-- Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG

Two years ago, in June of '08, the ES&S "InkaVote Plus" e-vote system in Los Angeles County misprinted 4 out of 12 of my own votes.

Today, as I tried to vote on the same system, the failure was even worse. Incredibly. And not just because I cover issues of Election Integrity for a "living."

I spent more than two and a half hours not casting a vote on the system before eventually I, the poll workers, and, apparently, the folks at the L.A. County Registrar's central help desk call center, simply gave up. A complete and total failure of the e-voting system for disabled voters in the nation's largest voting jurisdiction. Again. On a system the county spent millions to buy in order to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) boondoggle by allowing disabled voters to cast their votes independently. Complete and total failure.

I did my best to document the disaster as it happened, in real time, on my Twitter feed. But the cell signal was very bad at the polling place, so not everything got out. But here's what happened in detail, and with a few graphics tossed in...

As we flagged last night, early reports today are that the concerns about the polling place fiasco in Garland County, Arkansas, have now "come to full flower."

Garland Election Commissioner Charles Tapp had unilaterally (without the vote of his two other commissioners) decided to reduce the number of polling locations from 42 during the general primary on May 18th, to just 2 for today's run-off primary.

The decision is expected to most drastically affect Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who did exceptionally well in the county during the general Democratic primary in his now-very-tight race against incumbent U.S. Senator Blanche Lincoln.

After Tapp had announced that an additional polling place would be opened last Saturday for early voting to ease the expected crowds today, he changed his mind at the last moment, and "hundreds of voters" are said to have shown up on Saturday, without being allowed to vote.

Today, long lines and parking problems are being reported at the county's only two open polling places, after 12,000 had cast votes in the general primary on May 8th...

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport
VIA SMART PHONE: Stitcher Radio!

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Another very bad week for the fossil fuel industry: explosion, spills, & toxic dumps! Girding up for the long haul in the Gulf ... PLUS: Will Democrats finally use the BP Oil Disaster to pass clean energy legislation? And will the GOP keep lying about it? ... 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): Murkowski's (R-AK) resolution is a step backward for American clean energy; EPA tightens Sulfur Dioxide limits; Scientists projects "Arctic death spiral"; Guilty verdicts in Bhopal tragedy that killed 15,000; Judge blocks Alaska's wolf-kill plan; Mystery crop damage threatens hundreds of acres; Renewables revolution to provide 95 per cent of global electricity by 2050...PLUS: Ten Things You Should Never Buy Again ...

Elections are being held in some 13 states (Arkansas, California, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia) today. Lord help us.

A reminder how helpful screenshots of election results taken from official websites on election night and in the days following, can potentially be, can be found in our recent exclusive on the still unexplained results from the Monroe County, Arkansas, May 18th primary, where thousands of votes "disappeared" in the days after the election.

If you don't know how to take a screenshot, here's the quick primer (at least on a PC): While viewing the page in question, hold the ALT button and hit the PrtScreen button. Then paste the ensuing clipboard graphic into a graphics program, and save with a filename that includes both the date and time the shot was taken. Hopefully someone else can explain how to do that on a Mac in comments.

Of course, as you hear or read of problems at the polls throughout the day, feel free to email us with details and URLs, and we'll do our best to look into it.

On the more-political-less-Election-Integrity side of the equation, The BRAD BLOG's resident attorney/historian-in-chief Ernest Canning has offered a number of recent, noteworthy articles on matters related to the ballot out here in CA, perhaps they're worth re-linking this morning. Of particular interest --- even to readers across the country --- should be the top item below, concerning Prop 16, and the deceptive way in which a huge corporate power is attempting to deceive voters with the use of millions of dollars to support a phony campaign.

For that matter, in reviewing the articles below, they each speak to one common element: the outlandish power that money holds, now more than ever, when it comes to our "democracy"...

5/9/10: Prop 16 'Power Play': A Private Utility's Assault on Publicly-Owned Electricity Providers

4/27/10: Meg Whitman, Wall Street, 'Billionaire Sociopaths' and the Media 'Substance Deficit'
5/31/10: Billionaire vs. Billionaire: Propaganda and Race in CA's GOP Gubernatorial Primary

5/16/10: Winograd Misses 'Debate' Chance to Slam Harman's Dissembling, Conflicts-of-Interest

I've been working on another story, of late, so haven't been able to cover the precinct place mess in Garland County, AR which emerged over the weekend. (What's the matter with Arkansas when it comes to elections?! See my exclusive on Monroe County from late last week, for just one possible answer, in case you're wondering). Also, I was happy to see the issue getting plenty of coverage from sites like DailyKos and MoveOn, etc., so didn't feel I was either needed, or had anything additional to add at the moment.

But, as the bizarre decision/behavior by the Garland County Election Commissioner Charles Tapp could come into play tomorrow, depending on the reported results of the hotly contested Democratic U.S. Senate primary run-off election between incumbent Sen. Blanche Lincoln and Lt. Gov. Bill Halter --- and as so many have written in to make sure I knew about the situation (I do) --- it seems worth at least flagging here for now at The BRAD BLOG, to make sure that you know about it.

For that, allow me to defer to Joyce McCloy's Voting News coverage of the coverage today...

