He's taking mail on the question right now to read on the air during Blitzer's Situation Room.

You can send him email here. "Should electronic voting machines be outlawed?"

UPDATE: Here's the transcript of today's show. The snippet from that transcript, including the questions Cafferty ended up reading on the air, is posted below...

The coverage of Voting and Electronic Voting issues is increasing exponentially at this point due to 1) the impending November election (read: coming train wreck) 2) the fact that an electoral meltdown occured in last Tuesday's Maryland primary (they've been happening in every primary so far this year as BRAD BLOG readers know, but now that they've occured in Montgomery County, MD, where the DC media and politicos live, the problem suddenly "exists"!) and, of course, 3) the news of the VelvetRevolution.ussponsored Princeton University Diebold Virus Hack.

I'm doing my best to keep up, but there is now much to cover and as well, I'm now being asked to do many media events which are time-consuming but also necessary. So, expect much more cover here shortly on all of the latest, even if some of that coverage must (necessarily) be a bit more abbreviated than in "the old days" when none of this stuff actually "existed".

One such new story worth covering is on the front page(!!!) of today's Sunday Washington Post. It begins this way:

...That's a good start --- if it took Maryland for WaPo to "notice" what's been going on now for months (in fact, years!), I'll take it! But the "truthiness" of the WaPo coverage goes quickly downhill from there.

Little wonder it's linked from Drudge Report right now!

The framing of the problems as mostly "human error" is exactly the type of coverage that Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, Hart InterCivic and friends are no doubt delighted about. The facts of the matter, however, are far different from the incredibly "Fair and Balanced" (read: uneven playing field, levelled inappropriately to the advantage of bad guys who don't deserve it, so WaPo stays out of trouble) spin given to the story. Even the WaPo's own coverage defies their own attempted spin, bias or failure (whatever you wish to call it)...

The Princeton Report, released a few days prematurely as it was, caught me somewhat off guard upon my arrival back home. My two months on the road were capped by two and a half hours sleep before needing to swing into action to change course from what had been previously planned for the report's release. I've been playing catch up ever since, and haven't even begun to crack into the thousands of unread, unanswered emails. But all in good time... I hope.

Before that, however, I've got Emcee duties tomorrow at SoCalGrassroots.org's big Election Protection event here in Los Angeles. It's to feature Gore Vidal, Maxine Waters, Debra Bowen, Bob Fitrakis, Mimi Kennedy, Lowell Finley and other notables, including myself as resident monkey. If you're in LA, I hope you'll stop by and say hello! Should be a great event! (It's also being sponsored in part by VelvetRevolution.us, as part of our Election Protection Strike Force public events series, just for the record.) The official flier for tomorrow's afternoon event, with all the details, is below the fold.

Lastly, for now and given the continually breaking events, I hope this note will suffice to give my heartfelt thanks to all of those who kept things rolling while I was "gone" over the past two months. Most notably, an enormous amount of gratitude goes to the good Winter Patriot, who we were able to thaw out for this special occassion, the fabulous Agent99 and, of course, the indomitable John Gideon. All served the good cause tirelessly and above and beyond the call of duty!

Additional thanks to all of the other BRAD BLOG Guest Contributors who picked up in my "absence," including (but not limited to) Joy Williams, Emily Levy, Michael Collins, Steve Huff, Joe Cannon, Chris Floyd and anyone else I'm insensitive enough not to have remembered right now.

Thank you all for making it possible for me to get the heck out of Dodge, cause some in-person trouble around the rest of the nation and get an hour or two of much needed peace and quiet in the bargain. I fear you all may be needed again soon, so please don't go too far! And thank you mightily again!

There is, I assure you, much much more to come. And soon.

And now, see below for info on tomorrow's event if you might be able to stop by! I shall endeavor to make it well worth your time if you do...

Just in case you thought Diebold was the only American voting machine company worthy of public mistrust...This just in on ES&S, the nation's largest supplier of electronic voting systems (and the one with the most disastrous record of failing in elections so far this year!)...

