Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Turnout at Broward County, Florida's precinct D001 was excellent in last Tuesday's primary election, according to the "unofficial results" posted on this county webpage.

With 1,028 ballots cast, and 930 registered voters at the precincts, voters having turned out, the turnout was an impressive 110.54%!

The BRAD BLOG called the Broward County Supervisor of Elections office to find out if there was any explanation for these numbers. We spoke with Patricia McCallister, an assistant to Supervisor Dr. Brenda C. Snipes...

ALERT! We just read the headline (via RAW STORY) at California's Bay Area NBC affiliate, and we are terrified:

"Huge delay"?! What? Why? How could it be? The first graf of the article said it all. My God...it's true...

After virtually ignoring the issue for some six straight years, our hometown newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, has run a two-part, 2,800-word "series" on concerns about voting machines, right on schedule, just in time to do absolutely no good at all before next week's upcoming Tsunami Tuesday election in the state. Waytago, LATimes!

The series reports absolutely nothing that has not already been reported over the last several years here at The BRAD BLOG, which is why the LATimes folks makes the big bucks and we don't.

They do, however, include an important point at the very end of the second article, in quoting from one of the country's most notable long-time voting machine apologists, Kimball Brace...

Diebold (which now calls itself Premier Election Systems) quietly released a "Product Advisory Notice" last Friday to the state of Florida, concerning an explained malfunction in the paper-based optical-scan voting machine used across the state. While reports of problems on those systems, and others, began surfacing throughout the day today across the Sunshine State.

The Diebold advisory warns that "No Error Message is Displayed when Ballot Fails to Feed Completely Through AccuVote-OS."

The AccuVote-OS is Diebold's precinct-based optical-scan ballot counter. The advisory is said to apply to "AccuVote-OS with Version 1.94w firmware" --- the same system which was used in New Hampshire earlier this month, and the one on which ballots were found to have gone uncounted or miscounted in virtually all of the precincts counted during Dennis Kucinich's election contest in that state.

Diebold's AccuVote-OS with v1.94w firmware is the identical system seen being hacked in HBO's Hacking Democracy after code found to be in violation of federal Voting System Guidelines was discovered on the system, and exploited to flip a mock paper ballot election without detection in late 2005.

Last November, The BRAD BLOG offered an investigative report on Diebold memory card failures discovered in Florida, and other states, about which both Diebold and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) --- mandated by law as a clearing house for such issues --- refused to notify jurisdictions that use the same system about the problem.

Though it was too late to check by the time we obtained a copy of the advisory, we are aware of no such notice having been sent to either New Hampshire nor any of the many other jurisdictions around the country which use the same, fatally flawed hardware and software...

Earlier today from a Palm Beach Post blog item...

For the record, although Florida's Republican governor and legislature have voted to finally trash the touch-screens and move to all paper ballot elections, today's Primary still uses the old touch-screens in many counties. Elsewhere, problems are occurring --- yet again --- with the paper-based Diebold op-scan systems in the Sunshine State. The same machines used in New Hampshire, and the same ones seen being hacked in HBO's Hacking Democracy, are reportedly failing in several locations there. More on that soon.

The touch-screen systems used by Palm Beach County, also home of voter fraud felon Ann Coulter, are made by Sequoia Voting Systems.

With "friends" like Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos, Democrats may not need Republicans to help them lose this year. Once again, the namesake of the largest supposedly-Progressive blogsite in the world misleads his readers, confuses issues of Election Integrity with unmade allegations of "conspiracy theories," and otherwise makes all-new extraordinary claims which are wholly unsupported by any evidence, extraordinary or otherwise.

The damage he and his minions are personally causing to the fight for verified, transparent elections is becoming greater than we can possibly describe. But we'll try...

Our friends over at BuzzFlash are featuring an exclusive interview with David Earnhardt, filmmaker of Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections, today.

