Had the same thing been carried out by a worker for the now-defunct ACORN, Republicans --- and even Newt Gingrich --- would have called it massive "voter fraud." But the 1,500 acts of fraud, by Gingrich's own admission, were carried out by a worker hired by his campaign, so it seems the media have barely noticed it.

Nonetheless, The BRAD BLOG has received confirmation from two different state agencies that the 1,500 alleged cases of ballot petition fraud said to have been carried out on behalf of the Gingrich campaign, in their unsuccessful attempt to qualify for the Republican primary ballot in Virginia, are now being carried out by the state Attorney General's office.

In late December, after Gingrich had failed to turn in enough valid signatures to qualify for the Virginia primary ballot, he was caught on video tape telling a supporter in Iowa that the reason for the failure was due to a campaign worker who created 1,500 fraudulent signatures.

"We turned in 11,100 --- we needed 10,000 --- 1,500 of them were by one guy who, frankly, committed fraud," Gingrich is seen and heard saying in video originally aired by CNN.

The former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives downplayed the incident, by explaining to the woman that the entire affair was "just a mistake," after they had "hired somebody who turned in false signatures."

Neither he nor his campaign, however, has made the name of the alleged "one guy" public, to our knowledge, despite the extraordinary number of fraudulent signatures created and turned in by that "one guy" in what an official at the Virginia State Board of Elections (SBE) described to us as "definitely an illegal act."

News of the embarrassing criminal investigation is confirmed today, even as voters go to the polls for Florida's 2012 GOP Primary, where Gingrich is facing off against front-runner Mitt Romney who, ironically --- and uncomfortably enough for Republicans --- may also find himself the subject of a criminal voter fraud investigation in the not-too-distant future...

To paraphrase Mark Twain's famous remark in 1897, reports of 953 "dead people" having voted in recent South Carolina elections appear to be greatly exaggerated. Who could have guessed it?

Following quickly on the heels of Rightwing hoaxster James O'Keefe's successful felonious conspiracy to commit voter fraud during the New Hampshire primary this year, by receiving ballots in the name of very recently deceased voters (resulting in a Republican call for his "arrest and prosecution" in the Granite State) and the U.S. Dept. of Justice's rejection of a new South Carolina law attempting to keep registered voters from voting at the polling place unless they are able to present a state-issued Photo ID, on the basis that the state's own evidence reveals the law to be both illegal and discriminatory, the SC Attorney General pushed back by claiming that a state DMV analysis had discovered some 953 votes had been cast by "dead people" in recent elections there.

Funny thing though. Upon closer examination, as is almost always the case in these matters, those 953 "dead voters" may not be so "dead" after all. That, according to SC State Election Commission (SEC) Executive Director Marci Andino who both testified [PDF] and released a statement on the matter last week.

According to both her statement and testimony to the SC House Election Laws Subcommittee, Andino, the state's chief election official, said:

Zounds! Who could have guessed that Republican claims of hordes of zombies voting in South Carolina's elections --- as first publicized in a short, evidence-free AP article trumpeted at Fox "News" --- were, um, "greatly exaggerated"?!

And that's not the only specious claim by the AG's office that Andino dismantled during her testimony last week...

Ohio's Republican Sec. of State Jon Husted has called on fellow Republicans in the legislature to repeal their controversial Election Reform bill, rather than see it face a voter referendum currently slated for this November's ballot.

The law, if it is not rejected by voters, will severely shorten the time for Early Voting and will ban it all together on the Sunday before Election Day in the Buckeye State, in a way that is geared towards suppressing Democratic votes. The bill also includes other major barriers to voting such as a prohibition on county Boards of Election mailing absentee ballot request forms to voters and a ban on poll workers instructing voters where their correct precinct is located. Opponents of the law have noted that some 200,000 voters in Columbus alone --- or 4 in 10 votes cast there in 2008 --- would have had to cast their vote in a different manner in 2012 has the law been allowed to take effect this year as planned.

Husted, the state's chief election official, elected in 2010, had worked with GOP legislators in crafting the bill which was passed and signed by Republican Gov. John Kasich last year, before being met with a wildly successful petition campaign in support of a "voter veto" of the bill. That campaign, led by progressive groups such as Fair Elections Ohio, garnered more than 300,000 signatures, or more than 75,000 above the total required to put the bill on hold and place it on the ballot for a popular vote. The result is that, last December, the bill was officially suspended for 2012, when Republicans had hoped it might help suppress Democratic-leaning voters in the swing-state's Presidential election. Instead, the law is now set to be on the November 2012 ballot for voter approval or rejection.

