Think things have gotten bad for Diebold and friends? Something tells us they're about to get a whole lot worse.

HBO has just announced that they will be debuting Hacking Democracy, the long-awaited documentary film by Simon Ardizzone, Robert Carrillo Cohen and Russell Michaels, on November 2nd --- just days before millions of Americans will head to the polls to use all-new untested, inaccurate, hackable, electronic voting systems for the first time.

The BRAD BLOG received the first press release issued by HBO on this film late yesterday; it's posted in full at the end of this item.

We've yet to see the final version of the eagerly anticipated film (though we're told a screener is headed our way) but we've spent hours of time in conversation over the last year or two with both Michaels and Cohen as the pieces --- and the evidence --- were coming together.

We're told there are some remarkably damaging revelations to be seen --- and heard --- in the film, which includes not just interviews with Elections Officials, Computer Scientists, Security Experts, and Diebold Spokesliars, but loads of on-the-scene, first-hand documentary footage of some of the most remarkable and stunning moments during the long road of discovery in the E-Voting Revolution Scam that's been perpetrated on American democracy before, during and since the 2004 Election.

The investigative film, nearly three years in the making, is said to lay out a devasting case against E-voting in general, and Diebold in particular. The film, previously known as VoterGate, was released on the Internet in a very short, barebones "Presidential Election Special" just prior to the 2004 Election. At the time, that early, quickly compiled version --- which was jaw-dropping in and of itself --- followed the early stages of investigations into electronic voting machine fraud, vulnerabilities, and malfunction by Bev Harris and the late Andy Stephenson of BlackBoxVoting.org.

The earlier clips were released for free on the Internet in 2004 when the filmmakers felt they had already acquired so much important footage that they felt a responsibility to do something with it before the Presidential Election.

But as remarkable as the revelations of that short version were, that was then and this is now: some two years, miles of footage, and at least two or more actual demonstrated voting machine hacks later. The now-retitled film includes scores of fresh never-before-seen interviews, damning statements, and documents, and culminates in one of the most devasting moments in E-voting's short and sordid history: The Leon County Florida Hack, by computer security expert Harri Hursti, of a Diebold optical-scan voting machine in December of 2005.

The filmmakers were there for that watershed moment when the legendary Supervisor of Elections in Leon County, Ion Sancho, allowed independent computer security experts the opportunity to try and hack his paper-based Diebold optical scan voting system. The result was a flipped mock election, with no trace of the hack left behind, save for the paper ballots (which, in Florida, are now illegal to examine by hand after they have already been counted by a machine.)

Diebold said it couldn't be done. Diebold, apparently, lied.

That hack resulted in shockwaves across the national electoral landscape as it revealed the very real consequences of what had, up until then, been a largely theoretical fear about the vulnerability of electronic voting machines to malicious tampering.

An election had now been flipped for the first time on an actual voting system, this one a paper-based Diebold model. The touch-screen systems, we would later learn, are even more vulnerable.

The Leon County Hack will be seen, as it occured, for the first time when HBO premiers the film just days before this November's general election, when millions of Americans will be using those same new, hackable, optical-scan and touch-screen voting systems made by Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S, Hart InterCivic, and others for the first time.

It's about to get much worse, indeed. We hope to have more on Hacking America in the coming days.

UPDATE 10/15/06: Details now available on HBO's site here...

HBO's complete first press release on the film, including a schedule of air-dates, follows in full...

The Cleveland Plain Dealer is reporting today that over 1,500 ballots were sent out to absentee voters with the party designation swapped on one race.

According to Plain Dealer:

Of course, we've heard such reports during Primary Elections around the country already this year (see this one, where the Diebold touch-screen voting machine gave a voter a ballot for the wrong election, noticed only because he happened to be an eagle-eyed talk radio political reporter.)

Now, this just in yesterday from "bonobo", a blogger at dKos, on the first day of Early Voting on the same unreliable, hackable Diebold touch-screen voting machines, but this time in Franklin County, Ohio. And, again, from someone who happened to be politically involved enough to notice the "error"!...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

Yesterday Lou reported on the "We Count 2006" gathering in Cleveland, Ohio which featured Bev Harris, Bob Fitrakis and many others. Also reported is that the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections has asked for oversight of the complete election process from the Center for Election Integrity at Cleveland State University.

UPDATE: Video now available below, hat-tip to the democracy-lovin' folks at Election Defense Alliance whose banner can be seen at the conference in the video!

