To nobody's suprise, Democracy Now! announces that charges against journalist Amy Goodman and two other staff journalists arrested while doing their job covering protests at the Republican National Convention are being dropped by the City of St. Paul. Journalists intimidated. Mission accomplished...

Chris Bowers has more thoughts on the arrests of journalists, and the dropped charges, and what he alleges amounted to 'a deal' of sorts between the RNC and the St. Paul cops.

Videos of DN! reporter Nicole Salazar being assaulted by the police (:23 seconds) and Goodman's outrageous arrest while peacefully trying to learn what had happened to her reporters (:49 seconds), both follow below...

It is now a bit fun watching some previously silent news organizations fall all over themselves as they suddenly recognize that our election process is seriously flawed. Today CNN reported, and many smaller organizations picked up the report, that the GAO released a report this week on voting system testing that finds that the Election Assistance Commission [EAC] has not notified election officials across the country about electronic voting machine failures.

This has been no secret within the Election Integrity community and has been one of our main complaints about the EAC. Voting systems fail and the EAC does nothing about it. They argue instead that none of the voting systems were certified by the EAC so they have no right/mandate to do anything about them. The GAO recommends that congress step in with legislation to force this issue.

We agree but dislike the fact that we have to wait on a snail-slow congress to do anything. CNN also reports on the CommonCause/Century Foundation report that was also released this week and that points to 10 states that they believe will have problems in Nov. My guess is that the “ten states” will grow substantially to 40 or more by election day and on beyond.

Also in the news is that the re-re-recount of ballots in Palm Beach Co Florida is taking place today and tomorrow. One can only guess what they are going to find. Ballots from 2004? Punch cards with hanging chads?

And a member of the Washington DC council has subpoenaed Sequoia for records that may reveal what really happened in the recent primary. Could it be that the council will find that the Sequoia spokeswoman, Michelle Shafer’s, declaration that the company is not at fault; “No, no, no” is really “Yes, yes, yes”? ...

The chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers, is calling on the John McCain campaign to "immediately halt Republican vote suppression efforts," as seen recently in Michigan --- where a county GOP chair announced his intention to use home foreclosure lists to challenge voter eligibility at the polls on Election Day --- and elsewhere.

Conyers has announced hearings on these issues, and is calling on Attorney General Michael Mukasey to launch an immediate "full scale investigation" into these matters. He has sent letters both to McCain [PDF] and to Mukasey [PDF] (the latter signed by 23 members of Congress) to that effect, as well as issuing the following statement today...

Tribune Media Services' Bob Koehler was one of the first voices, from within the corporate mainstream media, to speak about the bastardization of our current electoral system. He did so, beginning way back in the darkest days of 2005, when writing and/or saying such things aloud got folks fired, spiked, and otherwise Dixie Chicked for daring to speak such truths in a country which once claimed to believe in "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press."

From Ohio's 2004 abberation of democracy, to voting systems that don't work, to those who would do anything to win, such as keep voters from voting however they can, Koehler has continued to bang the drum, no matter the heat he has taken in return.

This week he continues to beat that drum, and offers us a few kind words in the bargain, yet again. Here's a few key grafs from his latest, headlined "Goo Goo Government"...

Guest Blogged by des...

Nouriel Roubini, RGE Monitor, who accurately predicted the current economic crisis: "Last week we argued that, with the nationalization of Fannie and Freddie, comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke had started transforming the USA into the USSRA (United Socialist State Republic of America). This transformation of the USA into a country where there is socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street (i.e. where profits are privatized and losses are socialized) continues … with the nationalization of AIG."

Atrios: "The entire financial system is practically collapsing and they're lamenting the possibility of more regulation...People who prattle on about 'the free market' are usually too stupid to have a clue how complicated and pervasive the "rules" had to be to to get a well-functioning modern market system: sophisticated concepts of contracts and enforcement, property rights, legal entities, proper accounting, bankruptcy, limited liability, etc... etc..., did not descend from the heavens but were, in fact, created."

Matt Yglesias: "Who knew the 'Washington Consensus' would die in Washington, DC under a Republican President in a mad fit of bailouts and nationalizations?"

Tom Toles:

From the St. Petersburg Times...

The article goes on to note that FL's Republican SoS Kurt Browning believes the mailing is "confusing" and "unfortunate", but does not note whether or not he plans to do anything about it. We're not holding our breath. Neither are we holding it for Democrats down there to do much about it either.

