Colorado restores purged voters; Vote-flipping caught on camera; And Penn SoS (a Democrat!) still won't grant EVERYONE right to paper ballots

Colorado has agreed in federal court to restore the voting rights of roughly 20,000 voters who were illegally purged by Republican Secretary of State Mike Coffman, according to the NY Times.

The Advancement Project, who filed suit (not the Democratic Party mind you) argued successfully that the voters were wrongfully removed from the voter rolls within 90 days of the election. Coffman said voters were purged because they moved or were registered twice. Under Colorado's former SoS, Donetta Davidson, the state changed or canceled 1-in-5 voters (more than 500,000 registrations) between 2004 and 2006. The status of those purged voters have never been challenged.

Today the Rocky Mountain News is reporting that Coffman is still defying the court order prompting an emergency hearing agreed to by the court. It's unclear whether this will resolve the issue pertaining to 35,000 voters who requested mail-in ballots, but who have not have had their identity verified in Colorado, forcing them to cast provisional ballots instead.

By the way, Coffman is expected to be elected to Congress this year. How on earth someone who is charged with regulating the election system is allowed to run for office at the same time is completely beyond me.

What's also remarkable about this story is that the illegal purges by Colorado have been reported extensively by the NY Times and others -- including my own story at Miller-McCune.com -- but the Obama Campaign and the Democratic Party didn't think it was necessary to file a lawsuit. What gives? Do they not have the money for legal fees?

In other Colorado voting news, vote-flipping has been reported on a Diebold Accuvote (failing to register Democratic votes as virtually all vote-flipping stories go: Coincidence?) and thankfully the Adams County Clerk has taken action. These early vote-flipping stories are opening up a dangerous precedent that give maintenance personnel -- who often work for contracted vendors without any oversight -- the opportunity to recalibrate the voting machines. This is exactly how computer scientists have proven these machines can be so easily hacked.

For more stories on vote-flipping go to Videothevote.org and watch the videos embedded below.

Also unexplainable is Democrats' no-show appearance over the outrageous decrees by Pennsylvania Secretary of State Pedro Cortes, a Democrat, who refuses to throw away his state's massively faulty touchscreen and push button electronic voting machines (which do not have a paper trail) and broke down repeatedly during the primary.

Two days ago a court ordered Cortes to offer voters paper ballots if at least half of the machines in a particular precinct break down. Cortes wanted to only give voters an option to vote on paper if ALL the machines broke down. Alas, he issued the following directive in compliance with the court. But as Bradblog.com is reporting today, 80 percent of counties are unprepared for paper voting.

Once again, the Obama Campaign and the so-called Democrats in Pennsylvania are completely MIA. Have they not read any of the news stories about these horrendous voting machines?

This is why these machines can't be trusted. This is from West Virginia:



Here's an actual testimonial also from West Virginia during early voting:

Florida's first caging; the aim (perhaps) of McCain's misleading mailers; and other voter suppresion updates from the nation's favorite swing state

Just as Florida Gov. Charlie Crist declares a voting emergency and extends early voting hours because of record turnout and widespread machine malfunctions, a hodge-podge of election suppression activity has been brewing for the past week in Florida.

Chief among them are voters, such as Marilyn Fielding featured in this Naples Daily News story, who was forced to cast a provisional ballot because she applied for an absentee ballot in Connecticut, even though the voter says she never made such a request.

Could this be the aim of the misleading McCain mailers sent out in September across the country and Florida?

“We are receiving many, many reports from poll watchers that provisional ballots are given out much too often to our voters in Lee County,” said Nancy Troy, a Democratic Party activist. “The poll watchers in Lee County are telling us it's hard to keep up with all of them.”

Other issues include a vigilante sheriff candidate who marks the first story of GOP caging in the state; a dispute over amending registration records at the polls; and blocked (temporarily) federal poll watchers.

In Glades County, it’s sheriff candidate Robert Wilson who broke the ice for the GOP caging effort. But Wilson says he took it upon himself to crunch voter registration records against things such as home foreclosures to form the basis for a challenge. As the Miami Herald notes today, the list is almost all Democrats, “save a dead Republican or two.”

