Blogged by Brad from deep in the heart of Diebold Country Texas...

The Source Code Review sections of CA SoS Debra Bowen's independent "Top-to-Bottom Review" of voting machines were released yesterday after being scrubbed of some of the more dangerous, specific "road-maps" for hackers.

As expected, the reports are exceedingly troubling and damaging to the entire failed e-voting industry and Diebold, once again, is shown for the menace to democracy that its once-good name has now come to signify.

As reported by PCWorld...

Voting machine "sleepovers," anyone? (Yes, we're talking to you Mikel Haas, Deborah Seiler, and Michael Vu in San Diego!)

And finally, there's this --- bolding added so it can be seen easier by members of CONGRESS...

Got that, Mr. Holt and Ms. Feinstein?

And with that, we eagerly await Bowen's fateful decisions, due today, on what to do with California's electronic voting systems. She may choose to do a) nothing, b) decertify, or c) recertify with new conditional security elements. Today is Judgement Day. Stay tuned...

Special to The BRAD BLOG by Emily Levy

"The part what really makes me mad is the part that I don't know who hit me. You know, it might sound weird, but that'd be a little bit of closure for me to know who done it. You know, because when I got hit, and I hearin' somebody clicking a gun by my head about three, four times, and that gun not going off. You know, for a lot of years I've been hearing that click and I've been hearing that gun going off. Jumping up out of my sleep."
--Larry Young, July 2007, 18 years after he was attacked in the parking lot of a Savannah, Georgia Burger King.

You might think Larry Young would know who hit him, because two weeks ago the man who was convicted in the case came within 24 hours of being executed by the State of Georgia. But Larry Young doesn't know because he, like nearly all the witnesses whose testimony originally convicted Troy Anthony Davis of the assault on Young and the murder of a white police officer that night, doesn't believe Davis is guilty. Next week, the testimony these witnesses want to give, testimony that will show their original "witness statements" were coerced by police, will finally be heard.

On August 19, 1989, Larry Young, an African American man who was then homeless, was assaulted in a Burger King parking lot by two or three men. He was hit in the head by what is believed to be a gun. As Young described to The BRAD BLOG in a phone interview, he fell to the ground, bleeding. Someone held a gun to his head and tried to shoot him, but the gun didn't fire. Young's friend dragged him away from the assailants. Before they got far, they heard two gunshots. Police officer Mark Allen McPhail had been killed.

Young himself was detained that night, he told The BRAD BLOG. "The blood was just steady fallin', sort of fallin' … The police grabbed me, threw me on the car, handcuffed me and threw me in the police car. And I was back there for about a hour and a half, maybe about a hour and a half. And I kept telling 'em, you know, I needed some medical attention."

The police took him in for questioning, refusing him medical care until he signed a statement implicating Troy Davis, a man he says he never saw that night, in his attack and the killing of Officer McPhail.

Young told The BRAD BLOG, "So whatever statements that they made me take, I mean, it was just a lot of statements made like, 'Well, you give me a statement of what you need, what we need, and then you'll go to the hospital.' So therefore whatever the statements were that was given was not accurate statements. ... I'm concerned ... about my health, you know. And I'm hearing these clicks in my head still, you know what I'm saying, sitting up there, I'm pretty much kinda scared. So I just pretty much signed what they wanted me to sign and whatever went on the courtroom, you know, I mean it was all pretty much like coerced."

On evidence like this, the State of Georgia may send Troy Davis to his death?...

Blogged by John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org

"The problems we found in the code were far more pervasive, and much more easily exploitable, than I had ever imagined they would be." Matt Blaze 02 August

Today the California Source Code Review Reports were released by Secretary of State Bowen's office. Reports were released on the Diebold, Sequoia, and Hart Intercivic voting systems.

The lead researcher for the Sequoia source code team was Matt Blaze. In his blog, Exhaustive Search, Blaze discusses the results of all of the inspections.

Blaze then concludes with what may be a hint of decisions to come:

Blogged quickly by Brad Friedman, still on the road, still deep in the heart of Texas...

Currently way off the grid, and not even sure if I can get this item to post from here. So we'll leave the heavy lifting to Jose Lambiet of the Palm Beach Post, who delivers another Ann Coulter Voter Fraud scoop, reporting that she's "not off the hook" just yet.