-- Windows Media Player version...

The text-transcript of Monday's segment on Lou Dobbs Tonight follows in full...

Could this be the first dirty trick in Ohio's 2006 Election? If so, we also expect it won't be the last.

Former Hocking County, Ohio, Board of Elections Deputy Director turned 2004 recount whistleblower Sherole Eaton, and Paddy Shafer, campaign manager for Green Party Gubernatorial candidate and Ohio journalist Bob Fitrakis, contacted us over the weekend with some interesting news.

It seems that Absentee Ballot Applications with an election date of November 7, 2000 are showing up all over various public libraries in Ohio. A typo? Apparently not. The forms are old ones, but for some reason are being made available, along with old Voter Registration forms --- from 2004 --- in all sorts of locations!

Here's a sample from one of the photos they sent in over the weekend:

While all of this could simply be an innocent mistake, we'll remind you that this is Ohio, Election Snakepit and Dirty Tricks Capitol of the World since dethroning the previous world champ, Florida, but just by a hair, as of 2004.

The "innocent mistake" theory seems more unlikely since it seems to have been found in so many locations, as described by Shafer and Eaton (see a full letter from Eaton below), who told us she never saw even a single such occurrence while serving as an election official during the entire 2004 Bloodbath in the Buckeye State.

"Innocent mistake" or not, remember: Ohio Sec. of State J. Kenneth Blackwell rejected thousands of Voter Registration forms in 2004 because they weren't on heavy enough paper stock. So would he flinch for a second at tossing out "old" Voter Registration forms received today? Or refuse to send an Absentee Ballot because it failed to specify the correct election date? Especially, when he points out on his official SoS website, that such applications require "A statement identifying the election for which you are requesting an absentee voter's ballot?"

As well, the rules for such applications have changed as the Ohio legislature has imposed new, draconian laws in their never ending attempt to keep people from being able to vote. The last four digits of the voter's Social Security number is now required on Voter Registration forms, but was only optional on the 2004 forms. Just another reason that Blackwell may be able to use to reject an application at his whim.

The official SoS site tells voters that they may pick up Voter Registration forms at "public libraries" on the page answering the question "How can I obtain an Ohio voter registration application?" So does the SoS have the responsibility to make sure that such applications are properly made available in such places?

Blackwell, of course, is also running for Governor, even while overseeing the completely fair and impartial adminstration of his own election as SoS. (The good news, when last we checked, he was some 20 points behind his Dem opponent, Ted Strickland.)

Eaton has more details, and warnings for all Ohioans in the following letter she sent to us last night...It's posted in full below...

ED NOTE 11:49pm PT: Well, it hadda happen. A story at The BRAD BLOG that needs retraction! It's an unfortunate first in our going-on-three years here. Hopefully a last. But so it goes. We're pulling the following story (leaving it below in full, along with a note where we went wrong) so nobody accuses us of trying to hide anything. When we're wrong, we're wrong. And unless further info appears, it would seem that we worked too quickly in our research here and were, infact, wrong. We most certainly regret the error and regret slurring Ms. Hoke, albeit accidentally, by reporting that she was an attorney for Bush/Cheney '04! She appears to have been representing the Green and Libertarian parties in the Ohio 2004 recount instead. Further explanation below, if you're interested...

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!

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Regular BRAD BLOG readers will know that Thomas Noe has been in big trouble for a long time. As reported previously on these pages, the former head of the Lucas County, OH GOP and a "Pioneer" level (responsible for more than $100,000 in contributions) fundraiser for Bush/Cheney '04, pled guilty to three charges including funnelling more than $45,000 in illegal contributions to the Bush/Cheney re-election effort in Ohio. Noe's wife, Bernadette, was the head of the Lucas County board of elections and was forced to step down after "irregularities" were found in their management of the 2004 election. Some of those points are discussed in Bobby Kennedy's Rolling Stone article on the gaming of the 2004 election.

Today we got the first meaningful indication of how much time Tom Noe is going to spend in prison. The Toledo Blade has very good coverage, and more than I can quote here. So hurrry on over and get yourself some of this: Noe gets 27 months in federal prison for illegal Bush contributions

It's an incredible tale in the American-dream mold: rags-to-riches-to-prison!
And Mike Wilkinson has done a fine job on the story so I really want you to read it all.