The dispute over provisional balloting pertains to a legal opinion in a letter by the lead attorney for the Florida Association of Supervisors of Elections. In a letter last week Robert Labasky basically told every election supervisor in the state to ignore Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning's directions for how to handle new voters unverified due to the state's controversial "no-match" law.

Labasky said election supervisors could allow voters to amend their registration records at the polls. This just in: Broward County announced it will follow Labasky's advice.

Browning said voters have to cast a provisional ballot regardless what they could show an election judge at the polls, forcing voters to return to an election office within 48 hours. He even threatened legal action against the election supervisor in Pinellas County who wanted to actually ( bless her heart) make voting easier. The opinion by Labasky did, however, give discretion to election supervisors if they chose to follow Browning’s advise.

More than 12,000 voter registrations were "unverified," according to the St. Pete Times today. The matches are done against the Social Security Administration database, which has an acknowledged error rating of 28.5 percent.

Last week Browning showed a soft side in another matter when he came around and decided to “encourage” four county election supervisors to allow a team of federal observers at polling sites.

Sequoia admits Colorado ballot mistake following report on widespread voting machine troubles

Private corporations just can't be trusted to run our elections. Period.

Back in August, VotersUnite.org put out a report detailing the control election officials across the country have turned over to private corporations. I wrote about it at Miller-McCune.com and Ellen Theisen at VotersUnite was featured on CNN. (See video link to the right.)

Last week revealed a story from Colorado further demonstrating the danger of this most undemocratic practice putting contracted vendors in charge of printing and mailing out our ballots.

Denver election officials discovered that 11,000 mail-in ballots were never sent by election vendor Sequoia Voting Systems, even though the company said it mailed all 21,450 ballots.

This is the same corporation, you may recall, that tried to get a report about its faulty voting machines suppressed. But a New Jersey Superior Court Judge earlier this month released the report showing that Sequoia voting machines in New Jersey, all of Louisiana and a few counties in Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had serious security risks and failures.

It's time to kick these secretive, incompetent, Democracy-destroying private corporations out of our election system!

DOJ voter suppression rolls on; the DNC's obscure election protection; and advocates fill civil rights void

Two years after the US Justice Department was exposed for politicizing its Civil Rights Division into what should more aptly be named the Voter Suppression Division, the top federal prosecutors are at it again just a week before Election Day.

Instead of looking into widespread reports of illegal voter purges, voter intimidation, faulty voting machines and the shortage of polling places in minority districts, the US Justice Department together with the FBI has instead (oh so predictably) turned its complete attention to the myth of voter fraud. Mainly, the FBI is going after ACORN and the Justice Department is taking on Ohio's 200,000 contested voters who Republicans want to remove from the rolls because of a typo.

Now if that's not about the most un-American thing I've ever heard.

In just about every swing state, voting rights groups have gone to court in opposition to state policies that appear to violate the law. Meanwhile, Republicans went to court to block the vote.

Just today, the Advancement Project announced it would level the first lawsuit -- finally -- against Colorado for two state policies that remove people from the voter rolls within 90 days of an election. That would seem a clear violation of the National Voter Registration Act, but the Justice Department nor voting rights groups or Democrats for that matter had been willing to touch it. The Advancement Project felt empowered to file suit coming off a recent win in Michigan that restored 1,800 voters to the rolls based on a similar argument.

In New Mexico, it's Project Vote and other civil rights groups that are suing the New Mexico GOP for allegedly intimidating voters. Republican attorney Pat Rogers reportedly hired a private investigator to question voters who registered through ACORN. The voters, all Hispanics in Albuquerque, said they felt harassed, one driven to tears.

In each of these cases, Democrats could stand up for voters too. But they haven't. As for the faulty machines still being used in far too many states, the Democrats and the Obama campaigns are complacent as well.

The NAACP had to sue in Pennsylvania to have the state offer paper ballots when at least 50 percent of the voting machines malfunctioned. Current law wouldn't allow paper ballots until all the machines in a particular precinct broke down. The Republicans are of course fighting this in court even though the Democratic Party and Democratic state officials are noticeably MIA.

For those worried about the lack of oversight this election, keep in mind that thousands of lawyers will descend on the polls not only by the Dems but the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights through reports into 1-866-Our-Vote and attorneys on the ground. We can all see what they're getting here at Ourvotelive.org.

