Polls have been closed in Lake County for some 6 hours, but no results in Indiana's corner county, closely bordering Obama's homestate stronghold of Chicago and home to Gary. Tiny Union County has also failed to come up with any numbers just yet.

As of now, Indiana remains "too close to call" according to all the cable nets, with 92% of precincts (not necessarily votes, since Lake County is the second-most populous in the state) reporting. There are currently just under 20k votes reportedly between Clinton, who is currently leading, and Obama, out of more than 1.1 million "counted" so far.

For the record, Lake County uses a combination of the failed, unverifiable MicroVote Infinity DREs and paper-based MV-464's voting machines, according to Verified Voting's database of voting systems.

Union County, on the other hand, you needn't worry about, since our old friend Diebold runs the place with a combination of their hackable paper-ballot systems, and their unverifiable and hackable DRE (touch-screen) systems. But Union also has a tiny population of just more than 7k, whereas Lake has a population of just less than half a million.

Unfortunately, I don't know that I'll be able to follow this one through the night, so if I can't (or even if I can), I welcome you folks to tell the story in comments below as you are best able to figure out what seems to be going on there. Tonight, I'm guessing you can tell the story as well as (or better than) I can...

UPDATE 12:47pm ET: Results now coming in. The state could be a squeaker by a few thousand votes or less.

Let's see, with Indiana's own estimates of 43,000 voters who could be disenfranchised by their new Photo ID/voter suppression law, and less-conservative estimates suggesting several hundred thousand voters who could be robbed of their right to vote...Gosh, hope the final results in the Hoosier State don't come down to the question of a dozen or so 80 & 90 year-old disenfranchised nuns from South Bend...

Early on election night last Tuesday, with just 18.07% of the unofficial returns from the Pennsylvania Primary in, astute BRAD BLOG reader Matt Sircely (who was aware enough to save off the HTML page locally!) noticed the following oddity on the official Dept. of State website results page...

Note the three different sets of bars and percentages representing Obama's tally. The problem did not occur for any other candidate [Update: looks like it did, see updates at bottom of article for more info], as seen on the full web page, which was noticed early in the evening, and saved locally by the alert reader. Whatever the problem, it was eventually corrected by officials.

Today, Sircely called the PA Dept. of State to try and get an explanation of what caused the problem seen above (audio from call is posted at the end of this article)...

Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is the luckiest woman in the world. Just when it looks like she'll have no chance to become the party's nominee, extraordinary good news comes her way, just at the last minute. Again.

Take, for example, yesterday's Pennsylvania Primary. For weeks we heard endlessly how she would need a double-digit victory margin in the Keystone State to offer a legitimate reason for her to stay in the race. And, as the gods would have it, she achieved the ability to trumpet that double-digit margin by a single tenth of a percent.

With 99.51% of the vote reportedly counted as of this moment, according to the PA Dept. of State's own numbers, it's Clinton's 54.6% to Obama's 45.4%.

So, in truth, that's actually just a 9.2-point difference, but, as luck would have it for the New York Senator, rounding each of those numbers to their nearest percent, as the bulk of the media were happy to do today, allows for a nice, easily-trumpeted, double-digit, 55% to 45% number that can be reported far and wide!

The stunning turn of good fortune comes on the heels of Clinton's last make-or-break moment back in New Hampshire, when conventional wisdom had all but counted her out after her loss to Obama in the Iowa Caucus. But, there again, Clinton came through, despite both pre-election and exit poll numbers which all, almost uniformly, predicted she'd face a thumpin'.

Of course, you conspiracy theorists out there are likely to spin this tale of remarkable providence, into a shadowy tale of skulduggery by supporters of a Clinton nomination, be they Democrats or Republicans, who'd rather see her, instead of Obama, go up against John McCain in the fall.

But you'd have not an iota of actual proof to support your paranoid suspicions...

On Tuesday night, you will be told who the winner of the Pennsylvania Primary is. You will accept it. You will have no choice. No matter who the winner really is. Or isn't.

This Tuesday's crucial contest will be primarily run on 100% faith-based, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen or push-button) e-voting machines across the state. There will be no way to determine after the election whether the computers have accurately recorded, or not, the intent of those voters who voted on them. As VerifiedVoting.org summarizes the crucial contest, it "will be essentially unrecountable, unverifiable, and unauditable."

Most of the votes, more than 85%, will be cast on such DRE systems which do not provide so-called "Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails" (VVPATs), as their use has been found unconstitutional in the state, since its been determined, accurately, that ballot secrecy cannot be guaranteed when using such paper trail systems. Not that it matters.

With or without a so-called "paper trail" printer, all touch-screen/push-button/DRE voting machines are equally unverifiable and antithetical to American democracy. Period.

So, as with South Carolina's primary, so so long ago, and other states since, whatever the officials tell you at the end of the election is what you, and we, will have to accept. Whether votes are counted accurately is completely out of anyone's hands at this point. It's strictly Democracy of the Gods...

This guy --- and I'm sorry I don't know his name --- is my new hero. Can't really set up the following must-watch killer video any better than "Rat" of RatTube, from whence it was found, did:

Yes. Very good. Can we please get the good father his own TV show? Perhaps at 8pm ET on Fox "News" where they currently show nothing but Anti-American trash?...

And that's what America really looks like. Which is why you normally don't get to see it on TV. Not sure where the video actually aired, if anywhere. Though the questioner was O'Reilly's reporter/hitman, not surprisingly, I've yet to see any clips of that interview on his show (though, admittedly, I don't get to take out the trash every day.)