More at Ritchie's campaign website...

Noted University of Iowa computer scientist and e-voting expert, Douglas W. Jones, posted a reponse via email this morning to Diebold's official reply to Princeton University's recent report, detailing the ease with which Diebold's AccuVote touch-screen voting machine may have a virus inserted into its system.

Such malicious code, the first-of-its-kind report details, could flip votes, steal an election and replicate itself from one voting machine to the next. The dirty deed could be done by a single individual with about a minute's worth of unsupervised access to a single machine or memory card, and could be designed to be undetectable to either voters or elections officials.

The mainstream media appears to have finally found this issue fit to report, after all our years of covering it here. There has been a good deal of MSM coverage over the last two days, since The BRAD BLOG broke the full story, both here and in shorter form over at Salon; some of it has --- no surprise --- been better than others. We'll have more on that hopefully later this evening.

In the meantime, Diebold released their predictably misleading and disingenuous response late Wednesday evening. To which Jones replied via email this morning. This is his response...

It's incredible (or is it at this point?) but the lawsuit filed by several Colorado voters to ban touch-screen voting machines manufactured by Diebold, ES&S, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia in the state has revealed that the state's appointed "expert" --- responsible for certifying voting systems --- has no actual college training in computer science and failed to do any actual testing of the systems before certifying them!

As reported in an excellent article from Rocky Mountain News news this morning...

The issue was also covered quickly in a Denver Post article last night:

We've long been describing Bob Ney as the "Soon-to-be-Indicted Bob Ney". It looks like that day is finally here.

The New York Times is reporting that Ney, the leader sponsor and author of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) is headed to jail...

We've also long reported on Ney's "good luck" in winning $34,000 at a London casino owned by some good friends...at the exact same moment he owed exactly that much in credit card bills. Says The Times...

With both Ney and former Republican Majority Leader, Tom DeLay (R-TX) now facing indictments, that means there is only one remaining congress member who went on Jack Abramoff's golf junkets to St. Andrews, Scotland who has yet to be served with criminal charges: Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL)

Feeney is currently facing a challenge for his seat by Clint Curtis, the man who has sworn in affidavit, video-taped congressional testimony and polygraph test that Feeney asked him to create vote-rigging software when they both worked at the same computer firm in Florida in 2000 (where Feeney was general counsel and registered lobbyist, even while he was also serving as Speaker of the Florida House).

Anyway, now that Ney is apparently going to jail for his Abramoff-related crimes, can someone other than The BRAD BLOG please look into the hornet's nest surrounding the passage of HAVA, as aided and abetted by Abramoff's old lobbying firm, Greenburg Traurig, and Ney's former chief-of-staff-turned-Diebold-lobbyist, David DeStefano? Pretty please? Here's a nice place to get you started!

John Gideon covered the mess for us as things unfolded last Tuesday. Johns Hopkins computer science professor Avi Rubin was, once again, a poll worker on Election Day during last Tuesday's primary in the state. As BRAD BLOG readers know, Maryland was/is one of Diebold's original "showcase states" along with Georgia.

Rubin's post, detailing his experiences at his one polling place alone last Tuesday, gives a crystal clear picture of what a fucking mess we've got on our hands. A. Fucking. Mess.

Train wreck ahead. Big time. Please don't say you weren't warned.

-- Brad Friedman, EXCLUSIVE
-- (Salon.com has posted a shortened version of the following report right here:
"Hack the vote? No problem")

A vote for George Washington could easily be converted to a vote for Benedict Arnold on an electronic voting machine and neither the voter, nor the election officials administering the election would ever know what happened. It wouldn't require a "conspiracy theory" or a "conspiracy" at all. It could be done by a single person with just a few moments of access to the voting systems.

Those new findings are detailed, and illustrated on video-tape, in a new first-of-its-kind study released today by computer scientists and security experts at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.