According to AlterNet here and here, Obama's election protection efforts HAVE been doing SOMETHING. There's this bit about Ohio Green Party efforts.

The DNC's current plan appears to rely on campaign volunteers to call random precincts in red counties in swing states to collect the reported results. In contrast, the Ohio Green Party will be stationing observers at polling places and in the county Board of Election office to conduct an independent vote count by comparing the number of people who sign into vote with the reported totals. The Green Party response will not reveal if GOP loyalists with access to the vote-counting machinery have programmed software to reallocate the percentage of the vote awarded to McCain and Obama. But it will guard against stuffing ballot boxes if it can deploy enough election observers in Ohio's reddest counties.

In Florida, I got the following message from a poll watcher working parallel DNC efforts.

I'll be in the tabulation room with the canvassing board making sure the Votes get counted. Our Election Protection teams will have been at the precinct all day and their final task is to review the closing and collect the Precinct totals. The Lawyers & I will make sure the same results from the Precincts are put into the Tabulator.

Republicans suffer setbacks in voter suppression efforts

Originally posted at Miller-McCune.com

Ongoing efforts to limit the number of voters in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Nevada - all predicated on the fear of voter fraud and all launched by Republicans -- suffered major setbacks this week.

The decisions, either by judges or secretaries of state, bring to a close several of the legal battles detailed in the latest compendium of swing-state disputes Miller-McCune.com reported earlier this week, and focus on the right to vote trumping the fear of fraud.

In general, Republicans in at least 10 swing states have cited problems with new registrations - including some clearly spurious applications submitted across the nation -- creating the possibility of widespread voter fraud. Democrats have generally responded in two ways, calling the GOP efforts an attempt to disenfranchise a wave of newly signed-up (and generally pro-Barack Obama) voters and noting that it's difficult for a phony registration by say "Mickey Mouse" to end up as a cast ballot.

In Ohio, Republicans on Thursday withdrew a case before the Ohio Supreme Court that would've jeopardized the ability of more than 200,000 registrants to vote because of typos and other minor discrepancies on their voter registration records. Republicans lost a similar case before the U.S. Supreme Court last week.

At the same time, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner issued a directive saying that election officials may not challenge a voter on Election Day "based solely on the fact that the person offering to vote has been the subject of a data discrepancy between computer records maintained by the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles" (including Social Security Administration data) and that person's voter registration record. In September, Brunner issued another directive saying voters can't be challenged based solely on returned mail.

In Indiana, on Wednesday a judge threw out a lawsuit by Republicans aimed at shutting down three early voting sites in Lake County (part of the Chicago metro area) Democratic strongholds. On Thursday, Lake County Republicans appealed their case to the Indiana Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the early voting sites are staying.

In Wisconsin, a judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, who wanted the state to use a computer database known to be inaccurate as a way to verify voters' eligibility. The judge said the case should be decided by the state's Government Accountability Board, which already ruled against Van Hollen's request. When the six-member board ran their own registration records through the computer, it threw out four of them.

Van Hollen says he will appeal the case.

Finally, Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller ruled on Thursday that voters should be allowed to correct mistakes or incomplete information on their voter registration records at the polls during early voting. The Nevada Republican Party had wanted those voters to cast provisional ballots.

Let the vote-flipping/malfunctions begin: Incidents reported in FL, WV, TN, stay tuned for more

Have you forgotten about the electronic voting machines, not just the touch screens -- mind you -- but the optical scanners that read paper ballots? As I reported back in May, they are extremely faulty and easily hackable.

Well...reports of vote-flipping and malfunctions have already started coming in. The Raw Story reports on CNN reporter John Zarella's own experience in Florida where he waited three hours to vote early because the machines were malfunctioning. Other similar reports of voting machine problems were reported elsewhere in the state. I personally heard an account about machines in Lee County. Also, in Jacksonville and Miami, voters had problems. Florida, remember, threw away most of their DRE (touchscreen and push-button) machines, but as you may well know, the optical scanners -- made by the same shady, secretive companies -- are just as troublesome.

This is completely insane. Our votes are being counted in a secretive black box, the details of which we will never know. The American people would be raising holy hell if the MSM would actually tell them.

Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com also reported yesterday on two vote-flipping incidents. One in Tennessee was experienced by the makers of the documentary Uncounted. The touch screen buttons were not registering a selection after multiple attempts. At one point the vote-flipped from Obama to the Green Party candidate. Even the poll workers couldn't figure it out. After dozens of tries, their vote was apparently counted, but who knows because there isn't a paper trial on those machines. Brad notes that they are ES&S iVotronic, the same machines used in the highly suspicious Sarasota County elections in 2006 that still has failed to account for 18,000 missing votes.

Also, two counties in West Virginia experienced vote-flipping.

Finally, check out this investigative report on ES&S.

Luckily, the Green Party is planned to heavily stack poll watchers in Red counties, particularly in Ohio, where the vote can be padded for McCain. Here's a good story about the election protection effort.

Ohio SoS Brunner gets death threats: She must be doing something right

If you wondered whether the Republican war on voting has reached full steam, consider the story that broke yesterday detailing how Ohio SoS Jennifer Brunner has been the target of death threats and a mysterious white powder delivered in the mail.

Also yesterday the Ohio SoS Web site was reestablished after a security breach. Read the press release about the incident here.

Death threats against Brunner come on the heels of a rash of burglaries and vandalism against ACORN, which registered 1.3 million mostly poor or minority voters. There's no doubt this comes in relation to statements made about ACORN and potential voter fraud by John McCain and leading Republicans. Remember McCain's statement in the last debate? "ACORN is destroying the fabric of Democracy."

While Republicans go around carrying on about ACORN and a few faulty voter registration records, Republicans are practicing election fraud on steroids.

The latest dispute that could seriously steal the election involves a dispute over 200,000 new voters this year whose social security or motor vehicle record did not exactly match their voter registration records.

Last week, the US Supreme Court ruled that the 200,000 voters can stay on the rolls, but Republicans have now taken the matter to the Ohio Supreme Court where a more favorable set of judges may shift in their favor.

This is all disturbingly reminiscent of 2004 when Republic SoS Kenneth Blackwell and county officials in Ohio purged more than 300,000 voters from the rolls leading up to Election Day, not to mention the 35,000 Republicans directly challenged at the polls based on returned mail.

Things have changed in Ohio. Brunner is defending voting rights and restoring due process. So it's no wonder that Republicans are threatening the life of a public official when things dont' go their way.

Joe the Plumber unwillingly becomes best Obama pitch yet

Joe the Plumber has become Joe the Camel of this campaign. As the media swarmed like flies on shit to this self-proclaimed, self-made man, they discovered some startling things about Mr. Joe/Samuel: He makes no where near $250,000 and he owes close to $2,000 in back taxes. He makes $40,000, according to reporters who looked up his divorce records. Joe would actually get a greater tax break under Obama. And he doesn't even have a plumber's license.

Now reporters have connected another dot in Joe's story, that he would be barred from voting if Republicans had their way in Ohio. Admittedly, that's reaching a bit far on the Plumber Joe story. But it is true. That's because Joe's last name on his voter registration record is misspelled. Reporters must have spotted it while checking on his party affiliation.

Florida, has the most stringent matching criteria for registering new voters. And Colorado has about the loosest voter-roll purging criteria.

I guess it doesn't really matter who Joe is. I agree with Fox News, which said the media had Plumber Fatigue. There's probably a rich guy out there who's bitter about potential tax increases. But it wouldn't be Joe, and it wouldn't be the thousands cheering for McCain at his rallies.

The story of Joe and how he believes that somehow the Bush tax cuts helps him is such a clear demonstration of how Republicans vote against their self interest. It's Obama that argues they should keep more of their money. McCain and every Republican since Reagan has a way of defending the rich by making it seem like they're defending everyone. These Republicans who say they can't trust a Democrat to cut taxes forget that they aren't rich. McCain talks about a tax giveaway. What do you call the stimulus checks?

How sweet it is that the McCain poster boy has now become the poster boy for Obama not only demonstrating that any company, or plumbing company for that matter, which takes in $250,000 a year is very rare (about 5-in-100 rare) but also for how loose matching criteria led by Republicans to purge voter rolls can nab legal voters.

