undervotes" in the November 2006 U.S. House election between Christine Jennings and Vern Buchanan in Florida's 13th Congressional district continue to inform the nation about the dangers of electronic voting machines, new information has recently come to light exposing a shocking lack of responsible oversight by those entrusted with overseeing the certification of electronic voting systems at the federal level.

An investigation into what may have gone wrong in that election has revealed a serious security vulnerability on some, and possibly all, versions of the iVotronic touch-screen voting system widely used across the country. The iVotronic is a Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) touch-screen voting machine manufactured by Elections Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), the nation's largest distributor of such systems.

The vulnerability is said to allow for a single malicious user to introduce a virus into the system which "could potentially steal all the votes in that county, without being detected," according to a noted computer scientist and voting system expert who has reviewed the findings.

And yet, despite their federal mandate to serve as a "clearinghouse" to the nation for such information, a series of email exchanges between an Election Integrity advocate and officials at the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) has revealed that the federal oversight body is refusing to notify states of the alarming security issue.

The recent email conversation shows that even in light of the EAC's review of the warning from the computer scientist who characterized the "security hole" as severe, needing to be "taken very seriously," and among the most serious ever discovered in a voting system, the EAC is unwilling to take action.

Recent reports by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) have taken the EAC to task for a failure to meet their legislated mandate for informing the public and elections officials about such matters. However, a review of the email communications to and from the EAC's Jeannie Layson shows that the federal body is steadfast in their refusal to take action to alert either elections officials or the public about the security risk recently discovered by a team of eight noted computer scientists.

The EAC's current Chairwoman, Executive Director, Director of Voting System Certification, and other top officials at both the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), and even the GAO, were included in the series of email communications, The BRAD BLOG has learned.

The vulnerability was initially discovered by a panel of scientists convened by the State of Florida to study the possible causes for the FL-13 election debacle. The team's discovery revealed that a design issue in the widely used iVotronic system could allow for a viral attack, by a single individual, which could then spread unnoticed throughout the electronic election infrastructure of an entire county.

A similar vulnerability was found in DRE touch-screen system made by Diebold last Summer by a team of computer scientists at Princeton University.

Attempts to seek information about EAC plans to notify other states and local jurisdictions that use the same vulnerable voting systems as the ones in FL-13 have been met with an astounding refusal, troubling denial, buck-passing, and a lack of accountability by the federal commission of Presidential-appointees. The agency has also come under fire in recent weeks for a number of questionably partisan decisions and other failures to perform as mandated by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.

Of late, the EAC has been forced to respond to a great deal of controversy, on a number of different operational matters and policies, as revealed by a series of articles on this site and in mainstream outlets such as the New York Times and USA Today. Several of those matters have drawn Congressional notice, questioning of EAC officials, and letters of inquiry. Thus, this latest revelation is likely to add to the rising concern of Congress members as new federal legislation introduced by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), currently facing mark-up by a Congressional committee, would permanently fund the now-embattled EAC. Funding for the agency was originally mandated by HAVA only through 2005.

The new ES&S iVotronic vulnerability first emerged on February 23, 2007, when the Florida Dept. of State released a report detailing their findings from the investigation into what happened in Sarasota's still-contested Jennings/Buchanan race. That election was ultimately decided by just 369 votes. The state's official findings included a report [PDF] conducted by an eight-member computer science and technology team under the auspices of Florida State University (FSU). The report sought, unsuccessfully, to determine the cause of the unexplained "undervotes" reported by the iVotronic touch-screen voting systems used in Sarasota's portion of the FL-13 race on Election Day and in early voting.

Although the reason thousands of votes turned up missing from those systems remained unknown, the study team did discover a serious security flaw in the iVotronic system that is used in Sarasota and many other jurisdictions across the country (and even the world, as France is set to use the same systems in their upcoming Presidential Election.)