The Sec. of State called on fellow Republicans to overturn the bill in the legislature, scrap it, and revisit the issue after the 2012 election, rather than allowing it to remain on the ballot in November. Those remarks have raised the hackles of some powerful GOP lawmakers in Ohio.

Husted is developing a record for standing against some of the most radical elements of his own party's agenda in some cases, as seen, for example, in his outspoken condemnation of an attempt to institute polling place Photo ID restrictions on voters in the same bill last year, as well as a bi-partisan effort in 2007, with the previous Democratic Sec. of State, to do away with 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems in the Buckeye State...

Guest blogged by Duncan Buell

The League of Women Voters of South Carolina recently screened Patriocracy, a new film by Brian Malone, who attended the screening and participated in a question and answer event afterward. The film focuses on the question of whether the US political system is broken because politics have become too partisan and the unwillingness of polarized groups to compromise.

My primary motivation in writing this review stems from a segment of the film that featured Americans Elect COO Elliot Ackerman making the familiar and discredited argument that if we can bank and shop online we can vote online.

If one were doing a film about cures for cancer, and time were given to someone explaining theories of the arrangement of crystals around the patient, the science would be called into question. If one were doing a film about nuclear energy and time were given to someone explaining that the answer lay in extending the half life of uranium by a factor of four to six, the science would be called into question. If one were doing a film about the possible evils of the Citizens United decision of SCOTUS, and time were given to someone discussing how to have the House of Representatives solve the problem by passing a law, then the legal judgement would be called into question, and the judgement of the filmmaker would be called into question in permitting a bogus argument like that to be included in what was purported to be a legitimate film.

However, as is so often the case, the film did not find it necessary to call into question the science (or lack) of Internet security. So I asked Malone the question of who his computer security experts were, and what their credentials were, that would have led him to include a technical statement about Internet voting in his film about political matters...

What a difference two years and one brutally ugly, obscenely cash-based GOP Primary Election cycle makes. One wonders if even Republicans, at this point, are finally beginning to realize the problems wrought by the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United decision two years ago yesterday.

If this Rasmussen poll can be believed, the Right-leaning polling firm now finds that 58% of Americans are calling for new campaign finance laws. That's up from three years earlier when, as ThinkProgress notes, a majority of the nation, according to the same polling firm, felt that it would be "good" if then-existing campaign finance laws were struck down by the court.

Well, they got their wish two years ago yesterday. Wonder how they feel about it now.

To mark yesterday’s somber and embarrassing anniversary, John Wellington Ennis, filmmaker of the wonderful, smart, insightful and often deftly amusing 2008 documentary FREE FOR ALL!: One Dude's Quest to Save Democracy, has another one on the way. The new one will focus on our now even-sorrier state of "democracy" in the long dark shadow of Citizens United. While the new feature-length film, Pay 2 Play: Democracy's High Stakes is due later this year, yesterday Ennis released a short documentary, based on some of the work he's done on that film, focusing on how Citizen's United came about, and what is has meant to the nation.

His new soulful short, Citizens United: How Did It Happen? follows below. I'm honored to say that I appear in it myself, but it's very good anyway. Ennis has a few additional thoughts on it all right here today. But, at the very least, you owe it to yourself to give his new short documentary below a look on this 2nd anniversary of the horrific SCOTUS decision that is actively undermining our absolutely most central values as a nation...

By the way, The BRAD BLOG's 8th(!) anniversary is this Tuesday! Unfortunately, we have not been the recipient of secret millions from corporate "people" in the wake of Citizens United. In fact, we have never enjoyed either corporate or foundational support for our completely independent work here, and continue to rely almost solely on you, our readers, to keep going. We have survived this long, barely, thanks to you! But we desperately need your support to continue.

Please consider an 8th Birthday donation to The BRAD BLOG to help us continue our important work in what is guaranteed to be a long, ugly and difficult Election Year, when your help here is needed the most. Also quite welcome are sustaining monthly donations of any amount you choose! For that (or our snail mail address for olde tyme paper check contributions), please see the light blue box about halfway down the right sidebar of all of our pages. Anything you can offer is greatly appreciated! My sincere thanks in advance!

The voting systems in use for the nation's first three all-important electoral contests in the 2012 primary --- from Iowa to New Hampshire to Saturday's South Carolina Primary --- go from pretty great to intolerably horrible. And then comes Florida, which deserves its very own special category, thereafter.

