Guest Blogged by John Gideon

And so it begins! Today the Washington Post has revealed, in a superbly written and investigated story, that Diebold secretly made modifications to thousands of their voting machines in Maryland and that everyone involved seems to have forgotten to tell the State Board of Elections about it.

It seems that after the state bought machines in 2002 they began experiencing intermittent and wide-spread screen freezes. Finally in 2005 Diebold installed all new systems boards in all 4,700 machines.

And, oh by the way, they forgot to tell the State Board of Elections that they had done anything. The State Elections Administrator, Linda Lamone, and her staff seem to have known but members of the SBOE seem to have been left out of the discussion.

UPDATE FROM BRAD: This is a very detailed story with a duplicitous cast of characters and it is very well investigated and told. Kudos to WaPo's Cameron W. Barr for this coverage! We look forward to seeing much more of it!

Also see Baltimore Sun's coverage which offers still more damning details about the duplicity of both Diebold (who still has the MD contract and hasn't yet been sued) and the MD State Board of Elections as headed by the Democratic Diebold-apologist Linda Lamone (who still has a job, remarkably enough.)

UPDATE FROM JOHN 10/26 4:45am PT: A coalition of candidates in Maryland has now asked that only paper ballots be used in the upcoming election. The coalition, with candidates for different offices and representing different political parties, has joined together under the banner of the non-partisan Candidates Alliance for Recountable Elections (CARE). A media release explains their stance on this subject and is below...

NOTE: The coverage of the Hart Intercivic screen display problems in Virginia having been found now in other states such as Texas and California has been moved to it's own item here....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

As reported by The BRAD BLOG on Tuesday, Hart Intercivic machines being used in Virginia are cutting off the names of candidates when they appear on the review screen. Thus James H. "Jim" Webb shows as James H. "Jim" on the screen.

Well, when a problem is found in one place it is going to be found elsewhere too. Now counties in Texas are reporting the same problem according to the Austin American-Statesman.

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 mandates that a voting machine must provide the voter with an ability to review their vote before they finalize the process. These machines may be in violation of that law but that can be left to the attorneys. It might be nice if those attorneys showed up now, instead of after the election when it'll be too late.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Tucker Carlson speaking today to Missouri Senate candidate Claire McCaskill about the Michael J. Fox stem cell research ad she is running in her effort to unseat Republican Jim Talent:

So Tucker is a bit uncomfortable with the video because he feels like it makes his views appear immoral. But, since that cannot be the case, it must be McCaskill's fault for putting him in the awkward position in the first place. How dare she play on his emotions by showing a real person being ravaged by a horrible disease. Really, what does any of it have to do with the stem cell debate?

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Enlist at www.VideoTheVote.org.

Watch for more from VelvetRevolution.us soon.

Last month we reported on the Defense Department's newly announced scheme to allow military and overseas ballots to be cast via the Internet. It was pointed out, among other concerns, that in many cases troop and overseas citizen votes would be subject to conversion from unsecured email voting into faxed documents by a private company who, in turn, would then forward the vote to the appropriate county jurisdiction.

The San Jose Mercury News quoted experts at the time who charged the system was "ripe for fraud" as military voters would apparently not be warned that their ballots might be seen by others and transferred into faxes, etc. by "a private contractor whose top executives have made political contributions to Republican Party organizations."

Underscoring those initial reports today, a group of independent computer scientists and E-Voting experts including David Jefferson of Livermore National Laboratories, Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins, David Wagner of UC Berkeley, and Barbara Simons, a former researcher for IBM, have released an alarming short paper warning of "significant risks" found in the newly announced plan from the DoD's "Federal Voting Assistance Program" (FVAP).

The group had been members of a scientific peer review panel for a previous DoD Military and Overseas Internet voting scheme in 2004. At the time, they found the plan featured "a large number of security risks and vulnerabilities, including denial of service attacks, insider attacks, viral attacks on voters' PCs." That experimental program was subsequently cancelled after the findings.

But now, in September of this year --- just over one month ago --- the DoD announced and implemented their new scheme for military and overseas citizen voting via the Internet, to be used this November 7th without any public testing or peer review whatsoever.

According to today's report, the new DoD voting scheme --- known as the "Interim Voting Assistance System" (IVAS) --- has been put in place without any "publicly available external security examination" and has "never been used in a public election before (not even in a primary)."

The scientists say that security concerns about the new, untested system include loss of privacy and identify theft for the military and overseas voters and, even more troubling, they found the system to be vulnerable to hackers and tampering by governments both foreign and domestic.

The six page report is now available here [PDF].