McCain's "clean election" committee a Bush-like contradiction

The Oxdown Gazette care of Bradblog.com has this interesting bit about John McCain's so-called "Clean Election and Voter Fraud Committee." The insight: That at least five of the 21 members have been involved in GOP-related vote suppression or false claims of voter fraud.

A member of the committee, Tom Davis, former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, was openly laughed at by a room of journalists recently at the National Press Club when he said the GOP would never be involved in any voter suppression.

See The Oxdown for more details about the others caught in direct quote.

McCain has gone insane

This will surely get the McCain-has-lost-his-mind theorists going. Check out this photo taken from the debate the other night. What the F? He apparently was reacting with self humiliation to losing his sense of direction. This isn't the first time he's been lost on stage. Here he is caught on video. Some have speculated he suffered a seizure as the left side of his face seemed to crease just before his lapse in directional awareness. Brave New Films already launched this eye-opening look at McCain's health. Greenwald also put this insightful film out about the hatred and slander being extolled by right-wing bigots linking it directly to statements repeated by Sarah Palin.

GOP war on voting in full swing, Colorado voter purges explained and the biennial campaign against ACORN

Voter purges soared into the news last week because of a New York Times article that reported much of the same material I've been writing about at Miller-McCune.com and other diligent reporters have covered -- that at least nine states were/are improperly removing people from their voter registration lists.

It's much more sexy than the countless barriers to voting that we chronicled for KBOO radio last week. But alas, the New York Times, our savior of record.

The Associated Press responded with a story starting out like it's going to criticize the Times for some reason and then spins off a story of it's own. Far better than the Denver Post article in response to another voter purge story raised by Robert Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast about Colorado.

The two came out with a multi-media blitzkrieg, hawking DVDs, BBC Newsnight exclusives and -- would you believe -- comic books. They have a funny way, no doubt, of not revealing any kind of details that would make the story sound plausible. Almost more shocking than Kennedy's shocking claims of Colorado having canceled a quarter of its voter rolls, is Palast's claim that he and RFK Jr. are the only two investigators looking into this stuff.

"It's just me and Robert Kennedy Jr." he told KJFK's The Solution Zone (second sound clip).

The truth is there is a lot of truth to Greg's statement about Colorado, much of it online by the Election Assistance Commission. (Read on) Odd, given The Denver Post responded this way at the end of an article about cross-party accusations.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Mike Coffman's office flatly denied charges recently levied by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that a quarter of Colorado voters have been taken off registration rolls.

Kennedy on his radio show this weekend alleged that a so-called "perfect match" clause in the Help Americans Vote Act has led Republicans to purge Democrats from voter rolls by using a computer system to compare "your registration application to all other government records of you in the state," according to a transcript posted on Air America's website. If there are any discrepancies, Kennedy said, "they remove you from the voting rolls."

Secretary of State spokesman Rich Coolidge said: "That is patently false. There is no basis in fact," he said. "There is no requirement . . . that there be a perfect match."

When they say Colorado purged 1 in 5 voters, they're talking about the Election Assistance Commission report covering 2005 and 2006, which shows that Colorado leads the nation in purging voters, having canceled 19.4 percent of the voter rolls.

I called Coolidge myself for my article at Miller-McCune.com. Coolidge this time acknowledged at least the basis in fact, then explained that the numbers include anyone who changed their address or made any other changes to their voter registration record. So saying they were canceled is not entirely correct, an error the NY Times also commits.

Meanwhile, as if sensing a defeat in widespread sympathy toward voters, Republicans launched -- with cooperation of law enforcement throughout the country -- it's most aggressive attack against ACORN in recent history, launching raids in Nevada, Ohio, Missouri and Florida. Would you believe, those states are also swing states and ACORN has registered 1.3 million new voters this year. FOX News is having an absolute field day. As we speak the ACORN's web site is down.

We interviewed in our KBOO studios Michael Slater, creator of Project Vote, which works closely with ACORN on voter registration campaigns. He talked about the myth of voter fraud and other topics related to voting disparities.

That was last week. What we're seeing play out this week is the GOPs largest, most aggressive campaign at complete and total opposition to the democratic process.

The assault on ACORN is a biennial campaign to vilify a group that's registered 148,000 in Pennsylvania, 152,000 in Florida, over 217,000 in Michigan, and over 238,000 in Ohio. The majority are low- to-moderate income people, 60-70 percent are African American or Latino, and over half are under the age of 30.

