Guest Blogged by John Gideon

According to an article in today's Cleveland Plain Dealer the recent Cuyahoga County primary fiasco was the result of widespread dysfunction in the county's election offices, where officials ignored specific warnings of the looming calamity, according to a report also released today that blames election chief Michael Vu and deputy chief Gwen Dillingham.

According to the paper:

In a companion article the Plain Dealer reports on the 13 warnings and gives some examples:

Tonight's "Democracy At Risk" featured a discussion of Wednesday's congressional hearings on electronic voting.

Video in Streaming Flash format...
Video in Windows Media format...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

Readers of The BRAD BLOG know that the state of Arkansas had a "Train Wreck" in their primary election and that much of the blame was laid at the feet of their voting machine vendor Elections Systems and Software. Now the Associated Press and The Arkansas Democrat Gazette both report that an independent study has been done at the request of the state and the study agrees with what The BRAD BLOG has said all along.

According to the Associated Press article:

and they go on to report:

ES&S has the largest slice of the voting machine business in the country. They found it impossible to support a string of state primaries held over a 5 to 6 week time span. How are they ever going to be able to handle a general election where all 50 states vote at the same time?

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

The Big Cat is still on his "vacation" (as you can tell from his appearance yesterday on "Catherine Crier Live") and the kitten who has been trying to fill his "shoes" (do cats wear shoes? mine doesn't!) is too busy to blog very much at the moment. Maybe later, as they say, but not right now.

That shouldn't deter YOU! If you have something to say, please say it here!

Video in Streaming Flash format...
Video in Windows Media format...

NOTE FROM BRAD: I'm still out on the road, will be for a while, and thus unable to check into the net with much frequency! Not getting all of my email either because of it, so my apologies. Thanks Dave for getting this up! More when I am able to check back in from a location with net access and enough time to get caught up-ish.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

A few good news items for friends and allies of The BRAD BLOG:

Brad Friedman and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are scheduled to appear on Court TV Thursday afternoon (2PM Pacific time, 5PM Eastern) with host Catherine Crier, whose election coverage lately has been excellent!

ALSO: News Hounds covered DemocracyFest and even included a picture of Brad Friedman.

From the News Hounds item, here's a link to a website you might enjoy visiting: The CA50 Action Committee. Its "Get News" page says the first thing to do is visit The BRAD BLOG!

Cool! That's the same thing Mike Malloy kept saying the other night on Air America!

One more item of minor consequence: your lowly and nearly frozen correspondent has resumed blogging again, if only because Cynthia McKinney Is Getting Robbed And Nobody Is Even Blogging About It! So, in the words of an old familiar phrase, please don't read my blog.

UPDATE: Video of the Catherine Crier Live appearance (with RFK Jr. as well) is now online here...

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Staff Writer Leslie Wolf Branscomb of the San Diego Union-Tribune actually gets some of the story right in her July 19th piece: Reliability of voting machines questioned.

Brad mentioned this story yesterday, noting that it was among "the worst" of the most recent local coverage of the Busby/Bilbray election, which, as all regular readers know, happened over a month ago and is still under a cloud of doubt.

Just before he left for his "vacation", Brad mentioned that "the reporters continue to allow Haas to pass on his knowing obfuscations, and the media is usually too lazy or ill-informed to bother to call him on it. So that's your job now!" and he also said: "Please help such media out by giving them the facts to counter Haas' ass-covering spin, misleads, red-herrings and bald-faced lies."

And so, without further ado ... after the fold you will find extended excerpts and some commentary from your lowly and nearly frozen guest-blogger.

And please also read Brad's post on the subject, if you haven't done so already.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

A timely reminder from our friend Jay:

I'm getting ready to go out of town for a bit, and will need to rely on 6 or 7 of you to help keep San Diego County Registrar Mikel Haas' misleading statements and out-and-out lies from making their way into "conventional wisdom".

He's working hard to cover his ass right now in regard to his horrendous administration of the June 6th U.S. House special election between Francine Busby and Brian Bilbray, in which he allowed programmed, hackable, election-ready Diebold electronic voting machines to become effectively decertified (at both the state and federal level) when he sent them home with poll workers for days and weeks prior to the election. As he well knows, that means he allowed illegal votes to be cast on those decertified voting machines used across the entire California 50th congressional district.

There are loads of articles on all of this today in the San Diego papers and on the local television news websites. That's all good, in general, even though the reporters continue to allow Haas to pass on his knowing obfuscations, and the media is usually too lazy or ill-informed to bother to call him on it. So that's your job now! Especially while I'm otherwise on and off the grid over the next several weeks trying to sneak in some much needed R&R.

(On that note, I'm leaving ASAP, but am scheduled to appear live tomorrow night on Catherine Crier's CourtTV show at 5pm ET. Probably will have to do it from Vegas, where I'll be nearby. Currently RFK Jr. is booked along with me on tomorrow's show.)

So, very quickly before I scram, here are are Mikel Haas' top three spins, lies and misleads of late that he's shoveling out to media, as witnessed in coverage over just the past 24 hours on San Diego's Channel 8, Channel 10, the North County Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune, just to name a few. (Channel 10 and the U-T story had the worst of them)

Please help such media out by giving them the facts to counter Haas' ass-covering spin, misleads, red-herrings and bald-faced lies. Here are his latest Top Three most dangerous, disingenuous and misleading whoppers...

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

The Atlanta Progressive News has published a long article about a situation we were very interested in yesterday, which otherwise seems poised to fall off the map. How curious!