From the report's troubling introduction:

In an email received by The BRAD BLOG this morning, Simons summarizes the report's three main findings, characterized as "serious concerns about the security issues posed by this new system."

Her succint, yet alarming, email is posted in full below....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

The Chicago Tribune is reporting that the city of Chicago Board of Elections Commissioners has decided that they may hold back payment on their new voting machines because they are afraid of 'potential glitches.'

Cook County's election board, a separate entity, will not be paying their portion of the $26M still owed to Sequoia until after the election in two weeks. Now the city has openly voted, at least for now, to see what happens in the election before they make a decision to make their final payment.

The guinea pig voters may end up giving up their democracy in the bargain, but at least they may save a few dollars!

Sequoia's president, Jack Blaine, told the paper that he felt the company had done all they could and that they deserved to be paid. As the Trib reports...

What with all the talk of the disaster that is Diebold, Inc., other Voting Machine Companies such as ES&S and Sequoia have gotten a far too easy ride over the past several months. The easiest ride of all, however --- of the big four democracy-hating American Voting Machine Companies --- has gone to Hart InterCivic, which deserves no such benefit of the doubt.

So to be clear: Hart InterCivic voting systems suck just as much as the others.

Washington Post today has details on how their machines are sucking in the hotly contested U.S. Senate race in Virginia between George Allen and "James H. 'Jim'"

The "good news" reported in the article: "Hart InterCivic officials yesterday said they hoped to correct the problem by next fall."

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.Org

In this segment of 'Democracy At Risk' Lou and Kitty cover the latest cautionary report on voting and elections, in this report from Electionline.Org, a national non-partisan, non-profit group. Lou also reports on yesterday's breaking story from The BRAD BLOG regarding the elections security breach discovered in the Chicago, Illinois voter registration data base.

The text-transcript of Tuesday's segment on Lou Dobbs Tonight follows in full...

The endorsement from Esquire magazine is short and sweet, and is now added to the list --- along with the Daytona Beach News-Journal's endorsement of publications supporting Clint Curtis over the corrupt Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff) in Florida's 24th U.S. House Congressional District:

So much for Feeney's discredited attempts to sell the idea that Curtis is "not fit for Congress." Looks like the nation's newspapers and magazines seem to think it's Feeney who's not fit for the post.

And the voters, in yesterday's Zogby poll showing Curtis and Feeney in a "virtual toss-up," would seem to agree. Notable numbers, if only because Curtis has had almost zero money to use in his campaign while Feeney has had more than $1 million.

(Donate to Curtis here if you'd like to help --- unlike Feeney, Curtis is currently getting no money from either the national party or huge corporate PACs.)

In the meantime, the Curtis campaign has just released two new one-minute radio spots. They're both linked below. In the first one, he challenges Feeney to a public polygraph test for the both of them. (Clint has already passed one himself in re: his allegations about Feeney.)

-- Curtis for Congress, Audio Ad: "Take the Test, Tom!"

-- Curtis for Congress, Audio Ad: "Vote for Clint Curtis!"

Let us know what you think, and remember that donations made above will help to get these things on the air all over the 24th district in Florida to counter Feeney's disgraceful smear campaign against Curtis.

One last thought, posted below the fold is a comment sent to the Clint Curtis Blog from someone who claims to be a professional pollster who says about that Zogby poll showing the dead heat that the "That poll is even better news than advertised. That's not a dead heat --- you may well be winning!"

He goes on to add, "I'm a professional pollster and let me give you a polling insider's tip about how to interpret a poll like this one." Those "insider tips" are beneath the fold...

In a WaPo article from Saturday (we were outta town, and are just now getting caught up with much) on the possible origins of the double-super-secret Diebold source code which showed up out of the blue in a Maryland candidate's office last week, Diebold's leading spokesliar Mark Radke is quoted as saying the following...apparently with a straight face...

Heheh..."dampen innovation in the field." Those Diebold spokesguys and their crazy sense of humor.

By the way, as we were looking for a nice photo of Diebold's top mouth-piece, we came across a new little factoid --- new to us anyway. Seems that before Radke came to his new post as Diebold's chief liar, he had been Chief of Staff to George W. Bush's crony SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt. Small world. Go figure.

Diebold's chief obfuscator is a former Bush Administration official. Just one of those wacky coincidences, we guess.

CORRECTION 10/25/06: Good news! After digging around on this one, trying to figure out how it could possibly be that Radke was a former Bush Administration official and none of us knew about that until now, Russ Michaels, one of the filmmakers of HBO's Hacking Democracy writes to let us know that there is a different Mark Radke out there! The Diebold Radke is different from the Bush crony SEC Radke. Details on the other one, Mark S. Radke, right here...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.Org

In this segment Lou interviewed two ex-Commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission. Ex-Chairman Deforest Soaries and Ex-Assistant Chairman Ray Martinez. As revealed in an earlier interview reported by BradBlog, Chairman Soaries is speaking out and speaking out loudly.