But I can't resist this bit:

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

Tonight we had two segments on voting issues. The first on the lawsuit in Ohio against Ken Blackwell, will help to ensure the 2004 voting records are saved for longer than may be the whim of Blackwell. The suit also asks that Blackwell be removed from the ability to oversee his own election for governor. Also HR-550 is discussed by Congressman Rush Holt and a representative of Election Science Institute.
Note: While they reported that the bill has 159 co-sponsors the number is actually 211 or 209 when you discount one co-sponsor who is now a Senator and the District of Columbia delegate who has no real vote.

The text-transcript of tonight's segment on Lou Dobbs Tonight follows in full...

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Today's New York Times has a front-page article called Ohio to Delay Destruction of Presidential Ballots, which starts like this:

The article gets around to mentioning the secretary of state in Columbus by name, but it never quite manages to point out that in addition to supervising the electoral process, Kenneth Blackwell co-chaired the Bush/Cheney '04 Ohio campaign.

Can the NYT spell "conflict of interest"?

More widespread irregularities than previously known? Yikes! We already knew so much!

Guest Blogged By John Gideon

Election Science Institute (ESI) of San Francisco, California was paid $341,000 by Cuyahoga Co., OH to investigate why the county had so many problems with their voting system in the May 2006 election. Were the problems really all human or were the machines at fault? ESI finally issued a report last week that had plenty of blame to go around between poll worker training problems to voting machines that could not add votes, counting devices that didn't match up on the same machine and, in several cases, machines that registered no votes at all.

Of course Diebold Elections Systems Inc. immediately denied that there were any voting machine problems at all as they blamed all problems on voters, poll workers, and election administrators. As reported earlier on The BRAD BLOG, Diebold also received nearly instantaneous assistance from "outside" sources who obfuscated in their reporting of the problems, singling out the issues concerning the voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) and ignoring everything else that was in the report.

Now county elections officials seem to have decided that they don't like the results from the investigation they paid for, as done by ESI, so they are throwing ESI under the bus while they run to defend Diebold. Suprised? Apparently they don't want to have to explain why they spent millions of dollars for a voting system that is flawed. Or perhaps Diebold applied pressure to their partners in crime at the Cuyahoga Board of Elections.

In either case, Columbus Dispatch reported yesterday morning that Diebold and the County have worked everything out, and it's all just fine after all...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

Election Science Institute (ESI) of San Francisco California was hired to investigate and report on problems with the May primary election in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. The 240-page report was just released this month (August), and some in the elections community have ignored a large majority of the report and zeroed in on a single aspect that supports their thesis that voters don't need any paper, even when voting on a Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine.

Daniel Tokaji is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and the Associate Director of Election Law at Moritz. He has testified against a voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) to a US House committee and the Election Assistance Commission..

In his paper on the ESI report, Tokaji ignores many significant findings of the report and distorts the overall findings by highlighting only the compromised VVPAT. As pointed out by VotersUnite.Org in their analysis of the ESI report, there was much more substance from ESI than just VVPAT printer problems:

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Regular BRAD BLOG readers will remember reading about Election Science Institute (ESI) and the report they prepared on the May 2 primary in Cuyahoga (Cleveland) County, because John Gideon blogged about it on Wednesday.

Also on Wednesday, at the Columbus Dispatch, Public Affairs reporter Mark Niquette and Senior editor Joe Hallett wrote about it too: Cleveland study questions accuracy of Diebold voting machines.

We have a few excerpts below the fold. We also have another piece, written by Mr. Niquette, which appeared on the front page of the Dispatch on Thursday, and in which the Dispatch asked for comments from readers.

I think Mr. Niquette and Mr. Hallett and their colleagues should hear from 6 or 7 green-and-yellow bloggers.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

Tonight Lou revisits the world of electronic voting in Ohio, where the evidence points to voting machine problems, but the vendors, especially Diebold, and the state want everyone to believe that the poll and election workers are just too dumb to do the work and all of the problems are their fault. For more on this story see the recent BRAD BLOG article regarding the Cuyahoga County investigation.

Here's a quick sample from the text transcript:

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

The text-transcript of tonight's segment on Lou Dobbs Tonight follows in full...

Election Science Institute (ESI), a San Francisco based non-profit, was contracted for $341,000 to do a complete study of the May 2 primary in Cuyahoga (Cleveland) County. The study was just released to the public and it is another scathing report against Diebold and their voting machines.

Ohio requires a voter verified paper audit trail printer on every Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that ESI found: