The non-profit, non-partisan Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has launched a unique website to help safeguard the fairness and integrity of US elections, using the power of citizen journalism. The Election Protection Wiki can be found HERE. It enables citizens, journalists and government officials to actively monitor the electoral process in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. CMD and its community of volunteer editors will continue to improve, expand and update the EP Wiki beyond the upcoming November 4th election....

Today we have four “Featured” articles. These four were selected together because they were all in the “Tennessean” newspaper; one of the largest newspapers in the state of Tennessee. These four articles are all found in the ‘Opinion’ pages and were written by the state’s coordinator of elections, a member of the advocacy community, the mayor of Shelby Co Tennessee, and the newspapers editorial staff. These pieces cover a gamut of issues from voting machines to voter intimidation and suppression. It’s encouraging to have a newspaper feature these pieces and do it in this way. ...

We have two important recommendations. Please pass this email on to your distribution lists.

Check your voter registration. For months, we have been recommending that everyone check to make sure they are registered to vote. It has recently come to light that 19 states are not following federal law; they are purging voters close to the election.

These states are: Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Delware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Masachusetts, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas and Washington.

But even if you live in some other state, please check your registration status right now – if you can. Otherwise, check on Monday. We have created a page to assist you. It’s HERE

If you have been wrongly purged from the voter rolls, don’t simply register again. Call your county election official to say you were wrongly purged and should be placed back on the rolls. If you do not get satisfaction, contact your state election officials. If you still have problems, let us know.

Don’t vote straight-party. Problems abound with straight-party voting – on electronic voting machines and on paper ballots. We highly recommend that, if you want to vote for the same party across all races, vote for each individual person separately, and don’t mark any “straight-party” choice at all. See today’s “Featured” article for a good reason why straight-party voting is not a good idea....

Today I listened to, and watched, a hearing, on-line, from Washington DC in which the DC Council heard testimony regarding the recent failures in the district’s primary election where there were thousands of phantom votes from one precinct and even after those were discovered and cleaned-up the final numbers still do not add up. The two council members who asked questions in the morning, Council members Mary Cheh and David Catania, were extremely well prepared and concerned especially when taking sworn testimony from Michelle Shafer and Ed Smith, both VPs of Sequoia Voting Systems and other Sequoia representatives.

Soon after one representative from Sequoia tried to claim that the problem found in DC was unique, the result of pollworker mistakes, and that no votes had ever been lost on Sequoia machines Mr. Catania began asking questions about past problems that are very much like the problems that happened in DC and that may have resulted in lost votes. There were, of course, claims of mistakes in the media and misunderstanding of the facts from Sequoia.

Further testimony was taken from computer scientists who also had concerns about the Sequoia product and testimony. Our featured article discusses this hearing in more detail. I will include a link to an archive of the hearing if/when it becomes available. And, watch for more articles from Washington DC about the hearing and the fall-out from the hearing....

The latest testing results from Palm Beach Co Florida seem to clearly point to problems with the voting machines. It wasn’t the only problem the county had in the primary but it seems to have been a large part of it.

Tomorrow (Friday) there will be a hearing in Washington DC to discuss and take testimony about the failures in the DC primary election. How did one precinct have over a thousand more votes than it had voters? Again this seems to clearly be a machine issue.

The tie that binds Palm Beach Co and Washington DC together is that their voting machines were all supplied by Sequoia Voting Systems...

ADDENDUM FROM BRAD: More details on all of the above now here...

In one of our ‘Featured’ articles CBS Evening News has raised the “Red Flag On Purging Voter Rolls”. This article reports on a just released report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law on voter roll purges. The report “provides troubling new insight into the process. There are no national standards and as a result, the cleaning up of voter rolls is not as precise as it should be and eligible voters are often wrongly removed. The Brennan report calls the nationwide process 'chaotic,' 'shrouded in secrecy', 'riddled with inaccuracies', 'prone to error' and 'vulnerable to manipulation'."

Our second ‘Featured’ article is a report done by USPIRG (Public Interest Research Group) in which they blow the whistle on nineteen states that are violating federal law in their handling of voter roll purges.

Neither of these articles should have been necessary. State election officials should be carefully following the law and carefully ensuring voter rolls are properly purged and not in such a way as to deny legally registered voters their right to vote. Any election official who does not feel the need to ensure due diligence should be replaced and, if they violated federal law, they should be investigated for that violation. ...

According to today’s ‘Featured’ article: With record voter turnout expected at the polls this November, the Election Protection coalition, which includes the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Rock the Vote say they have prepared the largest and most comprehensive election watch effort ever undertaken.

"We’re confident that we can help millions of Americans overcome obstacles to make sure their votes count," said Jonah Goldman, director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections, part of the Lawyers’ Committee.