Of note in tonight's interview is this exchange:

The text-transcript of Monday's segment on Lou Dobbs Tonight follows in full...

Blogged from the road by Brad Friedman

Another stunning security breach has been exposed in our nation's electoral system, The BRAD BLOG has learned, as the online voter registration database --- containing the personal information of some 1.5 million voters in Chicago --- has been found to be vulnerable to both downloading and hacking.

The flawed electronic database which allowed the retrieval and modification of personal voter information --- including social security numbers and birthdates of Chicago voters --- was discovered recently by members of the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project (IBIP), a non-partisan group of Election Integrity advocates.

IBIP members say they were not only able to get full editing access to the online database, they also found they could modify the records for registered voters, setting them to inactive and otherwise changing addresses and other key information fields.

The ability to gain access and hack the system, said by IBIP to be covered on the front page of tomorrow's Chicago Sun-Times, was documented by the group on video-tape. (UPDATE 10/24/06: As promised, the Sun-Times story is now here...)

An exclusive version of that video-taped hack has been made available to The BRAD BLOG.

-- Streaming Flash version...

Cook County elections officials are said to be scrambling to plug the hole in what has become an ever-increasingly unsecured system of voting in America in light of new regulations, encouraging the use of electronic voting systems, and state-wide registration databases, as set forth by Congress's Help America Vote Act (HAVA) after the 2000 Election Debacle.

In a news release sent to The BRAD BLOG earlier today (complete release posted at the end of this article), Bob Wilson, the Cook County chair of IBIP, says that the vulnerability would allow a malicous hacker to change voter registration status for thousands of Chicago voters.

"For example, you could change the status of all the voters in a precinct to inactive after the registration deadline so that when one of those voters checked their online status they might believe they were ineligible and wouldn't attempt to vote," Wilson says.

"Or, you could change their polling place information," he added, "so they would show up at the wrong precinct on election day . . . the possibilities are nearly endless and could cause election day havoc."

The problem was discovered by IBIP weeks ago, and the group immediately notified the appropriate authorities. "We had hoped that the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners would take quick action to plug this hole, but apparently that's not the case," IBIP member Peter Zelchenko is quoted as saying.

He estimates it would have taken little more than five minutes to fix the problem originally, but late last week IBIP and Zelchenko became aware that the security breach was significantly more severe than first thought. The Board was immediately notified again and finally began taking action over the weekend to install a new web interface for the system.

Zelchenko, an information technology expert who originally discovered the flaw, says the latest alarming discovery underscores the vulnerability of our new electronic system of voting in America. As reported by the news release:

Since the vulnerability reportedly affects only the online version of the voter registration database, as opposed to the master copy, it is hoped that the damage may be controlled and that any tampering might now be minimized. Such tampering --- either the collection of personal information for political, or more nefarious purposes, or legally registered voters having their online records deleted or otherwise set as inactive --- may have already occurred before the problem was discovered.

Whether the problem has been corrected by now or not, the remarkable security breach may have already given some voters incorrect or misleading information concerning the status of their registration or the correct location of their polling place when checking the online system for information.

We'll try to update this story when new information is available from the Sun-Times as we continue to be on the road and are unable to keep up and/or follow-up as much as usual.

The complete news release from the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project follows in full...

UPDATE, Posted by John Gideon 4:45pm PT: ABC News has now picked-up this story...

UPDATE by Brad, 8:09pm PT: Though we gave this story to ABC, having spoken to them earlier today, they didn't see fit to credit us. And yet, we always give them proper attribution for their stories. Sigh...Still always the bridesmaid I guess.

UPDATE 9:34pm PT: Chicago Tribune reports (and attempts to slightly downplay, as expected from the conservative Trib) "Voter information open to hackers". Associated Press reports "Group says data vulnerable, election officials investigating".

Blogged from the road by Brad Friedman

Once thought to have been a "safe" Republican U.S. House seat in Florida's 24th Congressional district the race to defeat the once-powerful incumbent Rep. Tom Feeney now appears to be up for grabs, according to a new Zogby International poll.

Computer programmer turned vote-rigging whistleblower turned Democratic Congressional candidate Clint Curtis is now in a virtual dead heat with Feeney, despite the sitting Congressman's enormous campaign treasury funded by top-tier GOP funders and corporate PAC money.