(The version of the video demo at the Princeton website is being hit hard, and thus, slow to download and view currently. We've got a quick flash version available here for your convenience, courtesy of David Edwards.)

The scientific study has revealed, for the first time, that a computer virus can be easily implanted on an electronic voting machine which could, in turn, result in votes flipped for opposing candidates. The virus, as well, could be written to then spread itself from one machine to the next resulting in a stolen election. The malfeasance would likely never be discovered, the scientists have said.

Though the concept of stolen votes via electronic voting systems has been widely regarded as theoretically possible by experts up until now, a top-secret four-month long hands-on study of an actual touch-screen voting system, by the scientists at Princeton, has confirmed the worst nightmares of elections officials and American voters…not to mention a voting machine company known as Diebold.

The BRAD BLOG has had exclusive access to the scientists and information being tested as the team's various hack attempts have been designed and carried out over the course of the study.

Working directly with a Diebold AccuVote TS touch-screen voting system, the computer scientists have been able to implant a nearly-undetectable virus onto a touch-screen voting system, managing to successfully alter a voter's ballot --- after it's already been confirmed and cast --- in order to flip the vote so that it is recorded for a candidate other than the one the voter had intended.

According to the study's team leader, Edward W. Felten, a professor at Princeton's Department of Computer Science, the report confirms – and records in a video-taped demonstration – that such a malicious virus could be easily inserted onto a Diebold touch-screen voting system by a single individual "with just one or two minutes of unsupervised access to either the voting machine or the memory card" used with the system to store ballot definitions and vote tabulations.

The virus, as programmed by the Princeton team, could then spread from one voting system to the next depending on the way the machine in use is configured, or the way in which votes are tabulated in any particular jurisdication.

(NOTE: This story was set to break on Sunday, with a release of the study on Monday morning. I had written an exclusive story for The Nation to be released Sunday night along with exclusive coverage that was being scheduled with ABC World News Tonight. The scientists of the study, unfortunately, jumped the gun in releasing it this morning without warning me. Currently scrambling to get a version of my previously prepared report up on Salon.com to be followed by a more complete report here at BRAD BLOG shortly.)

UPDATE:
-- My full exclusive report is now posted here.
-- Salon is now running a shortened version of that full report. (Requires subscription, or viewing of a short ad.)

As I roll down the freeway towards home, I'm reminded of our friend, the legendary and mysterious Freeway Blogger, who didn't wait five years to remember 9/11. Here's a look back at a few of his finest moments remembering...while Bush and Friends had long forgotten...

Blogged by Brad on the road...after 5 days offline, but not off the job (unfortunately)...

After a car breakdown in Kansas, in the middle of nowhere, literally, we're now $650 lighter, but back up and running and closer than ever to the West Coast. And what's the matter with Kansas? Nothing. The folks who helped us out of a jam were aces. With a few meetings over the next week between here and home, and some hot feature articles and other super-secret missions that I'm working on in the background, we'll be back no later than late next week. With much to come the following week.

In the meantime, here's a couple of quickies...

+ I'll be back on Peter B. Collins' show tonight in my usual weekly 5:20pm PT (8:20pm ET) slot to discuss the latest developements (and a few unpublished details) in the Clint Curtis/Tom Feeney election, the Busby/Bilbray matter, and anything else that comes to mind. Listen up online here or call in to say hello! We'd love to hear from you! 1-888-573-8372.

UPDATE: Peter B. called earlier after another guest had to drop at the last minute, so I went on about 15 minutes early. If you tried to tune in, but missed the first part of the interview --- including some previously unpublished details of Tom Feeney's beer-fueled election night flip out last Tuesday --- the interview is now archived here for your listening pleasure.

One section dropped out briefly from my recording, concerning the story I wrote for Hustler on Ray Lemme. Lemme was the man from the Florida Inspector General's office who was mysteriously found dead just prior to releasing the results of his "all the way to the top" report (as it was described by vote-rigging whistleblower turned congressional candidate, Clint Curtis) in a Valdosta, Georgia hotel room. That report, which was published in Hustler's September issue --- and warning: it contains some graphic crime scene photos --- is available in porn-free PDF format right here in case you missed it.