Guest editorial by Ernest A. Canning

"The problem with making excuses for and giving explanations for a child's misbehavior(s) is that it doesn't 'help' the child. It doesn't HELP anybody. In fact, it does nothing but cloud one's judgment preventing any form of objective observation from being made thereby eliminating any real assistance being implemented."
- Randa Williamson-McCoy, "Making Excuses for Your Child's Actions and Behavior," 05/19/2010

Beginning with Israel's unprovoked attack on the U.S.S. Liberty during the 1967 Six Day War, continuing throughout the next 43 year illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, right up to the June 2, 2010 Obama administration decision to block a U.N. Human Rights Council proposal to establish an independent international inquiry into Israel's heavily armed assault and capture of the six vessel, unarmed civilian humanitarian aid convoy in international waters, the relationship between the U.S. and Israel has resembled that of a parent whose love, devotion and inability to say "no" to their incorrigible teenager in the face of increasing levels of anti-social behavior only serves to harm parent, child and society...

Not satisfied with merely destroying the Gulf of Mexico, on Friday, BP reported the emission of more than 500,000 pounds of pollutants and non-pollutants in April and May at their refinery in Texas City, TX. The emissions included hundreds of thousands of pounds of deadly benzene, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide.

Via Think Progress:

For the record, this is the same BP refinery where an explosion in 2005 killed 15 workers and injured more than 170 others. The company was forced to pay a meager $71 million in federal fines for that incident. It's as if the company has friends in high places, or something...

-- Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG

What's going on in Monroe County, Arkansas?

We've been looking at their May 18 "Super-ish Tuesday" election night numbers on the AR Secretary of State's website (Monroe County doesn't have its own public election results website) since the night of the election, and the posted results can only be described as going from "impossible" on the day after the election, to possible but still entirely inexplicable.

At least six different election officials at both the county and state levels remain unable to tell The BRAD BLOG how any of it could have happened, even though thousands of votes appear to have simply disappeared in the final certified results, and the state is set to hold its primary run-off election next Tuesday...

More here if you can stand them...

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), the decades-old media watchdog group whose condemnation of the NYTimes mis-reporting on the ACORN Pimp Hoax picked up on our detailed exposé here, and ultimately helped force the "paper of record" into a begrudging partial correction, has now picked up on our coverage earlier this week of ABC News' Good Morning America host George Stephanopoulos' and his near-verbatim use of the Times discredited reporting in his introduction to an interview with Rightwing hoaxsters James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart on Tuesday...

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport
VIA SMART PHONE: Stitcher Radio!

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Latest on the BP Oil Disaster: Progress on 'Cut-'N-Cap'? President Obama rallies for a clean energy economy, Oil reaches the beaches of Mississippi and Alabama... PLUS: Dumb things Sarah Palin now says about offshore drilling ... 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): Record-breaking heat wave kills hundreds in India, Pakistan; USDA forecasts a plague of grasshoppers for 2010; Has Southwestern U.S. reached 'peak water'?; Greenland's rapid uplift is evidence of rapid ice loss; EPA finally forcing Texas to clean up its air ...PLUS: UK nukes: "What we are effectively paying for here is decades of cheap nuclear electricity for which we have suddenly got a massive postdated bill"...

Via Bloomberg...

But wait! There's more...

As convicted federal criminal and rightwing dirty-trickster James O'Keefe repeated over and again this morning on ABC's Good Morning America, "this isn't about me." (Full video at end of article.)

To that end, neither is The BRAD BLOG's coverage of the scam artists' phony ACORN videos, or his attempted wiretap plot in a U.S. Senator's office, or his latest startling exposé for which he's released video today (also posted at end of article) purporting to show that he was allowed a full hour for his lunch break during one of two training days as a U.S. Census worker in April, and even allowed to leave an hour or two early when that day's training completed ahead of schedule. (Shocking, I know!)

Our coverage isn't about him. Never has been. We expect partisan scam artists like him, and his employer, rightwing con-man Andrew Breitbart, to get away with whatever deceptive, partisan nonsense they can. This has always been about the utter failure of the corporate mainstream media in irresponsibly giving them a platform to publicize their propaganda, without even bothering to check any of the facts for accuracy first.

This morning, George Stephanopoulos did exactly that in the introduction to his "exclusive" interview with O'Keefe and Breitbart (who was on hand to enjoy some of O'Keefe's spotlight as well, for some reason) by repeating an inaccurate report from the New York Times nearly verbatim, despite the "paper of record" having corrected at least part of it over two months ago, and despite their Public Editor (ombudsman) having been broadly ridiculed for an embarrassing attempt to defend it...

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport
VIA SMART PHONE: Stitcher Radio!

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: OILpocalypse Now: After 'top kill' fails, BP begins next new plan in the Gulf, as Obama calls for accountability ......And what about just bombing it?... PLUS: Crackdown on coal mines, sinkholes in Guatemala, and sneaky corporate anti-clean energy propositions in California ... 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): Processed food manufacturers use deceptive tactics to fight salt control; Gray wolves rebound in West, to residents' unease; The hidden health costs of transportation; Trafigura trial begins in Ivory Coast toxic waste dumping case; Virus ravages major food source in Africa; How utilities plan to continue evading toxic air pollution controls ...PLUS: Special Report: The world water supply looks unmanageable. But it needn’t be ...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

No doubt, the last person eight-term "Blue Dog" Democrat Rep. Jane Harman (CA-36) expected to see when she sat down for a Progressive Caucus panel discussion on April 20 at the California Democratic Convention was the progressive Democratic challenger for her U.S. House seat, Marcy Winograd. In fact, Winograd wasn't even in the room when Harman began to speak.

Winograd explained:

Winograd seized the moment to engage in a debate of sorts (video below), confronting the wealthy eight-term Congresswoman on a range of issues, including Harman's committee vote to significantly extend Big Pharma's patent protection over biomedical drugs. Harman's response was remarkably deceptive; yet, perhaps because this was not a pre-scheduled "debate," Winograd failed to seize a rare face-to-face moment to directly confront Harman's conflicts-of-interest and prevarication...