You can guess what? Republicans don't like it. Let alone the fact that any investigation into ACORN resulted from the group's own willingness to share records with the police, and let alone -- most importantly -- that NO ONE has ever tried to vote using any of the supposed ACORN frauds.

In Ohio, over the past several weeks, we can string a pattern together through a series of court actions. Had this been 2004, let's remember, there would never be the need because former SoS Ken Blackwell did everything the GOP wanted. Current SoS Jennifer Brunner (D) has been a Godsend for voting rights.

• Last week, a judge ruled -- in a lawsuit by the Ohio Republican Party -- that the state had to share with county election officials a list of names for which the state requested social security matches. Based on the Help America Vote Act, states must only request SS numbers when there's no driver's license record. There were 740,000 requests for verification to the Social Security Administration since Oct. 1, 2007, based on this AP story. Roughly 660,000 new voters in Ohio registered since the start of 2008. This could open the door to mass challenges ala 2004 when the Ohio GOP challenged 36,000 voters based on returned mail.
  

• The early voting window that brought many homeless people to the polls where new voters could register and vote on the same day ended last week despite GOP opposition.
  

• Republicans are also opposing Brunner's directive restoring due process to the state's challenge statutes.

• The GOP is suing in another case against Brunner's decision to throw-out Republican-sponsored absentee ballot request forms because of extraneous information. On this point, the GOP wants to count expand voting because they shot themselves in the foot. Some voter rights groups oppose Brunner on this one. But what a difference four years makes in Ohio.

KBOO Election Special -- Reboot the Vote

Yesterday, the election integrity program Meghan and I have been working on for the past two weeks aired on KBOO radio, our local community radio station. This was the longest radio program we completely produced ourselves and very satisfying due to its mind blowing content. Have a listen. Look out Ira Glass.

Introduction: Full Spectrum Listening

Chapter 1: The Truth of Voter Fraud

Chapter 2: Disenfranchisement

Chapter 3: Counting the Votes

Wall Street gambling led world market collapse

I've resisted writing here about what's becoming, as of yesterday, a worldwide market collapse because, like so many others, I understand very little about global economics.

I know I'm not alone also in saying that two recent episodes of This American Life aired nationally on NPR clarified two glaring loopholes that allowed investment banks and hedge funds to get out of hand: Credit default swaps and stock market short sales. Both create a situation where gamblers are voting with the house, betting in essence for the market to fail.

Watch the 60 Minutes story largely about credit default swaps, also this week, subtitled How some arcane Wall Street financial instruments magnified economic crisis. In it, an expert estimates the credit swap market was worth $60 trillion.

Tune in to Another Frightening Show About the Economy, which aired on Oct. 10. This show describes in the easiest way to understand terms, the complex world of credit default swaps.

And before that, TALs Giant Pool of Money episode.

Also check out the Top 10 Bailout Sweeteners at Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Meanwhile, reporters digging into the bailout bill found a one-week time frame to award the contracts to administer the bill "using special contracting authorities that enable it to retain private portfolio managers, custodians and other financial services consultants without following standard acquisition procedures," according to the Washington Post.

The article continues:

The department's quick turn to the private sector will help it prepare for the massive task of overseeing mortgages and other financial assets to be acquired by the government as part of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act that was approved by Congress and signed by President Bush on Friday.

But it means that the government has little time to assess the companies that will be partners in what could become one of the largest public-sector funds in American history. Some of the same firms that have played roles in the rise and collapse of the mortgage-backed securities market may end up guiding the government as the bailout unfolds, department officials said.

Contracting specialists said the department has the authority to retain "financial agents" to manage money on its behalf. By using that authority at a rapid clip, instead of through traditional acquisition procedures, the government creates a risk that it won't hire the best firms at the best price, they said.

In this case, the department issued requests for proposals on Monday and expects to being hiring advisers as soon as Friday.

Voting machine errors found in Florida, New Mexico

With less than a month to Nov. 4, election officials in two swing states recently discovered mistakes by optical scanners that read paper ballots, enough to potentially lose thousands of votes.

Sequoia optical scanning machines in Palm Beach County -- home to the infamous punch-card ballot debacle -- failed to get the same result twice after scanning the same batch of ballots.

