I'm happy to admit, along with everyone else on this particular beat these days, that we're all glad to see Keith Olbermann, currently the virtual-sole voice in the corporate media, willing to seriously follow the troubling stories of voting irregularities in Election 2004.

That said, while he's been doing a fine job of helping to keep the story out there, I believe he has largely screwed the proverbial pooch when it came to his blog story on Saturday in regards to the reporting of Wayne Madsen.

Madsen, "a self-styled investigative journalist", as self-styled investigative journalist Olbermann referred to him, has claimed in two different articles, so far, (Here, then with a few more specifics here) that there was an extensive and sophisticated vote rigging operation at play in Election '04.

The operation, Madsen alleges, was funded by Saudi and other overseas interests via a sophisticated web of Bush-friendly banks, trusts, holding companies and corporations. The starting point for all of this, he reports, is a $29.6 million check of which Madsen claimed to have been given a copy.

On the ground, the scheme is reported to have included the use of retired FBI agents posing as active FBI and/or Homeland Security Dept. agents in Ohio, Florida, Texas and California supplying false security/terror-related information to local election officials leading to "lock downs". These "lock downs" supposedly then allowed the "agents" and/or cyber technicians unfettered access to central tabulating computers where vote tallies could then be goosed to achieve the desired outcome. The goal in Ohio and Florida, of course, being to take the states for Bush and in Texas and California to prop up Bush's number to receive the popular majority that would supply the "broad national mandate" you have likely heard the Bush Administration wildly overstating at various times in the last four weeks or so.

Despite having been sent many notes about Madsen's articles over the last several days, I have yet to mention them on this blog at all until now. I've been attempting to get independent verification or confirmation for such stories before I add them to what I consider to be a rather solid body of evidence here indicating "electile dysfunction" of various possible magnitudes. In other words, I've been trying to confirm these stories as well as possible before reporting on them here, since so many have come to use this blog as a trusted reference source over the weeks since November 2nd.

Madsen's public reporting so far had, to my mind, contained a few too many vagaries as of yet to be added to the preponderance of evidence being compiled here. At least not until I was able to either get more specifics, or speak to him directly with some of my questions. That's precisely what I did yesterday in a thirty-minute or so phone call...

As The NY Times finally did yesterday, Newsweek follows in-step today by covering the problems with E-Voting and it's lack of paper audit trails, etc.

It's encouraging for the much-needed election reform movement that such articles are finally making their way into the Corporate Media. Yet I find it still somewhat beguiling that these organizations are finally willing to report on the lack of verifiability at the root of our country's democracy, how easy it may be to tamper with the results and how the end result is a lack of confidence in the outcome --- Yet with all of those acknowledged problems, the same Corporate Media still proves wholly unwilling to actually investigate the enormous body of data recently gathered via such troubling means a mere three weeks ago!

In other words, they acknowledge that possible trouble exists with the technology, but they are seemingly unwilling to expend any resources to determine if such trouble did exist in the November 2nd election! Newsweek even goes so far as to title their piece "Four More Years to Finally Get It Right". As if to say, nothing to see last November 2nd, but let's look ahead to '08.

In any case, here's a few key grafs from Steven Levy's Newsweek piece.

On those of us who have been dubious about what went on in Election 2004 and our refusal to take the questionable results lying down...

Really? Glad you've admitted that, but wouldn't you do even better by investigating if that may have actually happened?!

And then Levy closes by pointing to the concerns that those of us pushing for Election Reform have been pointing out for a while. He aptly mentions that the concerns are not only with E-Voting itself and finishes (ironically enough) by spanking those who don't yet seem to get it...

The sentiment is much appreciated. But what Levy fails to point out here is that the "2000 debacle" is what put these "leaders" in power in the first place! It's small wonder then that they'd wish to tamper with that easily-gamed system.

Levy quickly mentions "legislation that would have mandated such protections in 2004 was bottled up in Congress," but he conveniently or lazily doesn't mention that the "bottled up" legislation was "bottled up" by the Republican leadership in both the House and Senate (specifically by Hastert and Delay) who wouldn't allow these bills to even come up for a vote!

But let's not hold any actual feet to any actual fires. We wouldn't want to piss off our well-earned sources now would we?

Both this piece and the Times piece I pointed out yesterday are indeed encouraging and bode well (hopefully) for reform in '06 and/or '08 to a certain extent. But one would have thought the even more-obviously outrageous 2000 election would have kept us from being where we are today at all.

So while the emerging willingness of these Corporate Media outlets to finally acknowledge that these issues even exist, they would be far better off investigating whether any of the items they warn about actually occurred in this go-round. There's certainly ample evidence to look into if they decide to actually leave their offices and look into it!

Without attention and hard news reporting on the matter from such outlets, I see no reason why Election '04 will offer any greater incentive to force lawmakers to reform the system. If the well-reported-upon debacle of 2000 didn't do the trick, why would the picture the media has now succeeded in painting of a "relatively trouble-free" 2004 election encourage anybody to change anything?!...Especially with even more of those lawmakers --- the ones who were able to gain from the dubious system --- now entrenching themselves in the same halls of power that decided not to correct the problems last time?!