(Hat-tip to "CD")

UPDATE 8:34pm PT: Turns out the man in the video above is a Catholic priest by the name of Rev. Michael Pfleger, and apparently Bill O'Reilly did use a part of the interview above on his show. Approximately 5 seconds of it. On April 2. And yet, despite how well Pfleger deflects the nonsense tossed at him by O'Reilly's ambush reporter (as seen in the above, not on his show) O'Reilly has been flogging the same "racist, hate-monger" nonsense for weeks.

As if that's not bad enough, after the 5 seconds shown from the above interview, O'Reilly went on to do a full 6 minute segment discussing whether or not...wait for it...Pfleger should be sanctioned by the Catholic Church!

I wish I was kidding. Watch for yourselves...

Recently, Barack Obama indicated he would "immediately investigate" if "there [are] possibilities of genuine crimes" having been carried out by this White House, should he become President. He said he'd direct his DoJ and AG to "immediately review the information that's already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued."

In his comment, which seems to have carefully played every side of the street and both side of the fence, Obama told AttyTood's Will Bunch:

On the other hand, last night, during her appearance on the Colbert Report in Philadelphia, his wife Michelle was remarkably impressive, I thought. Really. For whatever that may be worth. Here's the video...

(Hat-tip BRAD BLOG comic sherpa, Pokey Anderson)

Perhaps we're missing something here?

Our friends at BuzzFlash have their top screaming headline set currently as...

...which links over to a quick report over at the Texas blog Burnt Orange Report (also good folks, as much as we know about them.)

"Ominously"?

The quick BOR article by Glenn Smith is headlined "Clinton Caucus Disruption/Vote Suppression" and appears to be at the end of a chain of increasingly panicked blog items which began with a report from Dallas Morning News, quoted as follows by Smith...

Some guy named Patrick Ruffini, at the right-wing Townhall blog of right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, is using the space to disinform readers as to the reasons for the current shutdown of the FEC. And he's dishonestly misrepresenting a BRAD BLOG article from last year (we're the "left-wing blogger" he links to in his comments below) in order to help fool his presumably gullible readers...

WTF?

(Hat-tip RAW STORY)

UPDATE 2/22/08: Secret Service responds. Says "no security lapses at that venue."

More voter registration problems. This time in Louisiana during today's Democratic Party Primary. From the Obama campaign website just after 7pm ET tonight...

For what it's worth, Obama reportedly won today's primary, but problems with voter registration rolls are quickly emerging this year as a huge problem in state after state. Our reporting from just the last week reveals problem after problem...

Georgia: Widespread bottlenecks for voters as problems occur with Diebold's new e-pollbook system and the state's new Photo ID restrictions. Voters waited in line for up to two hours in some places.

New Mexico: 17,000 (11%) forced to vote on provisional ballots in Democratic Caucus as previously registered Democrats find they are no longer on voter rolls recently privatized by voting machine company ES&S.

Arizona: We've begun receiving reports from voters and local officials of polling places where some 40% of voters were forced to vote on provisionals, after state registration system outsourced to ES&S. [UPDATE: One such report is now published here, from a poll worker who reports that of 1291 ballots cast at her polling place, 540 --- some 41% --- were forced to vote provisionally.]

California: Various reports of voters registered for one party to find they were switched to another, or not registered at all. Confusion about how to handle non-partisan voters in Los Angeles County leads to nearly 100,000 votes which may not be counted properly.

Many states are just now fully implementing new, statewide, computerized registration rolls as mandated by the disastrous Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. The systems are being outsourced to private companies in many states, and more and more Election Days seem to be turning into Beta Tests for the new systems...

The good news: New Mexico now votes on paper ballots, since their touch-screen debacle in the 2004 Presidential Election left Gov. Bill Richardson with little legal choice but to move to paper.

The bad news: The huge turnout in yesterday's Democratic Primary led to long lines, voters who found they were no longer on the registration rolls for some still-unexplained reason, 17,000 votes had to be cast on provisional ballots which remain uncounted today, and now it's being reported --- incredibly --- that at least three ballot boxes were kept overnight last night, uncounted, at the home of a Democratic County Party Chairwoman.

What makes it all worse, as if all that is not troubling enough, is that the current razor-thin margin between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the caucus stands at just 217 votes out of 136 thousand ballots cast.

The governor's apologizing, the party is prevaricating, the candidates' representatives are negotiating, and, as usual, it's the voters who are left hanging, wondering if their voices will actually be heard...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Now that we're finally back at The BRAD BLOG World News Headquarters in Los Angeles (for a few days at least) and have shaken off our road buzz (for now), gotten through the latest Sibel Edmonds blockbusters (until the next shoe drops) and have overcome last Friday's maddening 24 hour Internet outage, we've got some catching up to do on New Hampshire's continuing mess of a "recount."

Luckily for us, as we've been traveling for the last few days, and pulling off other related miracles, the hand counters in Concord took a break as of last Friday for a long weekend, which includes today's Martin Luther King Day holiday. As we all know, MLK would have hated the idea of anybody actually counting votes on his holiday, so we're glad the folks from the NH SoS office decided to let the ballots sit around and cool off in the darkness for three long days in a vault somewhere (maybe). The counting, which has so far covered just a small portion of all of the ballots, will resume on Tuesday.

So...From the latest hand count numbers, to the latest media coverage, to the latest reports from Election Integrity experts on the ground --- including one amazing photo essay illustrating New Hampshire's "chain of custody" protocol for its ballots, 80% of which have never been counted or examined by a single human being (that we know of) --- let's get caught up a bit.

Fasten your seatbelts and make sure your Pinto has a full tank of gas...

Who says Hillary doesn't have what it takes to beat Republicans at their own game next November?

According to Steve Rosenfeld at AlterNet...