The "First-in-the-Nation" caucuses in Iowa allowed voters to vote on hand-marked paper ballots, counted by hand in front of the public at the caucus site, with results announced to everyone right then and there before being called in to GOP headquarters and before ballots were move anywhere. The wonderfully transparent system allowed for Republican voters by the Iowa GOP (which they hypocritically fight against allowing for everybody else in other states, and even in their own during general elections) is just about as close as we general get in this country to Democracy's Gold Standard. It's also what allowed reporting errors to be discovered and confirmed by the public after an election with some 122,000 votes counted transparently within an hour or so of polls closing, leading to almost nobody charging "fraud" even though just 34 votes are said to separate first and second place in the certified results of the impossibly, and historically, close election.

As of the "First-in-the-Nation" primary in New Hampshire, however, election transparency for voters and their ability to oversee their own elections began to disappear. While a lucky 10% of voters enjoyed hand-marked, publicly hand-counted paper ballots, the rest of the state's voters were allowed to vote on hand-marked paper ballots, but forced to tolerate secret tabulation on oft-failed, easily-manipulated Diebold optical-scan systems programmed by a company (LHS) with a history of criminal behavior and convictions. The results from those 90% of Granite State voters may have been tallied accurately by the Diebold op-scanners or, as seen in the disastrous 2008 Presidential Primary, not. Since NH doesn't bother to actually check to see if their machines tallied the hand-marked paper ballots correctly, we're unlikely to ever know if they did --- barring a recount request where, by then, the secure chain of custody of the paper ballots would be uncertain (to put it mildly.)

And now we come to the "First-in-the-South" Republican primary in South Carolina, where all evidence of how voters vote disappears entirely as the voters will be forced across the entire state to vote on easily-manipulated, oft-failed, 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems made by the nation's largest voting machine company, ES&S. When the machine-reported results are announced tomorrow night they will either be accurate or not. Either way, there will never be a way for anybody to know one way or the other as there will be nothing to prove how voters voted and nothing to "recount", even if anybody wanted to.

Appropriately enough, perhaps, Saturday's primary in the Palmetto State will offer 100% "faith-based" voting, since it will be scientifically impossible to prove that even a single vote for any candidate on the ballot has been recorded accurately by the ES&S iVotronic touch-screens as per any voter's intent. Known what we mean, Alvin Greene?...

Even the GOP establishment --- which had long decided that Mitt Romney was their best hope to win back the White House in 2012 among those currently running --- could not overcome the intent of the voters as transparently expressed on publicly hand-counted, hand-marked paper ballots.

At the end of a January 3rd's Caucus Night in Iowa, our headline, written initially when Rick Santorum was momentarily up over Romney by just 4 votes, was "Santorum 'Wins' Iowa, Everyone Else Doesn't". An hour or so after we'd called it a night, the Iowa GOP stepped forward to declare Romney, not Santorum, had actually "won" by a slim 8 votes out of some 122,000 cast.

Finally today, the GOP has been forced to admit that Santorum was indeed the winner. Though our headline three Tuesday's ago was just slightly more accurate than the GOP's declaration for Romney that night. In truth, there was another winner in Iowa: The Voters.

It took just over two weeks for the GOP to admit it, but the party's final reported results from the hand-marked paper ballots cast on January 3rd, hand-counted in front of the public on Election Night (cast by voters who were not turned away for lack of a state-issued Photo ID) are there to tell the tail of who really won the all-important "First-in-the-Nation" Iowa Caucuses. The GOP couldn't have successfully lied about it if they'd wanted to. Oh, they could have tried. In fact, they did as Iowa's GOP chair Matthew Strawn announced just after 1p ET "Congratulations to Governor Mitt Romney, winner of the 2012 Iowa Caucuses." And the corporate media would have gone along with them --- and, in fact, they did, ever since the GOP's attempted lie on Election Night --- but the truth would have always been there for the public to see nonetheless.

Nobody ever had to rest their faith on a single source, like a political party or a candidate or a voting machine company --- though the media was all too happy to do so before moving on to New Hampshire. There was always a transparent, overseeable, system of checks and balances --- just as our Constitution envisions for the nation's governance as a whole --- there to assure that self-governance had a fighting chance to be more than a bumper sticker slogan hauled out when convenient, ignored when not.

Because the Iowa GOP allowed the people to oversee the counting of their own election, right then and there at the caucus sites, before ballots were moved anywhere, it was next to impossible for them to successfully game the system --- just as Edward True had proven two nights after the Jan 3rd Caucuses.