That's not all. After a month of recounting the primary election results, the outcome of a judicial race flipped twice. That was due to 3,400 ballots counted on Election Day but mysteriously disappeared during a recount. Officials also found 200 ballots that were never counted in the original tabulation.

According to Kim Zetter reporting at Wired magazine's Threat Level blog:

The month-long saga has left voters and state officials exasperated and distrustful of the ability of county officials to run a competent general election in November. More important, it's also uncovered perplexing problems in some of the county's high-speed optical-scan tabulation machines, made by Sequoia Voting Systems. The machines flunked reliability tests prompted by the recount - producing different results for the same batch of ballots.

This from Brad Friedman at Bradblog.com.

To be clear: The failed Sequoia voting systems are electronic paper-ballot scanners, made by a private company which does not allow the public election officials who use them to determine the results of public elections or any independent, public examination of the hardware or software of the systems.

The same type of proprietary voting systems are used to count ballots in every state in the nation. Results of ballots "counted" on them are typically accepted by officials, the media, and the public as accurate, and are almost never double-checked, in any way, shape or form, to determine whether the computer-reported results actually are.

Sequoia is currently in court in New Jersey fighting to keep the results of a court-ordered independent test of its failed New Jersey machines from being made public, even though --- as The BRAD BLOG reported exclusively last May --- the company doesn't even own the intellectual property rights to the voting systems, as it is claiming in that case.

Meanwhile, in New Mexico, a programming error of another optical scanner -- this one by ES&S -- used in Santa Fe County was caught before it had the potential to lose hundreds if not thousands of votes cast on a straight party ticket. Election officials said they caught the mistake during routine safety checks that every county is expected to perform.

For more election irregularities, visit VotersUnite.org.

McCain promises "whole bunch" of nuclear power plants, poor people to sacrifice

In one of his clearest visions for the future yet, Sen. John McCain said during the town hall debate tonight that he would build a "whole bunch" of nuclear power plants, and called for "hundreds of thousands" of nuclear jobs.

Americans can look forward to a nuclear power plant in their own backyard along with an impending threat of total annihilation for all the people in the surrounding area.

When asked what people should be asked to sacrifice with our economy collapsing and our dependence on foreign oil, McCain said he would sacrifice social programs, describing a complete "spending freeze" on everything but defense and homeland security. He wasn't talking about pork barrel politics. He's talking about social programs that help people who've been left out of this so-called free market. In other words, the poor should sacrifice. Ask nothing of the rich.

In all of his career, meanwhile, Tom Brokaw has never managed to string together as many stupid questions together in a row as he did tonight. I counted six out of something like seven or eight including several multiple choice questions. (see below)

Barack Obama, let's see...I thought he articulated so clearly his tax proposal, which debate after debate and time after time, McCain continues to lie about. Ninety-five percent of small businesses, just like individuals, make less than $250,000 a year, so they will see no increase in taxes.

I thought on the lying meter, Obama may have made a few errors -- as the scared-to-be-called-left-wing press will dutifully report, but McCain was off the charts on the lying-through-my-teeth-on-multiple-occasions meter.

Here's a big McCain lie, explained below by The Daily Show, that John McCain suspended his campaign to deal with the bailout bill in Washington.



Brokaw stupid question #1: Who is your pick for Treasury Secretary? #2 Are you saying the economy will get worse (though non one said that)? #3 What's your priority issue out of health care, energy or social security and Medicare? (Answer: all of the above) #4 Do you favor a Manhattan Project approach to alternative energy or have it be in spread out in people's garages like in Silicon Valley? #5 What is the McCain/Obama doctrine for the use of force when national security is not at risk? #6 Is Russia an evil empire?

Dirty details of voter purges

Check out the article I wrote at Miller-McCune.com that came out yesterday on two new reports calling into question the way states clean-up their voter rolls.

Cyber security expert Spoonamore: Elections are insecure

A bank would never trust the electronic voting machines in this country if instead of counting ballots, they were counting money. Bank security and cyber-security experts laugh at the lack of oversight and the failures to spot red flags. Meanwhile, our election administrators are running outdated computer platforms that even Microsoft doesn't support anymore.