For the backstory, see our "Coulter Fraud" Special Coverage Page at https://BradBlog.com/CoulterFraud. The short version: She committed third-degree voter fraud in Palm Beach County when she lied on her registration. Period. Dead to rights. She also lied on her driver's license down there (another third-degree felony) and knowingly voted at the wrong precinct (first degree misdemeanor). Again, all dead to rights. The link above offers all the proof any attorney with balls bigger than Coulter's would need. And here's her fraudulent Voter Registration form to boot.

But for now, here's Lambiet's latest scoop in the matter:

The rest of Lambiet's story is here at the Post site, but since those stories get archived after a while, and since we think it's a good idea to keep this story in the public eye, the rest of his coverage is also copied below...

Blogged quickly by Brad from somewhere deep in the heart of Texas...

Color us shocked. Elections Officials who oversee their own elections or those of their party leaders...and then go to work for the Voting Machine Companies they do business with/apologize for. Hey, at least they're now getting paid (publicly) for the lobbying work they were doing for those companies already.

New York Times notices the problem we have with the way our electoral system "works" and how so many of those who run it seem to work for everyone but the voters...

And a note to NY Times' Ian Urbina: Good story. Though it would be a journalistic breath of fresh air if you avoided already discredited political operatives as quoted sources. E.g., folks like Robert Pastor of the hoax Baker/Carter National Election Reform Commission and the anti-democratic GOP wingnut SoS of Indiana, Todd Rokita. Consider it a friendly request with appreciation that you seem to be back on this beat...

Guest Blogged by John Washburn

Currently, the public portions of the top to bottom review published by California last week have rightly been the subject of banner headlines. A report from the University of Connecticut, however, which was entitled "Integrity Vulnerabilities in the Diebold TSx Voting Terminal" and released a few days prior with not quite as much fanfare, provides an excellent counter to the oft-repeated vendor talking point that the California testing is similar to "giving keys to a thief."

The University of Connecticut report is immune to this specious argument. The University of Connecticut team had no access to source code or any information which was not publicly available. These limitations are precisely what all three vendors defined as "realistic" in their testimony in California at the public hearing on Monday July, 30, 2007. Yet, under these vendor-approved conditions, the University of Connecticut found yet another set of new, serious, and election altering defects and was able to exploit them in a disturbingly effective manner.

Blogged by Brad from somewhere in TX...

We've been largely off the grid for the last 24, and will likely continue to be over the next two or three days. At least. (On the road, with frustratingly spotty net access and several article deadlines looming.) So for now, we're happy to point over to AlterNet's coverage of the story listeners may have heard us cursorily break during a phone call from Ohio's Paddy Schaeffer on the air the Friday before last while we were Guest Hosting the Peter B. Collins Show from Houston.

Here's the lede...

Read Steve Rosenfeld's excellent report in full for much more detail and reminders of the raft of apparently fraudulent cases which these missing ballots may have helped to explain one way or another. Such as the "10,000 voters from several Bible belt counties who voted for Bush and voted in favor of gay marriage, if the results are true," along with the "dozen rural counties, [where] virtually unknown Democrats at the bottom of the ballot received more votes than Kerry."

As well, we're given a few jarring reminders of where else these missing ballots might otherwise have filled in so many still-unexplained gaps (all, of course, completely ignored by the corporate mainstream media for years)...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org

In a recently released report, New York Attorney Andrea Novick, Esq., tells members of New York state government and now the world that the vendors of the voting machines that most of us use are NOT responsible citizens and why. This report was written for, and addressed to, Governor Spitzer, the State Board of Elections and the State Legislature.

In her report Novick explains that New York state has laws that should bar any of the vendors from doing business in the state.

New York State Law states the following about corporate integrity...

According to a story in the Miami Herald by Marc Caputo;

The study by the Florida State University Security and Assurance In Information Technology Laboratory (SAIT) has found that the issues discovered by Harri Hursti in the now famous Hursti I hack have not been addressed by Diebold. The SAIT Team also inspected the state's Diebold DREs and DRE Bootloader.

In a letter to David Byrd of Diebold, Secretary of State Kurt Browning gave Diebold until August 17 to correct the identified problems. Failure to do that will result in the system not being certified for use in the next election in the state.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org

To date the "Red Team" reports have been released; a preliminary report on audits has been released; and the accessibility report has been released. Our cup nearly runneth over.

But wait, there's more?