Curtis' campaign has, to date, been funded only by individuals across the nation via the Internet. Neither the DNC nor the Democratic Campaign Congressional Committee (DCCC) has contributed funding to Curtis's race, which now appears set to possibly unseat the once powerful Republican House Deputy Whip.

The inequity in funding may all now (hopefully) change as Feeney is seen as leading Curtis by only 2 points in the new poll commissioned by Election Integrity organization VelvetRevolution.us.

The Zogby poll showing the dead heat also reveals that Curtis is leading among likely voters who describe themselves as independent by a full 11 points!

According to the report from Zogby International of 402 likely voters in Florida's 24th district when asked "If the election for Congress were held today and the candidates were Democrat Clint Curtis and Republican Tom Feeney, for whom would you vote?" respondents replied as follows:

The two point difference between Curtis and Feeney is well within the poll's +/- 5% margin of error. As we're currently on the road, and scrambling with a number of breaking stories even while barrelling down the highway towards home, we hope to have more details on the poll after we get the opportunity to review the internals, which look very good indeed for the challenger Curtis.

(DISCLOSURE: The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder of VelvetRevolution.us)

Feeney (R-Abramoff), the one-time gubernatorial running mate of Jeb Bush and close friend of the Bush family, carved out what was believed to have been an extremely "conservative" 24th Congressional district for himself while Speaker of the Florida House. Ascending to the U.S. House in 2002, Feeney was not even challenged for the seat in 2004, as he was thought to be unbeatable. Many Florida papers have continued to knee-jerk report on the race in those terms despite the lack of any known polling for the contest between Feeney and Curtis until now.

Curtis is the computer programmer and political novice who has alleged (as we originally broke back in December of 2004), that he was asked by Feeney to create electronic vote-rigging software back in 2000 when both men worked together for the Oviedo, Florida, software firm, Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI). At the time, Feeney was YEI's general counsel and registered lobbyist even while he was Speaker of the Florida House and even while they had multi-million dollar contracts with the state. Feeney has since been named one of the "Most Corrupt Members of Congress" two years in a row by the D.C. ethics watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

He remains the only sitting U.S. Congressman who went with Jack Abramoff on one of the lobbyist-paid golf trips to St. Andrews, Scotland, who has yet to be indicted.

Feeney has mounted a costly smear campaign attempting to label Curtis as "crazy" and unfit for office in light of the charges. Yet Feeney's campaign, which has included a number of documented lies, unevidenced claims and attacks, and even a controversial mailing which offended voters when it included doctored photos of Curtis and a Hustler magazine cover --- seems to have backfired.

The Daytona Beach News-Journal, which reported on a number of Feeney's ethical lapses over the years, recently endorsed Curtis over Feeney, criticizing the sitting Congressman for "not really talking issues in this campaign" and "choosing to focus largely on denigrating his opponent." Curtis, meanwhile, the paper says, "is an independent thinker" who has "prepared well" for office.

Curtis, once a Republican until his dealings with Feeney soured him on the party, made his allegations concerning Feeney and YEI long ago via sworn affidavit, video-taped testimony to a Congressional panel, and a polygraph test, which he has called on Feeney to take. Feeney has denied Curtis's allegations, many of which have since been documented via state and federal reports as accurate, but has refused to either take a similar polygraph test, or even meet face to face with Curtis.

His story has also been highlighted in a number of documentaries. We recently posted documentary video footage from the film Eternal Vigilance, which tells the basics of Curtis's story through interviews with the whistleblower.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Diebold's "system is utterly unsecured," said cyber-security expert Stephen Spoonamore in the online print version of ABC World News' report on Sunday Night.

Spoonamore continued, "The entire cyber-security community is begging them to come back to reality and secure our nation's voting."

With the election only 16 days away, ABC World News worries "about another Florida style ballot fiasco" in tonight's e-voting segment. One major concern, it seems, is that e-voting machine maker Diebold's source code is turning up in random mail boxes, as The BRAD BLOG reported last Thursday. Yet, despite this latest revelation coming on the heels of a Princeton study evidencing the ease in which Diebold machines could be hacked, Diebold maintains everything is peachy.

-- ABC's Video report here...
-- ABC's printed report (with additional details) here...

UPDATE FROM BRAD 9:22pm PT:

We're delighted to see that ABC News has finally decided that there is a story here worth reporting. Wish they had come on board long ago. In any case, the print version of their story, written by Jake Tapper, Rebecca Abrahams and Eduardo Sunol, has several notable details above and beyond the video report. In addition to the comments from Spoonamore above, there's this...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

(Hat tip to BRAD BLOG emailer Mike from The Campaign to Give Jack Cafferty a Show)