The mailings sent to registered Democrats appear to be classic "caging" letters, marked as "Do Not Forward", so that they will then be returned to the GOP if there is any problem with delivery. Those returned letters will likely then be used as a basis to challenge the legitimacy of those particular voters on Election Day....

MSNBC reports on the Dem injunction filed this week to try and stop the MI GOP's "anything-to-win" scheme to use home foreclosure lists to challenge voters at the polls this year. Kieth Olbermann discusses the matter with Allen Raymond, the formerly-jailed Republican, election rigger, and author of How To Rig an Election. Raymond notes that the scheme, while unseemly, is hardly unusual for the GOP...

RAW STORY offers more details...

Here's a welcome sign that at least some in the corporate media are finally beginning to understand the complicated threat to democracy that is the boondoggle of electronic voting.

Bill Mego, in the Naperville Sun, asks all of the right questions (and granted, they are complicated ones to understand, unless one tries) about the junk Diebold voting system irresponsibly employed, at great tax-payer expense, by the DuPage County, IL Board of Elections.

One could as easily replace "Diebold" in the above sentence with any other voting system vendor, and "DuPage" with almost any other county in the nation (even though DuPage features one of the worst Election Boards in the country, and you'll be hearing still more about them soon). But the "good news" for today: at least a few in the media --- okay, at least Bill Mego --- finally "get" it, and are beginning to serve their readership well.

Let's get a few hundred more and we'll be in business. (And I'd be out of it! Happily!)

Nope, and Eric Boehlert explains why. After years of having abdicated their Constitutionally-guaranteed role as watchdog for the public, the corporate media's too-little, too-late, temporary stint at actually reporting is now regarded as little more than a joke. And one that not even McCain/Palin feel they need to take seriously. What they've sowed, so shall we reap.

We’ve been telling you that voter registration issues are going to be important this year. Even voters who have been registered for years and who have voted in recent elections may find out, when they go to the polls in Nov., that they are not eligible to cast ballots. In our “Featured” article Kim Zetter of Wired News has done a great job in gathering information on voter registration data bases and presenting that information. It’s a scary story. Everyone needs to check to ensure they are still registered to vote and that the registration is correct. Do it now while there is still time to make corrections...

Over at HuffPo, Nancy Scola files a nice piece asking whether or not "New Media's obsessiveness" can save democracy, given that "Elections in the U.S. involve countless moving parts and...so many different players [that] Improving the way we vote demands sustained, focused attention --- not exactly the strong suit of the American Press."

It's a job for bloggers, she suggests, since the corporate media have, at least so far, not proven up to the task. She may be right, even though the thought simply exhausts me more than I am already.

She goes on to mention a few of us (yes, she names me specifically) who have been fighting this battle for quite some time. "From the sidelines, their campaign often seemed quixotic," she writes, "But [as electronic voting machines are now being scrapped for junk, recycled and/or sold on eBay] we're watching history bend their way."

Nice. Though not as nice as the following turn of phrase, so well writ that I had to share it:

Game, set, match. Well done, Nancy.

With that, one friendly critique for her if I could be so bold: Paperless electronic voting is not the problem --- as she suggests in the piece --- as if adding "paper trails" to touch-screens makes a damned bit of difference (this article and its accompanying video from the Computer Security Group at UC Santa Barbara should make that crystal clear, no matter what some computer scientists like Princeton's Ed Felten and Verified Voting's David Dill keep saying out loud.) The problem is that democracy in this country demands nothing short of the transparency offered by a hand-marked paper ballot --- one that is actually counted, and counted accurately --- for every vote cast in America. Period.

And that point should be served from a silver platter, and carried directly to every election official and election official in the country, in the beak of a bald eagle.

I'll once again be hosting KPFK/Pacifica's "Special Election Year Coverage" hour from 2p-3p PT (5p-6p ET) today (Wednesday).

I hope to be focusing on plans (or lack thereof) by both Democrats and Republicans to help protect your vote, though neither the Obama/DNC nor the McCain/RNC has so far been particularly forthcoming in offering a rep to discuss those plans. So if they don't show up, I guess I'll have to discuss their plans myself. To bad for them, I guess.

Guests scheduled for today...