And speaking of Edward True, the Republican Party of Iowa owes this man, this patriot, this Ron Paul supporter a huge apology...

As of today, I'm happy to say, my show on Pacifica Radio's KPFK here in Los Angeles has been expanded to a full hour. We made pretty good use of all of those minutes today, thanks in no small part to Rick Santorum (of all people) raising the issue of felon voting rights at Monday's GOP Presidential Debate in South Carolina. (And one heck of a largely unnoticed Freudian slip by Mitt Romney on that topic!)

Joining me to discuss the issue and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD)'s proposed "Democracy Restoration Act" --- and the shameful state of 4 million American citizens disallowed from exercising their franchise, many of them even after they've served all of their time and have completed all probation and parole, just cause they happen to live in the wrong state --- was Deborah Vagins, Senior Legislative Counsel of the ACLU.

I was also joined by Desi Doyen for the latest Green News Report as well as today's breaking news on Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline scam.

Plus 1 million signatures for the recall of Gov. Scott Walker in WI, other news of the day and a bunch of callers to boot! Listen to the entire show, commercial-free, below. Enjoy!

Download MP3 or listen online below [appx 58 mins]...

P.S. As I don't always get the chance to post all of my KPFK shows here (which is now LIVE Wednesday's from 3p-4p PT) you can catch all of 'em by subscribing to the podcast feed here or via KPFK's archive page for the show here.

P.P.S. Anybody wanna submit a suggestion for a cool logo for "The BradCast"? Happy to crowd source ideas, especially since you all actually came up with that name for the KPFK show in the first place! If so, here's a photo or two that may, or may not, come in handy.

This distressing news was flagged for us by Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org late Friday...

And how do we know SCYTL's electronic (Internet!) "voting technologies" are "secure"? Well, they tell us so themselves -- twice --- in their press release, silly!

They couldn't just say it was "secure" if it wasn't! Right?!

In any case, here's a bit of the red flag Harris waved on Friday to help unpack what all of this actually means for the future of what's left of our small-d "democratic" elections...

[Now UPDATED with tonight's nightmarish audio archives below! Enjoy!!!]

Mike has the night off! So we're back! Guest hosting the nationally-syndicated Mike Malloy Show on Friday the 13th! It's a Nightmare on Malloy Street!...

We'll be BradCasting all the horror LIVE from 9pm-Mid ET (6p-9p PT), coast-to-coast and around the uprising globe from the studios of L.A.'s KTLK am1150 in beautiful downtown Burbank. Join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! Our LIVE chat room will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG, as usual, while we are on the air. Please stop by and join the fun while you're listening! (The Chat Room will open at the bottom of this item a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

Scheduled tonight (so far):

• YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE! Me! With three hours over our public airwaves to talk about Iowa, New Hampshire & South Carolina voting nightmares! The nightmare that is Election 2012! And other related and unrelated nightmares!
• GRAEME ZIELINSKI, Spokesman from the Wisconsin state Democratic Party, with some late breaking news on the "Recall Scott Walker" effort in the Badger State!
• PLUS! The fraud that is James O'Keefe; the "cold" War against Iran; the failure that is the NY Times; the GOP wants more corporate money in campaigns; and all the nightmares on your minds, via your calls over your public airwaves at 877-520-1150 and your tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates across the country and also on SiriusXM Ch. 127. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate KPTR 1450 in Palm Springs or at WhiteRose Society or via MikeMalloy.com.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Tonight's show was a NIGHTMARE! Don't believe me? You can now listen to the full show, sans commercials, in the archives posted below. (You can also read the nightmarish chat room archives below too!) Be afraid...Be very afraid!...

Guest editorial by Ernest A. Canning

I am old enough to remember not only the civil rights movement but that, amongst all the Southern Jim Crow states, Mississippi had absolutely the worst reputation. It was the state where, in 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year old African-American from Chicago was lynched, burned and so badly mutilated his own mother couldn't recognize his corpse --- all because he whistled at a white woman (we'll spare you the horrific photo, but it's available here if you'd like to see it); where, in 1963, the NAACP's Medgar Evers was gunned down outside his home; where, in 1964, three civil rights workers attempting to register voters were lynched.

I have no doubt that the 83% of MS whites who, this past November, as we now learn in a new analysis, voted in favor of a state constitutional amendment that would mandate polling place photo ID restrictions as a prerequisite to voting --- as compared to more than 75% of non-whites who voted against polling place photo ID --- would vehemently deny their vote was racially motivated. They would do so even though African-Americans are more than three times more likely to lack photo IDs than whites and even though study-after-study has exposed the lie in the GOP's baseless claims that such laws are needed to prevent "voter fraud."