Election integrity watchdog John Gideon, a frequent BRAD BLOG contributer and the Co-Director and Information Manager for VotersUnite.org, says that the security flaw may pertain to "every ES&S iVotronic voting machine used in the US and overseas." A total of eight separate versions of the system --- without and without so-called "voter verified paper audit trail" (VVPAT)" printers --- are currently approved as qualified at the federal level, he explained. Three of those are definitely affected and it is likely that the others are as well.

The details, the dangers, and the denials are all described below...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

The Reno 911 Sheriff's Department tackles many important election issues including poorly written ballot initiatives, race, custody, legality of peeking inside the ballot box and actual election fraud. At a minimum, the ease with which a two person conspiracy can circumvent the will of the Reno voters is extremely disheartening. The video runs 6:46.

Thought from Brad: Not to be a stickler, but Reno doesn't use paper ballots (they use Sequoia EDGE II DRE's with the VeriVote "Paper Trail" printer), but point taken nonetheless.

Robert Reich on today's This Week:

Thank you, Mr. Reich. Consider it done. (For the last three years and counting.)

RAW STORY has the video and transcript...

Whaddaya know? A federal judge has found no "voter fraud" in Missouri, finding in favor of the Secretary of State, and against the Department of Justice in their continuing attempt to game the election system and keep voters from voting via bogus claims of "voter fraud".

This is what your Dept. of Justice has been wasting their time on, at the behest of the most criminally politicized bunch who has ever occupied the White House.

As BRAD BLOG readers likely know, Missouri is "Thor" Hearne country. The St. Louisan Hearne was the national general counsel for Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. and the cofounder of the currently-defunct "non-partisan" "American Center for Voting Rights" (ACVR). The ACVR was ground zero for entire GOP "voter fraud" scam and Hearne cut his teeth disenfranchising Missouri voters on behalf of Gov. Matt Blunt (and his father Roy, who once served as MO Sec. of State, and now serves as Minority Whip in the U.S. House).

See this page for more on the snakeoil salesemen of the ACVR --- who have, since the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal broke, slithered back underground. For now anyway...

The judge's full ruling in the trumped up MO "Voter Fraud" case is here [PDF].

(Hat-tip Victoria Parks!)

Just back in town, and catching up with much that we've been unable to keep up with. That process will likely continue for several days, even as we've got a "biggie" coming tomorrow.

In the meantime, today's "biggie" news comes out of The Albuquerque Journal indicating that the order to fire New Mexico's U.S. Attorney David Iglesias seems to have come directly from George W. Bush after Sen. Pete Domenici's (R-NM) attempts to get the prosecutor to either bring "voter fraud" cases or be removed had otherwise failed.

Domenici's attempts preceded the Nov. 2006 election between Rep. Heather Wilson (R) and NM's former Democratic Attorney General Patricia Madrid, who ended up being reported as the loser by fewer than 900 votes.

Talking Points Memo distills the Journal piece, we distill TPM's distillation...

A TPM followup to the piece notes that it's "curious" the White House has yet to comment --- at all --- on the report...

Guest Blogged by Stephen Heller

The truest act of patriotism is to protect the public from a corrupt and wasteful government.
-- TheFirstWhistleblower.org

The United States government and American corporations are counting on you to keep your mouth shut.

According to Transparency International's Peter Eigen, the World Bank estimates that every year corruption costs one trillion dollars. Here in the United States, billions of our tax dollars are stolen every year due to corruption, bribery, fraud, willful malfeasance and misfeasance, and plain old greed. And if you come across evidence of this fraud and corruption, you are expected to keep quiet about it.

The government and the corporations want you to shut up. Stay asleep, people. Nothing to see here, just move along. Go to work, earn your pay, watch TV so you'll know what products you should be buying, then go to the mall and buy them. Don't worry about what your government is doing, don't think about what the corporations are doing, just trust us and be good little "sheeple." Just. Shut. Up.

To hell with 'em.

Don't shut up. Don't let the bastards win. When you see something, say something. Take a deep breath, and blow that whistle HARD!