Yes, there are still 6 more reports that have not been released. There are three reports, one for each vendor, on the source code review. There are also three reports, one for each vendor, on the document review. All six of these reports are important to the total picture and all of them will be used in the final decision making process.

We encourage the Secretary of State to let the voters see those remaining reports. If the reports are 100 pages each, that's 600 pages of information that we need time to read and study.

Secretary Bowen, release the reports, please.

UPDATE 01 August: Today Princeton Prof. Ed Felten of Diebold Accuvote TS hack fame, asked on his blog, FreedomToTinker, "Where are the California E-Voting Reports". In his blog Prof. Felten says:

We ask again; Secretary Bowen, release the reports, please.

UPDATE 02 AugustAnother set of reports, source code review, has been released today. Thank you Secretary Bowen.

Blogged by Brad Friedman from somewhere in Texas...

If you've yet to find time to read the hundreds of pages from the landmark "Top-to-Bottom Review" of voting systems from California University, as commissioned by CA SoS Debra Bowen, we don't blame ya.

So after plowing through dozens of articles covering the reports, we'll make it easy for you, and recommend two short articles which will get you all quickly caught up with an overview of some of the most notable findings from all of the various reports as written in nearly human-being language.

As well, we're happy to sum up --- and destroy --- the pathetic, predictable, and lock-step Election Officials' and Vendors' response to Bowen's report in a few easy paragraphs....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.Org with input from Ellen Theisen, also of VotersUnite.Org

Now that the California Secretary of State's "Top-To-Bottom Review" testing is complete and the reports have been submitted, nearly everyone is falling over themselves to read and talk about the many startling vulnerabilities easily found by the "Red Teams" who performed hack testing on the systems.

However, there is another report that has been overlooked, for the most part, by the media and the public. That is the "Accessibility Review" which examined whether the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems meet federal requirements to allow voters with disabilities to cast their votes privately and independently as required by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Maybe it's because, as some have pointed out, accessibility issues are not as "sexy" as hacking into voting machines. Or maybe it's because this report is 155 pages long as compared to less than 20 pages for the "Red Team" reports. Either way, the failures found in the accessibility report may pack more dynamite and leave more questions unanswered than the security reports.

The "Executive Summary" of that report says it all:

Notice that the researchers say, "none met the accessibility requirements of current law." That's federal and state law. The machines have been sold for years --- and, in fact, the use of DRE machines as a whole has been jammed down America's polling places --- on the basis that they meet federal HAVA mandates for an accessible means of voting in every polling place. And yet, the California analysts found, they are not accessible at all...

Guest Blogged from Sacramento by Emily Levy of VelvetRevolution.us (with assistance from Michelle Gabriel, photos by Bill Lackemacher of Sacramento for Democracy) from the public hearing on 7/30/07, called by California Secretary of State to receive comments on her landmark "Top-to-Bottom review" of the state’s electronic voting systems. No internet access was available in the hearing room, so I wasn’t able to live blog as I’d hoped. I did, however, take copious notes, which are posted in full below this brief summary.

ED NOTE: The video of the hearing, which was not easily available as it streamed live today, is now posted here and here. But I recommend Emily's detailed description below for a great deal of value-added content and perspective! And it's faster! - BF

Note: Story very slightly updated with some corrections in the spelling of names, plus one substantive correction regarding Jim Soper's testimony (the very last one in the entire article).

SACRAMENTO - California Secretary of State Debra Bowen made opening remarks, followed by an overview of the Top-To-Bottom Review by the chief investigator, Matthew Bishop, University of California Davis (UCD) Professor of Computer Science.

Following that, each of the three vendors whose machines went through the Top-To-Bottom Review were given 30 minutes to respond to the report. Diebold went first and only took about five of the 30 minutes, followed by Hart Intercivic and Sequoia.

I’m absolutely thrilled to report that Sequoia knows just how to solve the problems found in the Top-To-Bottom Review: California should just by newer systems from them!

After lunch was the public comment period, the longest part of the hearing. I’ve paraphrased and sometimes quoted the comments of just about every person who testified (including my own testimony). There were maybe 25 or 30 county election officials present, many of whom spoke. Freddie Oakley of Yolo County, an election integrity hero, spoke in favor of the Top-To-Bottom Review and said we bought these systems to accommodate voters with special needs and disabilities and “we have let them down in the most appalling way” by certifying systems with such obvious defects and continuing to use them despite those defects.