CONTACTS...(Please be polite!)
Steven Levy, Newsweek Columnist: steven.levy@newsweek.com
Mark Whitaker, Newsweek Editor: mark.whitaker@newsweek.com
...Or, TheBradBlog@cville.com&Subject=Please Investigate and Report On Voter Irregularity, Mistabulation and Fraud in Election 2004!">Email both at the same time with a BCC to me so I can track numbers!

The New York Times deems to recognize that it just might not be such a great idea to rely on so many untested electronic voting machines created by private, partisan companies using uninspected software with no way to validate the results.

Appropriately enough for The Times their James Fallows column is found on their "Business Section - YOUR MONEY - TECHNO FILES" page of tomorrow's paper.

Not much new offered, just the fact itself that The Times is willing to talk about these issues at all is what's most notable here. A sample...

Very good. Now what are you willing to do, NY Times, to check-and-balance what these computers did not in this year's election? Anything more than simply talking about it?

managing-editor@nytimes.com; executive-editor@nytimes.com; national@nytimes.com; editorial@nytimes.com; oped@nytimes.com; public@nytimes.com; letters@nytimes.com; magazine@nytimes.com; QandA@nytimes.com; washington@nytimes.com; TheBradBlog@cville.com?Subject=Investigate and Report On Voter Irregularity, Mistabulation and Fraud NOW!">Click here to send an email asking them to do so if you haven't already!

(Thanks Desi for the link!)

"There's just a lot of allegations of vote fraud that placed their election, the validity of their elections, in doubt."
-- George W. Bush, 11/26/04. In regard to the U.S. position of not recognizing the validity of Ukraine's recent election.

If anyone sees a guy in a big top hat run by screaming "I'm late! I'm late! I'm late!" do not be alarmed.

(See Colin Powell's equally appalling ironic quote from a few days ago here on the same topic.)

I dare you to read this entire Columbus Free Press article and then explain to me why Ohio's election shouldn't be entirely invalidated and re-held!

Here's the first graf...

Now go read the rest and get back to me.

(Hat tip to John of Crooks & Liars for the link!)

There have been many reports since Nov. 2nd, of provisional ballots in Ohio being rejected because they were cast at the "wrong precinct" after Ohio Sec. of State J. Kenneth Blackwell issued a directive requiring provisionals be cast at the voters' own precinct.

In many of those cases, where polling places had been shut down and consolidated in urban minority areas to make way for E-Voting --- which was then cancelled at the last minute, even though the polling places remained closed and consolidated --- several different precincts were combined into a single polling place.

Where that took place, there were different tables that represented the different precincts. Many poll workers, however, were reportedly unaware that provisional ballots had to be cast at the voters specific "precinct" (or in such cases, table) which meant that some voters who were forced to fill out a provisional were told they could simply leave the ballot at "Table B", when their actual precinct was at "Table A" --- in the same building!

Such ballots are now being rejected for having been cast at the "wrong precinct"!

A Cincinnati Post report today describes how that happened in just one of Ohio's counties:

A lawsuit has now been filed in one county (Cuyahoga) against Blackwell and the State of Ohio arguing that such rejected provisional ballots should indeed be counted in Ohio!

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Voter disenfranchisment in America. Just another topic worth less coverage from our major news media than shoppers buying DVD players at Wal-Mart on the day after Thanksgiving.

Make no mistake, the cash register is the real voting booth these days in these dis-United States of America.

UPDATE: Columbus Free Press has an affidavit from Neil F. Schoenwetter, Jr., a Democratic "challenger" at the polls on Election Day in Ohio, who gives specific details of Election Supervisors and Poll Workers instructing voters that "ANY PROVISIONAL BALLOT THAT WAS CAST IN THE COUNTY WOULD BE COUNTED; THEY DID NOT HAVE TO BE CAST AT ANY PARTICULAR PRECINCT." See the link for the entire sworn account.

A Pentagon-appointed advisory panel has issued a harsh report on America's failing middle-east policies and "urged the creation of a 'strategic communication' apparatus within the White House and an overhaul of public diplomacy, public affairs and information dissemination efforts by the Pentagon and State Department."

The report, made available by the Pentagon just weeks after the U.S. Election, charges what so many of us have been charging for some time; namely, that the "US is losing the war of ideas" in the middle-east and the Islamic world in general. From The Australian's article on the report:

Duh...do ya think?!

Warren Mitofsky, head of the consortium which gathers and publishes the exit poll data for all of the major networks and newspapers, has been claiming of late that those who relied on and/or published his exit polling data during the course of Election Day were mistaken to have done so. The reason being, Mitofsky recently emailed Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, is because those raw numbers, leaking out when they did, are more aptly compared to "the score at half time at a football game" rather than information to be used to judge against the final election results.

I believe Joseph Cannon gets it exactly right, however, when he responded yesterday with this thought:

Of course, without the raw data from the exit pollsters, everyone is largely guessing. So I will associate myself with pollster John Zogby's sage demand on MSNBC last Wednesday wherein he said, "I think that the gentlemen who are responsible for the exit polls should be fully transparent, release their data, discuss their methodology. Let us see what exactly it is that happened, and why it happened...I'll take this opportunity right now to say I think that it's in the interest of healing this country and restoring some unity to this country for us to have a thorough investigation of what happened both to the election and with the exit polls."