Disclosure: Though we appear in the film, and Earnhardt advertises it here at The BRAD BLOG, we do not make money on the sale of the film. BuzzFlash, however, does, if you purchase it through BuzzFlash's sales link, which we recommend you do, in case you've yet to see this seminal film. They and Earnhardt deserve the support.

We hope you'll read the interview, as well.

We've got a small, if friendly, nit to pick with both Earnhardt and BuzzFlash's Mark Karlin in regard to one section of the interview in which they discuss the notion of ballots being printed out by machine, as opposed to marked by hand by the voter.

Machine-printed ballots can never be verified, after an election, as actually reflecting the voters' intent, and thus --- except for cases of disabled voters who wish to vote on such devices, as necessary, in order to vote privately and independently --- there is no legitimate reason to use such voting machines. Ever. That is, of course, if such machines even work at all. When they don't, voters can't even cast their votes.

The quick, scientific-study-based bullet points on why such machine printed ballots or "paper trails" can never be known to reflect voter intent follow below for those who'd like to know...

New Hampshire reportedly reaps $3 billion from its "first in the nation" Primary Election privilege. In the bargain, they have demonstrated to the rest of the nation how not to hold an election.

More embarrassing video tape, taken during the shameful NH Election Contest hand counts, as shot and posted by BlackBoxVoting.org...

Leave your Open Thread thoughts on tonight's State of the Union Speech in comments below...

POST-SOTU UPDATE: The Republicanists at Fox "News" just can't help themselves, even for the State of the Union...

UPDATE 8:10pm PT: Following the (supposedly) "centrist" response to the SOTU, offered up by the scared-to-death Democratic "leadership", in the person of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sibelius, a real response to Bush's SOTU was sent out by Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI). The short response follows below in full, and serves to remind us what reality looks like...

Blogged by Brad Friedman from the road...

Republican New Hampshire primary candidate Albert Howard, whose election contest hand count is currently ongoing in Concord, once again demonstrates how to call for a legitimate and reconcilable "recount."

He has just sent us a copy of the following letter, which was hand delivered to NH Secretary of State Bill Gardner earlier today [emphasis in original]...

Please note: We will be on the road for much of the rest of the day today, as we head from Santa Cruz back down to Los Angeles. We'll try to get caught up with things by tonight, as the SOTU rolls.

Thus we don't have time, for the moment, to give full background to the above story in this article. But plenty is already available, particularly in regard to concerns about chain of custody, and other sloppy "recount" procedures, from previous BRAD BLOG coverage.

For previous coverage of Albert Howard and Dennis Kucinich's Election Contests in New Hampshire, see all stories, newest first, here, and the index of most notable stories here...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Last night Fox 'News' aired a special hosted by Bret Baier, George W. Bush: Fighting to the Finish, that was an impressive piece of propaganda even by Fox's lofty standards. In order to make watching it a bit more palatable, I've made a couple of mashups addressing different aspects of the hour long program.

The first video covers the "unprecedented access" Fox 'News' was given to Bush. As Baier writes over at foxnews.com:

Unprecedented Access...

In the second mashup I've edited together many of Bret Baier's questions and transitional comments in order to highlight the extent of the propaganda. Hopefully you will find it as interesting as Baier finds his own work:

Hard Hitting...

A third mashup covering some of the remarkable content will follow tonight or tomorrow morning.

UPDATE: Third Mashup Below

Victory, The PDB, Osama, Bush's Joyousness and more...

(Hat-tip Mike Finnigan of C&L)

ADDENDUM...
By way of happy coincidence, we had mocked up the above item on Friday night for prep to run later, and then showed up to speak Saturday morning at the independent media conference here in Santa Cruz where a guy who looked very similar to the video above was making a few announcements from the podium. Turns out it was the same guy, Bryan Sacks of Philadelphia, and he was one of the organizers of the conference. Small world. Got to chat with him for a while later in the day, and happily so. He's a good guy. Plus, he thoroughly apologizes for not giving The BRAD BLOG its proper hat-tip in the above video, claiming that he did in the original script, but it ended up on the cutting room floor. We shall endeavor to forgive him and look forward to him otherwise keeping up the good work!