+ Watch PBS' NOW tonight (Friday) at 8:30pm ET for their report billed as "DOWN FOR THE COUNT: Will new voting machines cause an Election Day debacle? NOW takes an alarming look at the new systems in place, ready or not." If this quote from the now-resigned, formerly Bush-appointed first head of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission is any indication, it could be an ugly report: "We are no more certain today than we were in 2000 that we will not have an embarrassing moment and a tragic outcome in this year's election," Deforest Soaries, former Chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, told NOW. (Hat tip to Oregon Voting Rights Coalition for the heads-up! Check the NOW page for air times in your area.)

UPDATE: The PBS NOW report was tremendous. You can now watch the video here...

Still on the road. Somewhere in Oklahoma. Was sidelined by a surprise death in the family, necessitating an unplanned trip to Dallas for a funeral. So, aside from that, now a week behind my planned return to Los Angeles. Will be back next week... at some point... prior to Saturday the 16th when I'm hosting a huge Election Integrity event sponsored by SoCal Grassroots and VelvetRevolution.us with Gore Vidal, Maxine Waters, Debra Bowen and many others in Los Angeles! More details here....

Barely online last week, and may be off the grid entirely this week. Driving me crazy, especially with so much going on, but Guest Bloggers are doing great it looks like from my two minutes’ online (and hours on the phone!) to keep track. Must leave this motel right now!

Good luck to Clint Curtis tomorrow in Florida! Looks like the national PDA has now endorsed him as well! And Tom Feeney is as bizarre as usual (see this TPMCafe post, and watch for more here from WP or Gideon.) Suspect Feeney is up to dirty tricks? You betcha!

RIP Steve Irwin... and more as soon as I can get back onto the grid full time... which I now actually look forward to! Until then... rock on, Bradcorps!

Blogged by Brad from the road...

"It's outrageous," says Francine Busby, "that this judge just said the state of California doesn't have jurisdiction over our own elections, over this election."

Busby's remarks, in a report today by William Finn Bennett in the North County Times, were a suprising departure from her previously guarded stance concerning the challenge of the June 6th U.S. House Special Election between herself and Brian Bilbray.

"What happened today should be of concern to all voters," Busby reportedly said.

Bennett's coverage of yesterday's debacle in the San Diego County courtroom where Judge Yuri Hoffman dismissed the election contest in support of the defendants' arguments that the U.S. House, not the voters or courts of California, have jurisdication to adjudicate election challenges after the House has already seated a member, is quite good. Indeed, it was a refreshing departure from previous sloppy, sometimes wholly inaccurate and occassionally entirely partisan North County Times reports and commentary on the case (see this embarrasing commentary from Jim Trageser for the most egregious.)

Bennett's report today, on the other hand, quite fairly describes the court's atrocious decision which we reported on in detail yesterday. Here's a sample from his coverage...

Blogged by Brad from the road...

In addition to Emily Levy's coverage here on Friday night, and Winter Patriot's coverage last Thursday (which includes actual briefs and letters filed in the case), Miriam Raftery filed a superb summation at RAW STORY today of where the Busby/Bilbray CA50 Election Contest stands as of last Friday's hearing. She includes several details which the Guest Bloggers here hadn't previously touched on --- including details on the defendants' attempts at a frivolous "SLAPP suit" against the plaintiffs --- so we recommend giving her piece a quick read.

The Judge on the case in San Diego, Yuri Hofmann, is to decide tomorrow on the defense's argument that the case should be tossed out on jurisdictional grounds because, they argue, the Constitution gives the U.S. Congress --- not California voters or California courts --- the right to ultimately adjudicate such election challenges...even before, as in this case, the election was actually certified by the county or the state. No, seriously, that's what Brian Bilbray's attorneys are actually arguing. Out loud.