But I am also relatively certain that race played a role in the inability of so many of the children and grandchildren of formerly Jim Crow Mississippi to appreciate what it is that photo ID truly seeks to accomplish...

Long ago discredited, federally convicted criminal, Rightwing con-artist, pretend journalist, and accomplished liar James O'Keefe is pimping another secretly-taped and selectively-edited video sure to be a sensation on Fox "News" and at other Republican propaganda venues. It purports to show several voters showing up at polling places during New Hampshire's primary on Tuesday and giving the names of recently deceased voters to poll workers before procuring ballots to vote under those names.

The video, about which O'Keefe lies on his own website, is certain to add more phony fuel to Republicans' long-unsupported claims that people are regularly impersonating dead people at the polling place in order to vote illegally, an allegation which has absolutely no evidence to support it. The aim of the video is clearly is to shore up GOP attempts to institute polling place Photo ID restrictions, meant to do little more than disenfranchise Democratic-leaning constituencies such as the elderly, minorities and student voters, under the fraudulent guise of curbing "voter fraud."

As New Hampshire does not require a Photo ID before one is allowed to cast a legal vote, O'Keefe uses the video to try and create the impression that voting under the name of a recently deceased person is both simple and regularly done. It isn't. But that's his scam this week.

As usual, O'Keefe's video looks as if it represents something that is damning. That's his stock in fraudulent trade, and that's usually more than enough to reinforce the biases of the incurious who've been long-brainwashed, through a well-organized and well-funded GOP effort, into believing that something Rightwingers say is happening certainly must be happening --- despite a dearth of evidence to show that it actually is happening.

The video was released Wednesday morning at the website of O'Keefe's ironically named Project Veritas organization. It was also published "exclusively" by Tucker Carlson's rightwing pretend news site, Daily Caller. Naturally, the websites of Andrew Breitbart, a fellow professional liar, as well as O'Keefe's employer and a co-conspirator on his phony ACORN "Pimp" Hoax videos, quickly followed suit in publicizing the same misleadingly-edited version of the video.

At the Project Veritas site, O'Keefe lies about the video, claiming at the end of his short article accompanying it, that "the unedited videos from part one of the Voter Fraud investigation" have been made available as well. They haven't. He has lied about that. Again. Moreover, as several other sites reported on Wednesday, it's possible that O'Keefe and his band of merry fraudsters have also broken both federal and state laws.

But setting his various lies and possible criminal actions aside for now, let's first look at the supposedly "unedited" version of the videos O'Keefe offers up, and then I'll be happy to dismantle the underpinnings of this ruse below it...

Simultaneously, at the stroke of 8pm ET, all of the major TV news networks and news agencies declared Mitt Romney the winner of the all-important "First-in-the-Nation" GOP New Hampshire primary.

It's so important, in fact, that the "winner" was declared before any of the optically-scanned paper ballots --- 90% of votes in the state are tallied by easily-hacked Diebold voting systems, which sometimes simply just drop votes, as programmed by a company with a criminal background --- were examined by any human being to make certain the results actually reflected the voters' intent. (In NH in 2008, they often did not.) The vast majority of them hadn't even been tallied at all yet by one of those secret vote counting computers, as the news outlets declared their winner of the NH GOP primary based on Exit Poll results.

You remember Exit Polls, right? They're the things that, as we were told over and again back in 2004, are neither accurate nor reliable for use in selecting the winner of elections. In NH in 2008, we were told they were wrong as well.

Nevertheless, with 51% of precincts reporting (and, again, none of the paper ballots from any of the Diebold-tallied towns actually examined to make certain the computers tallied them correctly), the media-reported results declare Ron Paul coming in second, followed by Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and then Buddy Roemer.

One positive note: There was a dearth of problem reports, at least that I was able to find, coming from the polls today --- where voters enjoyed the freedom to both register and vote on the very same day, and no voter was denied their right to cast their legal vote due to a lack of Photo ID in the "Live Free or Die" state.

And one cautionary note: As usual, our standard reminder that concerns about tallies and related problems do not often come to light until days, weeks (and sometimes even months) after Election Day. But for now, if you trust the results of your elections to Exit Polls, Diebold voting systems and LHS --- the private, unaccountable company whose Vice President Ken Hajjar, a convicted drug trafficker, was barred from working on elections in the State of Connecticut after leaving profane remarks here in comments at The BRAD BLOG in 2007 --- which programs them, well, there you have it.