[UPDATE: The UK Sunday Times piece referred to below as "coming tonight" has now been published right here: "Tip-off thwarted nuclear spy ring probe." Some key passages and a bit more commentary has been been posted as an update, appended to the bottom of the article below.]

I'm in an alternative media conference up here in Santa Cruz, CA, for the bulk of the day and evening, so may or may not be here when the story gets filed. So offering an advance heads-up that UK's Sunday Times is set to offer another exclusive tonight on Sibel Edmonds' claims of the illicit sale of U.S. nuke secrets to the foreign black market, as protected by high-ranking U.S. officials, and the connections in the story to Valerie Plame Wilson's "Brewster Jennings" CIA cover company.

Should hit around 7pm PT ET. (If any of the BRAD BLOG eds are around, please feel free to update this item with a link to the new article when it runs.)

For those of you just jumping into this story, our most recent articles of note on the explosive series of Times/Edmonds stories are here...

1/6/08: SIBEL EDMONDS SPEAKS TO UK SUNDAY TIMES: SAYS U.S. OFFICIALS INVOLVED IN RELEASE OF NUKE SECRETS TO TURKEY, PAKISTAN, IRAN, OTHERS, POSSIBLY EVEN AL-QAEDA

1/8/08: Worldwide Coverage (Everywhere but in the U.S. ) of the Sibel Edmonds Bombshell

1/19/08: UK Sunday Times Scoops US Media Again, Confirms FBI Cover-Up of Documents in Sibel Edmonds Nuke Secrets Case

1/20/08: DANIEL ELLSBERG EXCLUSIVE: Covering Up the Coverage - The American Media's Complicit Failure to Investigate and Report on the Sibel Edmonds Case

The collection of all of BRAD BLOG's Edmonds stories are here...

UPDATE: The new Sunday Times piece is now posted. Here it is: "Tip-off thwarted nuclear spy ring probe"

It's another blockbuster. So big, the U.S. media have assigned several extra reporters to begin ignoring it immediately.

The article picks up on the Times' coverage from last week, which corroborated one element of an "anonymous letter" referring to an FBI case number said to be at the center of allegations by "gagged" former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds. In response to a FOIA request, the FBI had denied the existence of documents related to such a case number, though the Times corroborated the existence of an official document referring to that case.

The BRAD BLOG obtained the anonymous letter several weeks ago, prior to the Times' expose, but has yet to publish it in full.

Part of the letter alleges that Marc Grossman, the former #3 State Department official under Powell and Armitage, tipped off Turkish agents that Valerie Plame Wilson's "Brewster Jennings" was actually a CIA counter-proliferation operation tracking the sale of nuclear secrets to the foreign black market.

The Times series of articles, including the latest, does not give Grossman's name, but refers to him, and quotes him as a "State Department official." Here are the money grafs, and there are several of them, from the Times article, along with a few more details in follow-up...

Blogged by Brad from Santa Cruz, CA...

This is how bad it's gotten:

Last week, as The BRAD BLOG reported, machines in 100% of the precincts in Horry County, SC couldn't even be made to start working until noon or so in the Republican Primary. Folks were voting on any scrap of paper they could find, reportedly even paper towels. So now, it's print your own.

South Carolina uses DRE (touch-screen) voting systems made by ES&S. It will be literally and physically impossible to verify that a single vote has been recorded accurately on any of them. 100% faith-based voting. So, short of machines breaking down leading to the outrage of people not being unable to vote at all, or a huge undervote rate in some area (as we saw when 18,000 votes "disappeared" on the exact same machines in the 369 vote margin Jennings/Buchanan race in Sarasota's FL-13 Congressional election in '06 on the exact same machines) we'll likely have little to say about the results of today's Democratic Primary in the Palmetto State one way or another. Our guess will be as good (or bad) as theirs. Best of luck to ya, South Carolina.

By way of depressing reminder: This Election Year is just 26 days old.