The primary tool will be a toll-free phone number, 1-866-OUR-VOTE (and its Spanish counterpart 1-888-VE-Y-VOTA), a nonpartisan confidential voter services hotline. ...

In a clear victory for Ohio voters a federal judge and the State Supreme Court all agreed that voters can register to vote and vote all on the same day within a week-long period during early voting. The courts found that Secretary of State Brunner had, in fact, correctly interpreted a law passed by the state legislature.

Are you busy on Nov. 4? Of course you are going to vote but how about the rest of the day? Contact your county and volunteer to work for the election department for the day. Be a poll worker or work at the election office supporting the officials. Be involved. ...

In our featured article today we again get information about the pending shut-down of the Social Security Administration’s databases for maintenance. As related in the article by Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice, this shut-down is important because:

Why has the SSA scheduled this shut-down within three weeks of the Nov. election? Now Sen. Diane Feinstein has asked the same question. That letter can be found with the featured article...

Over 25 years ago one well-known political hack said this about voting, “I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." Democracy is only effective when everyone participates. Please don’t be left out on election day. Make sure you are registered to vote now and ensure all of your information is correct and up-to-date and then exercise your right to that vote on election day. Forty-one states have a registration deadline between Oct 6 and Oct 20. Find out where to go to get information from your state HERE: ...

Forty-one states have voter registration deadlines between Oct. 6 and Oct 20. One of the tools that states need is the online system provided by the Social Security Administration (SSA) that allows states to match Social Security Numbers on voter registration forms. So what does the SSA do? They schedule a total shutdown of their National Computer Center Building for annual maintenance from Oct. 10 to Oct. 13.

States are extremely busy right now checking a record number of new voter registrations. Closing down SSA’s online system, even over a weekend, will result in many new registrations not being filed and those new voters not being able to participate in this election. The chair of the Election Assistance Commission, Rosemary Rodriguez, has sent a letter to Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue asking that the SSA reconsider the date of the shutdown.

There is now evidence, and an investigation by a county District Attorney, that the fraudulent act of “slamming” is happening in two California counties; San Bernardino and San Joaquin. “Slamming” is the act of changing the party affiliation of a voter without their consent and knowledge. ...

Why is it that some election officials in swing states have decided to discourage voting by college students? The answer seems obvious: they know how a majority of them will vote and they don’t want that.

According to our “Featured” article today one Colorado county election official sent information to one Colorado College and asked that it be promulgated to all students. The information falsely claimed that students from outside the state could not register to vote if their parents claimed them as dependents on their tax returns. When faced with the truth the official tried to claim that his office had misinterpreted state law and “mistakenly published information that was incorrect.” This same misinformation drive has also taken place in Virginia and South Carolina, amongst others...

The election nightmare may be over in Palm Beach Co., Florida. After seven recounts, machine and hand, the election for a county circuit court seat has been certified. The losing candidate, of course, is considering legal actions. Still not explained is how ballots were lost then found and how the machines just couldn’t seem to get an accurate count. Sequoia should have some explaining to do beyond just “No, no, no, it wasn’t us.”

Think no one is using punch-cards anymore? You’re wrong. Eight counties in Idaho are still using them and they like them.

Over 25 years ago Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation and the Christian Coalition and a "Godfather" of the Conserviative movement said this about voting:

Democracy is effective only when everyone participates. Please don’t be left out on election day. Make sure you are registered to vote now and ensure all of your information is correct and up-to-date and then exercise your right to that vote on election day. Many states have a registration deadline the first week of next month. Find out where to go to get information from your state here: ...

This morning a judge in Florida authorized Palm Beach Co. to do another recount. That is they are going to recount the recount of the recount of the original count. In this machine recount the county hopes to find 159 ballots in 54 precincts in which good ballots were mixed in with ones that contain over- and under-votes. Those 159 ballots will then be inspected to determine what the voters intended.

Also featured is an article by Bev Harris with regards to voter list databases. These databases are largely untested in real elections and will almost assuredly be a point of problems in November. Some states made their own central data bases while others spent millions of tax payers dollars for ES&S or Sequoia or Bermuda-based Accenture to build their data bases. Errors in these data bases serve only to disenfranchise voters....

Early voting has begun, as of today, in Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia, and South Carolina.

Colorado doesn’t begin early voting until October 20 and it is probably a good thing because the ballot is so long that the voters guide is 144 pages long.

Palm Beach Co Florida still has no final results to report. My guess? They will end-up with the court deciding that this race go back on the ballot and the voters will be asked to do it over again.

Last but certainly not least is the plea once more that everyone who reads this check to ensure their voter registration is still good and that every piece of information is correct and up-to-date....