You should know that you'll probably get hammered for it. You'll likely lose your job, get harassed and threatened, you might even be charged with a crime.

I know whereof I speak...

Guest Blogged by DES...

The Progressive blogosphere has a long-running joke "theory" regarding a holy grail of sorts - the one story or the one piece of evidence that would tie together all the scandals rolling out of the Bush Administration on a near-hourly basis. A sort of Unified Field Theory, only of corruption, political style.

This week, the U.S. Attorney Purge Scandal has mushroomed like a toxic Turdblossom cloud over the Executive Branch, tying together the electoral and campaign machinations of the Bush White House with the increasingly obvious, and now documented, politicization of the Department of Justice. Not only were U.S. Attorneys fired for not pursuing bogus "voter fraud" cases while other U.S. Attorneys retained for misusing their substantial power in politically motivated prosecutions, but considerable taxpayer resources have been devoted (and misused) towards trumping up claims of "epidemic" voter fraud where none exists: even the supposedly non-partisan U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) is in on it, covering up their own reports whenever the results don't jibe with the Bush Admin Master Plan.

Democratic advocacy organization People For The American Way (PFAW) is still inexplicably mis-stating (or purposely obfuscating) the true nature of the difference between paper trails vs. paper ballots in the Holt bill, HR 811 and has now been found to be deceptively using Brad's name, and that of The BRAD BLOG to do it. We will, of course, remain vigilant in keeping the pressure on PFAW and their friends to do the right thing, and several articles this week call on you to write pfaw@pfaw.org to demand exactly that.

The unsinkable Secretary of State for California, Debra Bowen, presented a knock-out editorial last week spelling out the steps ahead for truly verifiable elections. And sitting right next to the Secretary of State's op/ed was BRAD BLOG's own guest blogger Emily Levy's op/ed, literally and figuratively on the same page!

As Arlen Parsa exposed last week, the Iraq surge is (unsurprisingly) unraveling like the U.S. Attorney Purge cover-up, and the next few weeks of House Oversight and Reform Committee hearings (will Condi Rice show? will Gonzales?) should be nothing if not, er, interesting.

And as Michael Richardson detailed, voter registration issues in Florida are once again drawing questions, even as AP reported thousands of destroyed voter registration forms found in Atlanta.

Catch up on the key headlines you may have missed last week at The BRAD BLOG, so you'll be upped for this coming week's istallment of Incompetence and Corruption on Parade. If lastweek's developments were any indication, hold onto your hats, folks, it's becoming an increasingly bumpier and bumpier ride...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Tonight on HBO's Real Time, Bill Maher smacks down the Bush administration for the hiring and promotion of unqualified personnel including #3 Justice Department official Monica Goodling and the other 150 graduates from Pat Robertson's Regent University Law School that work for the administration. For more on Regent's Law School be sure to check out my post, "When Jesus Calls" (at HotPotatoMash), from earlier in the week.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

As previously reported by The BRAD BLOG (here and here) the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is being accused of altering a report that they commissioned and that did not meet their expectations.

In this case the EAC was apparently hoping to show widespread voter fraud had taken place in recent elections but the report that they commissioned revealed just the opposite. The EAC buried the report and issued one of their own that came to no conclusion at all.

Today Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) sent a letter to Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Chairwoman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which has oversight over the EAC, "expressing his concern over the revelations and asking her to examine the process by which the EAC report was produced. Menendez maintains that the use of the EAC to advance a political agenda is a blow to the integrity of the electoral system and that an investigation into the motivations behind the panel's report is warranted."

Mendendez's press release on the matter is now posted here...

LATE UPDATE: Feinstein sends letter of inquiry on these matters to EAC, demanding all communications and processes leading to the alteration and/or hiding of both the EAC's "Voter Fraud" report and the report showing that Voter ID laws depress voter turnout. Announcement and Letter to EAC posted here...

ADDITIONAL NOTE: The BRAD BLOG will have an EXCLUSIVE new report next week, on yet another recently discovered and astounding failure by the EAC on the heels of a few questions we had ourselves for them over the past week or two...