It could be worse. It could be South Carolina...

For those masochists who'd like to relive all the "fun" of the 2008 New Hampshire primary election disaster, when Hillary Clinton defied dozens of independent pre-election polls and even same day Exit Polls to inexplicably be named the "winner" over Barack Obama in the "First-in-the-Nation" primary, you can check out an index of the key reports in our exhaustive coverage here.

It was an election that Keith Olbermann characterized that night, while unverified Diebold optical-scan computer results were announced, as "a titanic upset victory." NBC's Tim Russert called it "the most stunning upset in the history of politics." Two days later, Chris Matthews, still justifiably mystified by the unverified computer-reported tallies, demanded an explanation from the pollsters and politicos he featured on his show that night:

"Why were the polls taken, of people coming out of the booth, so off?," Matthews tried to ask of each of his guests again and again and again. They had no good answers. Only speculation about how Clinton's teary moment at a campaign event over the weekend may have swayed the electorate. Though that still didn't explain the Exit Poll results taken the day of the election, as voters left the polling place.

All of the pollsters and pundits simply presumed that somehow, all of the independent polls had been wrong. None wondered if the results produced by the easily-hacked, oft-failed Diebold system were actually right. Even though, by that time, not a single one of the ballots tallied by those machines had been examined to make sure the computer had read them correctly.

A well-known pollster had confirmed to The BRAD BLOG, via an email, which we never received permission to run publicly, that he too was looking at the raw exit poll data throughout the day (raw exit poll data that us mere mortals outside of corporate media are no longer allowed to see) and it was clear to him also that Barack Obama, fresh off his victory at the Iowa Caucuses, was going to handily defeat Clinton.

He didn't. At least not according to the very same computerized optical-scan computer systems made by Diebold and programmed and serviced by a company with a criminal background, that will once again be used in tomorrow's all-important "First-in-the-Nation" primary contests in the Granite State...

Before we move on to the nightmare of democracy and secret, concealed "trust-me" vote-counting which will comprise the bulk of the "First-in-the-Nation" primary in New Hampshire, I'd like to offer a few final thoughts, for now, and for the record, on last Tuesday's "First-in-the-Nation" GOP Caucuses of Iowa. What happened there ought to remain firmly in all of our memories as we move into what is likely to be a nightmare of democracy and secret, concealed "trust-me" vote-counting across almost the entirety of the nation in this important Presidential Election year.

I had planned to post this article (or one like it) on Friday, when I was suddenly side-tracked by the report from Ron Paul supporter Edward True that he had noticed a mis-reported tally on the Iowa GOP's caucus results website. It was a small mis-report to be sure, but in a race that had previously been "called" for Mitt Romney by just 8 votes out of some 122,000 cast at 1,774 different caucus sites, the 20 vote error noticed by True and called to the attention of the media (and since confirmed by the Appanoose County GOP Chair) could prove to be decisive in the final certified total promised a week or so from now.

The discovery of the error --- a reporting error, apparently, as opposed to a counting error --- and the ability to quickly and independently verify the real tally of that particular precinct through a number of different, independent sources, is a tribute to the way the Republicans allowed their own voters to vote and those votes to be publicly counted.

As we spent some time detailing over the last week or two, the Iowa GOP, in a remarkable display of almost indescribable hypocrisy, allowed their voters to use processes they fight virulently against allowing for almost everybody else, particularly in elections where non-Republicans will be participating. In the Iowa Caucuses, however, where the party, not the state, sets all of their own rules for access, vote-casting and vote-counting, caucus-goers were allowed to register and vote on the same day, without disenfranchising Photo ID restrictions, on hand-marked paper ballots which were immediately and publicly hand-counted at the caucus site with results announced to all before they were called in to the central party headquarters and before the ballots were moved anywhere.

That is largely the essence of Democracy's Gold Standard for elections and it is because of that process that there are so few questions about the overall results today.

It's important to make this point, loudly and clearly, before we get lost in what is to come. It's one that even MSNBC's Rachel Maddow --- whose political analysis, whether you agree with her personal perspective or not, is usually spot-on --- missed by a country mile on Friday night while reporting on this issue. She was broadcasting from New Hampshire on the True incident back in Iowa, and on one other quickly-cleared-up question that came up about the results late night on Tuesday, when she offered an assertion that seemed more cheap-shot at Republicans than supportable assertion. It was far beneath her usually excellent standards of fact-based analysis...