• JON GREENBAUM - Director of the National Lawyers Committee's Voting Rights Project, on their new, non-partisan, 866OurVote.org election protection effort announced today.
• MARK CRISPIN MILLER - NYU Media Professor, author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform and Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. See his BRAD BLOG guest blog on why he believes Palin was chosen as Veep by the GOP, filed yesterday.

In addition to that, I will be giving away some DVDs of the freshly released documentary Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story and tickets to next Tuesday night's Los Angeles screening of the documentary Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections at the Fairfax in Hollywood to callers (see the websites of each for more details.)

KPFK is heard at 90.7FM in Los Angeles and 98.7FM in Santa Barbara and streams live on the net at KPFK.org. Please tune in, stream in, and call-in at 818-985-5735, if you like.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: It was another lively, and hopefully very informative show today, with a bunch o' great calls and more. Unfortunately, our best laid plans for Mark Crispin Miller were for naught, as we lost him on the Long Island Railroad somewhere, but Jon Greenbaum was great, with a lotta good info, and some interesting information concerning the National Lawyers Committee's support for a bill that supported the continued use of touch-screen voting machines. I'm hopeful they will consider changing their position in the future, even as they're doing a great job of serving the voters with their 866-OUR-VOTE election protection effort this season!

MP3 Download (appx 55 mins), or listen online...

BTW...I hope those within spittin' distance of L.A. will come to the screening of Uncounted in Los Angeles --- as mentioned during the show, next Tuesday (9/23) at Fairfax Cinemas, 7907 Beverly Blvd. --- where you'll be able to spit on me, filmmaker David Earnhardt, "Diebold Document Whistleblower" Steve Heller, and host Jerry Quickly of KPFK in the Q&A that follows. If you can't come, you can get the DVD at the website, OR help support our work here and get a special version of the DVD, signed by Earnhardt, in exchange for a contribution of $50 or more to The BRAD BLOG.

We hope to offer a similar premium soon, for the just-released --- and scary as hell --- Murder, Spies & Voting Lies!

And, in addition to everything else, the dirty trick push-polling seems to have begun in earnest. From AP today...

As usual, "anything to win" for these guys.

SAVE R VOTE is a group of election watchdogs in Riverside Co California. Yesterday the group gave the county Board of Supervisors a report that they wrote after pouring over more than 10,000 documents for the past three months. Their report included evidence of elections staff correcting documents to balance ballot inventory; electronic voting machines being delivered up to 11 days before the election, some times to bathrooms [Election law permits officials to deliver voting machines a week before Election Day]; and missing electronic voting cartridges. Of course the county registrar could only do all she could do to minimize the issue. Congratulations to SAVE R VOTE. They got the county supervisors to listen. They have ordered an audit of the Registrar’s office to determine why there were hundreds of violations found. ...

-- Brad Friedman

I've been quite critical of the Obama/DNC plan (or lack thereof) for "election protection" this year, noting that it looks, smells and sounds a lot like a slightly beefed-up version of the Kerry/DNC "we'll have thousands of lawyers in place on Election Day should anything go wrong."

On Election Day, of course, if DNC lawyers are still trying to keep up with what's going on, it's already game over. While for years Osama Bin Laden and Muslim extremists had supposedly declared war on the U.S., as the legend goes, America paid little attention until it was too late. So it is with the raging Republican War on Democracy, where proactive steps are necessary (beginning long ago, but we'll take what we can get at this point) to join the war and push back against the GOP's assault on the most democratic of all values, the right to freely cast one's vote, to have that vote counted, and to have it counted accurately.

Back in 2006, after speaking to a group of DNC election attorneys in Chicago, I wrote about the "Dysfunction at the DNC" and the persistent cluelessness they had displayed at the time concerning a number of very real threats to our electoral system. While Obama has certainly displayed a tendency to understand at least some of the issues at stake --- far more so than his '04 counterpart --- the party, from every sign I'm able to get, remains out of touch with the serious threats they face: from the massive front-end disenfranchisement efforts, about which they are at least somewhat aware, to the back-end disenfranchisement efforts via manipulation and/or often-undiscoverable "tabulation error" of completely un-transparent electronic voting systems used in virtually every county, in every state in the union.

So we may be grasping for any optimistic straw we can find here, but at least today we have one such sign of proactivity from the Obama/DNC that we can tell you about...