Blogged by Brad on the road...

Imagine if the reporting at The BRAD BLOG was as wrong as often and consistently as the entire swath of the Rightwing Blogosphere. We'd be marginalized and completely ignored by every legitimate mainstream media outlet...even more than we are now. And we're almost never wrong. But in those rare occassions where we are, we're eager to admit it. Prominently.

We're not talking about the small potatoes on the wingnut side, either. We're talking about the most prominent of them, from DRUDGE to Malkin to Power Line to the entire plethora of echo monkeys in the wrong after wrong after wrong wingnut 'sphere.

And yet, despite their consistent record of getting the story wrong, time after time after time, they continue to be referenced as "news" sources by the MSM --- that supposed "liberal media" --- nonetheless.

"In the last month National Public Radio, MSNBC, Bloomberg Radio, Fox News, CNN, and CNBC have all (foolishly) cited the Drudge Report as a source or an on-air reference to support a particular story," Eric Boehlert reported at Media Matters on Tuesday. "Yet all of them turned away last week when Drudge smeared a well-known journalist with a lie. And here's 10 bucks that says those very same news outlets in coming weeks will go back to citing Drudge items," he predicts, in what would be a sucker's bet for anyone to take.

Boehlert's latest report is long overdue. Not that any of it will get the attention that the now-discredited wingnut reports did, as he details, following last week's monkey-echoed (and completely wrong) debacle, claiming that a CNN reporter had "heckled" John McCain at a Baghdad press conference.

Boehlert is dead right, of course. And while his report details one instance after another of high-profile wingnuts making absolute asses of themselves, and failing to correct in most cases or apologize in all cases, it's the corporate mainstream "liberal" media who continue to help perpetuate this sort of bullshit by both reporting it as "news" and failing to expose it as garbage when it's found to be wrong. As it usually is.

Meanwhile, the same MSM fail to cover even a fraction of the news reported from the Progressive 'sphere, despite the fact that it's consistently correct.

As Boehlert details:

Read his report and be appalled.

Beyond that, let us know if you have any ideas on how we could get away with being so wrong, so often, and still become so popular. It would save us a helluva lot of time. And we could use the money.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

It really doesn't get any worse than this Michelle Malkin (filling in for Bill O'Reilly) interview of Malik Shabazz Thursday night on Fox "News". There is so much wrong with the exchange that no analysis can do it justice. The clip picks up about halfway through a discussion on the Duke lacrosse case. Here is a taste:

Only on Fox "News" and immediately after back to back to back Don Imus segments!

Blogged by Brad on the road...

Jesus...does this nightmare ever end?!...

(Hat-tip BRAD BLOG commenter "Ancient")

It was "60 feet long and only lasted about fifteen minutes," the legendary and mysterious Freeway Blogger reports about the above handiwork, courtesy of a brave minion in Chicago. But it was "well worth it according to the artists," says FB, who points out the sign, seen by thousands in that short moment, was "Made with cheap latex paint and disposable plastic tablecloths: about ten dollars for a hundred foot roll. Brilliant."

But leave it to the legendary and mysterious one himself to hit it out of the park with this latest beauty featuring what just may be one of the best catch phrases of our time...

"Blowing the job" bumper stickers coming soon, FB tells us, along with a request that we alert folks to his new "public punditry" contest in league with a few other freedom fighting sites.

Consider it done, and a job decidedly not blown, amigo...Far it be for The BRAD BLOG to leave any unfortunate stain on our reputation.

(Be sure to click the link above, btw, for a sampling of some of FB's greatest historical hits!)

Guest blogged by DES...

Apropos of voter registration database problems elsewhere, as covered by BRAD BLOG's Michael Richardson earlier today, the Georgia Secretary of State's office has announced an investigation into how 75,000 voter registration cards ended up in an Atlanta trash bin, exposing sensitive information with voters' full names, addresses, and social security numbers.

AP has the details...