The APN piece is called Machine Vote-Flipping Claimed in McKinney Primary and I have found it on the net in a very few places. But I can't find any other news about this story on at all. Anywhere. Even the "McKinney for Congress" website is quiet --- it hasn't been updated since yesterday afternoon as far as I can tell.

In the interests of getting this story a bit more exposure, we provide not only a link to it (above) but we will also post generous excerpts below the fold.

By the way, according to the "official" results of the election, McKinney got more votes than any of the other candidates, but not a majority, and she will have to go through a run-off against her most successful opponent, Hank Johnson, to whom votes were being flipped yesterday according to the reports we have received.

Just off the air from the Mike Malloy show. And yes, before I came on he did comment that when touched the screen of the Diebold voting machine he used to vote in today's Georgia primary, it was touching the ass of Satan. If you missed it, his interview with me follows. It was a lively one. We discussed trouble at the Georgia primaries, the Busby/Bilbray sleepover mess, Diebold skullduggery in the California Secretary of State's office, and all manners of democracy crumbling.

He asked me to stay over for an additional segment after the top of the hour, when we had a....skeptic call in from Sacramento who believes I'm "a phony." Which is always fun, of course. Glad to meet the critics. Enjoy...

-- Brad on Mike Malloy Show, 7/18/06 [MP3, appx 40 mins]

Also, I had meant to post this a couple of weeks ago, so will take the opportunity to do so now before I hit the road for the next bunch of weeks and may become scarcer than I'd like (but I really need a break. Big time. So please forgive me) This is audio from the Ed Schultz when NBC/HBO sports anchor Jim Lampley was sitting in for Schultz show a day or two after our Emergency Busby/Bilbray Townhall in San Diego. I'm on with him for just a quick few minutes, but he gave one of the kindest and most generous introductions I've ever received. Lampley is a terrific hero himself, and was kind enough to show up to support us at the San Diego event with his wife Bree Walker (whose new show in Los Angeles, I hope to be doing soon as well. Like Lamps, she's aces!)

-- Brad on Ed Schultz Show, Guest Host Jim Lampley, 6/30/06 [MP3, appx 5 mins]

Guest Blogged by John Gideon...

Just reported by VoterAction.org, the great group led by attorney Lowell Finley, is that a US District Court Judge has sent the lawsuit, Holder v. McPherson et. al. back to state court. This is a victory for the voters of the state of California and is the first giant step in stopping the use of Diebold touch-screen voting machines in the state. VoterAction's press release follows in full...

The local media, in this case the North County Times looks to finally be getting the story right, and is attempting to hold San Diego County Registrar Mikel Haas accountable for his prevarications concerning the Diebold voting machine "sleepovers" that violated new state and federal laws and security requirements during the now-disputed June 6th U.S. House special election between Francine Busby and Brian Bilbray in California's 50th congressional district.

San Diego County's Democratic Party Chair, Jess Durfee is joining the growing calls for accountability in the matter, according to this morning's Times by calling for hearings on the matter and new legislation to ban the procedure known as "Sleepovers" where poll workers are given programmed, election-ready, hackable voting machines to store in their homes, cars and garages for days and weeks prior to the election. It's been shown that these machines, both Diebold's optical-scan and touch-screen voting systems, are exceedingly vulnerable to tampering and can be hacked within a few minutes time with no password necessary.

Previously, dozens of organizations and thousands of individuals have declared "No Confidence" in the results of the "bellwether" election and had demanded hand counts of all ballots after Haas' security breaches resulted in the use of decertified voting machines, and thus, illegal votes were cast on them across the entire county. Last Friday, the national Democratic Party joined the call in demanding accountability and a full manual count of all ballots in the race.

See the Times report for more details, a statement from state Senator Debra Bowen, and attempted obfuscations from Haas, but here's the opening grafs and one misdirect that Haas was allowed to get away with...

That's from Miriam Raftery's RAW STORY coverage of the Saturday Night events in San Diego at the DemocracyFest. But I was there, and that's what Dean said --- echoing, in part, the DNC Voting Rights Institute statement on the Busby/Bilbray election fiasco issued the day before --- to the appreciative acclaim of thousands at the open air theater concert/event Saturday night. Audience members spotted with "No Sleepovers" signs were picked up on the big video screens next to the stage.

I was just happy the night had cooled and, for me anyway, things had finally calmed down a bit after a non-stop day of speechifying, meeting, educating, rabble-rousing and other exhilirations as the sunshine at San Diego State University must have pushed the mercury towards the 100 mark.

Raftery's got a photo of yours truly at our press conference (more photos of all below) in her article, along with other details that I'm relieved she covered, because I'm still too exhausted and running behind (checking the clock, it's 4:04am right now) and playing catch up to hit everything by myself. I'm hoping we'll be able to get some of the local TV News coverage of the press conference from the local stations posted here, but I've gotta hit the road (I hope!) tomorrow and then do Mike Malloy's show from lord only knows where...I need a break. I'm gonna get one. If it kills me.

Anyway, let's play catch-up a bit. Some notes on the weekend --- that I wasn't able to log on and cover here for BRAD BLOG while I was in the very middle of it all --- including comments from Sen. Debra Bowen, Francine Busby, and other photos and personal thoughts on the last 24 to 72...

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

According to sources in the Cynthia McKinney camp, Georgia voters attempting to vote for her in today's Democratic Primary are seeing their votes flipped to her opponent, Hank Johnson.

McKinney has a well-deserved reputation for speaking truth to power, asking tough questions, and not backing down (see this video, or read this transcript).

Diebold, on the other hand, has a history of touch-screen machines flipping votes from one candidate to another --- commonly called "vote-switching" or "vote-flipping" --- and otherwise failing altogether.