Hear, hear, Mr. Zogby!...

A week or two ago I wrote an item here entitled "Why It Matters" which pointed to an article in the Russian PRAVDA Online discussing our election irregularities here in greater detail than we've seen from the bulk of the United States' own media.

My point in highlighting the article was that the world is watching carefullly what happens in the United States, perhaps now more than ever as we are attempting --- as claimed by the Administration, anyway --- to spread democracy around the globe.

Apparently I was more prescient that even I had imagined at the time in pointing out that particular article. Take a look at what PRAVDA Online now has to say about the U.S.'s recent objections to the election results in Ukraine:

Any other questions?

If we can't get democracy right in our own country or even show an interest in the fairness and transparency of same by the bulk of our controlling governmental bodies and corporate media, then one can hardly expect the rest of the world to follow an example which we're not particularly interested in applying to our own democracy.

Expect the international influence of the American Empire to continue to crumble in country after country, region after region as we here at home continue to fiddle even while worldwide democracy burns as a direct result of our own apathy for maintaining the health of our own once-fervently held democratic principles.

Apparently the number of Emails The NY Times has been receiving, spurred in no small part by our coverage here of their lack of, or otherwise condescending coverage of the hundreds of reports of "irregularities" in Election 2004 has caused a "flood" to their inboxes.

Or so says the New York Times "Public Editor" Daniel Okrent who has chosen to use his Times-supplied "blog space" to speak to that "flood" in his response posted here.

That response was both tepid, apologetic, and gave no real answers to the many concerns expressed by so many of you who have sent letters. Neither did he address any of the "15 Unanswered Questions" I compiled for them, and sent directly to Mr. Okrent's "flooded mailbox".

And so, I have now replied via Email to Mr. Okrent in regards to his reponse. I urge you to do the same. Here is my Email to him...

"We cannot accept this result as legitimate because it does not meet international standards and because there has not been an investigation of the numerous and credible reports of fraud and abuse."
-- U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, 11/24/04. In regards to Ukraine's recent election and the announced U.S. rejection of the results. From The Washington Post.

Welcome to CrazyWorld.

As promised, Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org has posted an update on the Fraud Audit she is now doing with a team down in Florida.

Last week she reported on their efforts to pick up the requested "Freedom of Information Act" documents at several Florida county election boards, and detailed a confrontation with election officials in Volusia County. She reported stonewalling from officials, incomplete records turned over, and having found official materials, including "polling tapes" in dumpsters outside election board offices. The "polling tapes" found showed discrepant numbers to the officially announced tallies. I've come to understand that "polling tapes" are the official records of who and how many voted at each precinct or voting machine as signed by poll workers before being handed off to officials for counting at the central tallying offices.

Today she reports that "Volusia County resident Susan Pynchon, with the help of Volusia County attorney Daniel R. Vaughen, P.A., filed a lawsuit on Tuesday, Nov. 23, seeking to set aside the Nov. 2, 2004 Volusia County election due to irregularities."

The full complaint is linked on her site, as well as a summary of the irregularities they've found in Volusia County to date. I've only had time to read the summary so far where many of the previously discussed issues are outlined. They are all troubling, worth reading. The last few in the list caught my eye...

As proof of how healthy our democracy is, WatchingTheWatchers.org has just informed us that Wyoming had a voter turnout rate of 106% this year!

That's right, according to the Wyoming Sec. of State's website (go ahead, click on it yourself), out of 232,396 registered voters in the state, 245,789 of them came out to vote this year!

Yes, go read those numbers above again. That's 13,393 more votes than voters in Wyoming! And yes, even the Sec. of State's website brags about the 106% registered voter turnout!

With national turnout rates somewhere around 60% this year, and only 56% showing up in Wyoming for their 2004 primaries, the state should certainly be proud of their new record turnout! Which beats the previous record in 2000 of 101% turnout!

Waytago Wyoming! You are "W Country" indeed!

Nope, nothing funny going on with voting in this country. Just worry about Ukraine. We're fine here. Nothing to see. Move on...

UPDATE: Eagle-eyed commentor Tracy updates us with a Nov 6th item from Wyoming's Casper Star-Tribune offering this "explanation":

So that explains that. For the record, Ohio, which doesn't have same day registration, but was the most contested state in the union this year had a registered voter-turnout of 69.86%.

Presuming interest was as high in Wyoming --- the reddest of the red states, where Bush won handily --- as it was in Ohio, that would mean that some 36% of the total electorate registered on Election Day in Wyoming.

As I said...keep moving...nothing to see here...these aren't the droids you're looking for...

Have to do some travelling here in the next few hours, so will be shortly out of the loop. There's several brewing items I'd like to comment further on, but for lack of time, I cover them quickly now and hit in more detail later as time allows:

As I've said, I hope to give each of the above items their proper due later tonight, hopefully along with more breaking news. In the meantime, safe travels to those of you moving about the country for Thanksgiving!

Any questions?