I believe every other elections official spoke critically of the Top-To-Bottom Review, most criticizing Bowen for not including county elections officials in the review, not reviewing policies and procedures as part of the Top-To-Bottom Review, and conducting the review in a laboratory setting rather than a real election setting. (I, in contrast, think our elections in recent years have been nothing but one giant beta test!)

It will take some scrolling to find my notes on the remarks of the many election integrity advocates who spoke. Most spoke late in the day, probably because they signed up later, after the pre-hearing press conference they held outside the Secretary of State’s office building. But it’s worth the scrolling, because many important things were said. Many of the EI advocates encouraged Secretary Bowen to decertify not just the three election systems tested, but all electronic voting systems. Many advocated for hand-counted paper ballots. Testimony was frequently backed up with credentials, experience, statistics and technical information. The depth and breadth of expertise in the election integrity movement continues to amaze me. (Note: I’ve posted my own comments in full because I had them available. If others who spoke would like their testimony posted in full, I invite them to paste them into the “comments” section of this blog item.)

Several people with disabilities and advocates for people with disabilities spoke. Some, notably Jennifer Kidder, spoke about the importance of election integrity. Kidder said, “The purpose of any equal opportunity legislation is to get marginalized voices heard,” and went on to note that this purpose is defeated if, after voting privately and independently, the vote of a disabled voter is changed by an electronic voting system.

Most of the people with disabilities and their advocates, however, cautioned against going “back” to paper ballots, saying that would be a move in the wrong direction in terms of the accessibility of voting systems. In general, they were supportive of the types of mitigations recommended by the accessibility team of the Top-To-Bottom Review, despite the findings that none of the systems tested actually met the federal accessibility standards as required by law.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s office is accepting public comments by email until Wednesday, August 1 at VotingSystems@sos.ca.gov On Friday, August 3, Bowen will announce what actions she will take in light of the Top-To-Bottom Review. We can only hope that she remembers why she was elected, and will take bold action to protect California's elections.

Detailed notes on the hearing appear below. Where I have paraphrased a speaker, I have done so in the first person, sometimes making my own [occasionally snarky] comments inside square brackets. I hope this isn’t confusing...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Hannity & Colmes break new terroritory tonight by discussing exorcism with two Catholic priests in light of a botched exorcism of a three year old child in Phoenix. First, Father Jonathan Morris, who believes more in God when he sees the presence of evil in someone, assures viewers that what took place in Phoenix was not actually an exorcism. Father Edward Beck then explains that being possessed by the Devil or an evil spirit is possible and that the cure for such a malady is exorcism.

Signs to look for to determine if the Devil has taken possession of a person include: speaking in a foreign language that is not one's own language, speaking in tongues, having a certain power or knowledge that one should not have, and seeing into the future.

At one point, Sean Hannity turns to Father Morris, who has witnessed an exorcism, and states:

Father Morris, a Fox News contributor, responds by telling a story that happened to him in Spain while promoting the movie The Passion of the Christ. Long story short, the chief exorcist in Spain didn't know what to think about the movie until he went to his most difficult exorcism case and mentioned the Mel Gibson flick. The Devil inside the tough case immediately went crazy which assured the chief exorcist that the movie was okay since the Devil hates all good things.

Next week, the chief exorcist reviews The Simpsons Movie.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Raising Bill O'Reilly's ire this time is a doctored photograph that appeared on the DailyKos website of Senator Joe Lieberman on his knees seemingly unzipping George W. Bush's pants in prelude to performing a sexual act. The fairly tame photo is clearly meant as parody but, according to O'Reilly, is "very offensive" and a "disgraceful exposition." O'Reilly assures viewers that Lieberman "is a patriot and a man of conviction" who is "opposing the loons in the Senate" and deserves "respect not hatred."

O'Reilly goes on to threaten JetBlue and the Democratic candidates speaking at the dKos Convention before bringing on two consultants to discuss the matter further where he again compares dKos to Nazis and the KKK. And when Lanny Davis offers a weak defense that not everyone on DailyKos is a hater, O'Reilly screams, "Hey look, there was some good stuff on the Nazi site. You know, give to the kids, give to the Aryan kids."

See video of O'Reilly's original attack of dKos here along with some commentary from Brad of The BRAD BLOG.