Stephen Spoonamore made such a compelling case on the Thom Hartman show this morning for scrapping every single electronic voting machine in this country. Spoonamore should know. He was a friend of Mike Connell, who Stephen discovered may have been involved in hacking the 2004 Ohio election results. Spoonamore told Hartman that he asked Connell personally about his involvement and he said he did something very bad for a group of people because -- something to the effect of -- they protect unborn children. Listen to the podcast here.

Spoonamore has said previously reported here that Connell's firm Smartech was the front end data source for whoever could have manipulated the outcome of the Ohio election results, which looks probable based on suspect election results in 18 counties. Connell also runs the firm New Media Communications, which publicly designed the McCain campaign web site and other sites for George Bush and the GOP. For the clearest understanding of the vote theft WATCH THIS.

Ohio attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Mike Fritakis have sued former SoS Kent Blackwell in the ongoing case King Lincoln v. Blackwell, a case that basically challenges the 2004 Ohio election. A judge two days ago issued a subpoena in the case to Connell. Attorneys are still seeking deposition of Karl Rove. VelvetRevolution.us has the complete coverage.

Spoonamore once again laid out the case against the Rapp family, which controlled the election machines in some 18 Ohio counties that raised serious red flags in terms of the vote totals reconciling with the exit polls. See the movie Steeling America Vote by Vote if you don't believe exit polls matter. These inconsistencies, says Spoonamore, would spark an investigation in any bank but apparently not when it comes to an election. Given that we already know computer scientists have proven time and again the vulnerabilities of our voting system, there's no excuse for not calling the Rapp family to task.

What I understand more clearly this morning is that Mike Connell was more of the linchpin that made the plan happen, not the mastermind that rigged the system. According to Arnebeck: Ohio SoS Ken Blackwell at the last moment before Election Day decided to outsource the statewide vote tabulating software to a server out-of-state that was operated by Smartech owned by Mike Connell. At the time, those same servers -- likely in a former bank vault in Chattanooga, TN -- also hosted GeorgeWBush.com and other GOP Web sites. Again, see Free For All.

Spoonamore in his interview with Hartman this morning also opened my eyes to one other thing: That Diebold sold off its election machine maker as Premier Election Solutions to a group of shady Texas investors because it didn't want the liability. This fits with Diebold's other election subsidiary, GEMS, which creates the tabulating software used by Diebold machines. GEMS, as Bev Harris at blackboxvoting.org can tell you, is run by convicted felons in Vancouver, BC.

Here's the video of a news story produced in 2006 that never ran about how Spoonamore had obtained a copy of damning Diebold report explained here and here.

Daily Show's hilarious take on bailout plan

I wanted to pick one segment to show here from the September 25 Daily Show (watch full episode here) and settled on John's impersonation of the World's Most Awkward Loan Interview Ever. I know I've said this before about particular segments, but this is THE BEST complete Daily Show episode of all time and this clip is perhaps Stewart's best performance yet.

Homeless bussed to polls in Ohio and the 3.5 million homeless vote

Reports of the Obama campaign in Ohio today shuttling homeless people to the polls must be infuriating to the McCain camp seeing as the GOP had unsuccessfully tried to block a longstanding state law that creates a brief window this week through Oct. 6 where voters can register and cast an early ballot on the same day... one-stop voting, so to speak.

As typically the case, having more people vote tends to favor Democrats while less voters usually helps Republicans. It just works out that way. Republicans have always known that same-day registration helps Democrats. Just as Democrats know that rain on Election Day hurts their numbers. Thus, the Republican-led war on voting and a widespread dirty tricks campaign happening right now across the country.

But don't assume that all homeless people vote for Democrats even though it's the Dems who mainly champion social programs that fight homelessness. In this NPR story on Morning Edition this morning a homeless man says he voted for McCain because he liked Sarah Palin.

Homeless advocates estimate there are approximately 3.5 million homeless people in the United States in a given year and roughly 125,000 chronically homeless. A coalition of homeless groups have been pushing for increased voting rights. Like everything else to do with the US election system, voting rights administration differs by state. Here's a rundown of how different states treat voting by homeless people. Keep in mind that in states with photo ID requirements or simple ID requirements with or without a photo -- such as Ohio -- this is a key barrier that prevents many homeless people from voting.