While The BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio usually airs live on Wednesday's, we did a special Monday version this week, as I was filling in for my friend Harrison who was on the road today and unavailable to do his normal show.

That gave me the opportunity to cover some of today's breaking news on the Obama DoJ's subpoena of AP phone records, to take a call or two on the pretend Benghazi "scandal" (including from one caller who doesn't exactly know why its a scandal, but really really wants it to be one), to offer a words on the recent Internet Voting hack on NBC's The Voice, the madness of the Democratic Party push for Vote-by-Mail (as witnessed last week in the Colorado legislature, and this week in L.A. where absentee ballot fraud charges are flying between two different candidates) and even some thoughts on the coolest song ever recorded in outer-space.

But, before all (or most) of that, we were joined for an all-Brad BradCast by Brad Johnson of ForecastTheFacts.org to discuss the disturbing landmark of passing 400 parts per million of C02 in the atmosphere (for the first time in millions of years), why that matters, and the wingnut "weapons-grade denial" pushing back against the facts...

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

It might be funny, but for the fact that beating back the Internet Voting virus --- even here in California, where it is Democrats who are being dumb enough to push for it, despite warnings from virtually every world-class computer scientist and security expert in the world that it's an insane, non-solvable idea --- but it appears that voting for NBC's show The Voice may have been hacked this week.

According to a statement from NBC tonight:

Here is how Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org just described what happened at the top of tonight's show in an email to a group of Election Integrity folks...

Whenever there is an e-voting failure, corporate mainstream media tends to downplay it as little more than a "glitch", "hiccup", "snag", or "snafu". So far tonight, they haven't disappointed in their gentle descriptions of the failure that seems to have struck The Voice's voting procedures...

Today on the KPFK/Pacifica BradCast:

My take on what happened in the 100% unverifiable Mark Sanford "victory" over Elizabeth Colbert Busch in South Carolina's Special Election for the U.S. House on Tuesday; How the media are pulling "an Iraq" all over again on the supposed use of chemical weapons in Syria; a bunch of great callers (including one who completely disagrees with me on Internet Voting); Desi Doyen with the latest Green News Report; and all of the Jodi Arias and Benghazi news you will ever need!...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

The good news: When the largest voting jurisdiction in the nation gets its new voting system, perhaps as early as 2015, it will not including Internet Voting, according to Dean Logan, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk of Los Angeles. The bad news: It will very likely include touch-screen computers and, with them, 100% unverifiable voting.

I interviewed Logan last week on my KPFK/Pacifica Radio show [full audio interview is at the bottom of this article], and we had a very informative discussion about what voters in Los Angeles may have to look forward to in the coming years, as well as many of you in the rest of the country, since the new system is being designed with an eye towards selling it to other counties in California as well as in the rest of the country.

So this is not just a local L.A. story. It's likely to affect the way that votes are cast and tallied in much of the nation. It's well worth paying attention to, even if, unlike me, you don't live here.

Los Angeles County alone "has more voters than 42 of the 50 states," according to Logan's office. It features nearly 5,000 precincts. Well over 3 million votes were cast in this one county alone during the November 6, 2012 Presidential Election. When Logan took over the job of Registrar after our previous one resigned, suddenly, just months before the 2008 President Election, he had a monster of a job to take over. It's still a monster. And it may soon get even more gargantuan as he attempts to re-work, re-design and, indeed, re-think how voters vote here, and as we move from our current publicly-owned voting system to our next publicly-owned voting system. (L.A. is one of the very few jurisdictions in the nation which owns, maintains and designs its own system. Most similar systems in the rest of the state and nation are proprietary, owned by the private companies which make them, and don't allow even the election officials in those jurisdictions access to their "trade-secret" software and source code.)

While, happily, Logan offered me some assurance that we won't be casting votes over the Internet with his new system --- an assurance that should bring some measure of relief to both Election Integrity advocates as well as the consensus of computer science and security experts who are also experts in voting systems --- there is still much cause for concern, as this still-unknown voting system begins to take shape...

What happens if we start with known public corruption cases and work backwards to the intersection with elections?

What you will find is kickbacks and bid-rigging schemes; at least two of these, in New Orleans and in Pennsylvania, connect back to Ciber, the Independent Testing Authority (ITA) that supposedly tested and then signed off on most of the U.S. voting machines currently in use in all fifty states, on behalf of the federal government.

You will learn of a now-admittedly corrupt government technology official who benefited from rigged bids, (courtesy of Ciber) who had placed, as one of his first priorities, setting up his very own Internet Voting system.

And when you look into money-laundering, the mechanism providing the juice for corruption, you'll find out about a strikingly odious situation: a New York City Democrat who bribed New York City Republicans to help him run for Mayor (as a Republican). The case has recently made news as at least 5 high-ranking elected and party officials were rounded up this week as part of a sweeping FBI sting in the Empire State.

"Trust" will never suffice when it comes to conducting elections. There can never be a place where counting votes in secret, or governmental snooping on how we voted, or hidden money behind campaigns, or hiding records on elections, can be accepted by the public, yet that is happening right now. In all fifty states.

Vendors who do business with the government do participate in bid-rigging and kickback schemes, and both politicians and government employees sometimes deprive the public of honest services, as we find in the New Orleans case involving Ciber, the company which signed off on almost every electronic voting system in use across the country today.

Political corruption spreads like cancer. It creates a neural system of one politician beholden to another. The public always needs to retain its right to know, to examine documents, and to see what's going on. Otherwise, who's gonna notice? Who's gonna tell?

I write about it all in great, and sordid, detail today at BlackBoxVoting.org, where, as I note, the moral of the story is this...

See Black Box Voting for the full story...

Bev Harris is the founder of BlackBoxVoting.org, a non-partisan elections watchdog organization. Her work and investigations at BBV have been featured by dozens of national media outlets, and she is featured prominently in HBO's 2006 Emmy-nominated documentary Hacking Democracy. Follow her on Twitter: @BlackBoxVoting

One month ago, The Miami Herald's Patricia Mazzei unleashed an excellent investigative report on an attempted series of online cyberhacks of absentee ballot requests prior to last August's primary election in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

Mazzei's article describes the mysterious attempt by someone to request more than 2,500 absentee ballots for elections in three different Miami-Dade districts using anonymous proxy Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from foreign countries to hide the real identity of the requester. A grand jury looked into the matter [PDF] of the "phantom" requests, but was hamstrung by the fact that they were not told --- the article says it was due to administrative confusion --- that the initial IP addresses used to make the absentee ballot requests were actually not from overseas, but local to Miami-Dade. Had prosecutors had that information, they might have been able to zero in on the culprits, rather than close the investigation late last year without identifying a suspect.

The case has now reportedly been reopened, but the length of time since the initial event may have allowed the trail run cold. Hopefully we will find out soon.

Last week, the story suddenly received a lot of fresh attention after it was picked up by NBC News' Gil Aegerter who describes what happened as the "first known case" of such a cyberattack on a U.S. election.

Setting aside, for now, the point as to whether this is the first such attack --- I've reported quite a bit of evidence of several others over the years (the NBC report links to a number of stories I've broken on these matters, including one of my stories at ComputerWorld in 2007 describing a malicious virus that struck Sarasota's contested 2006 Special Election for the U.S. House where some 18,000 votes ultimately disappeared from the touch-screen voting machines) --- there are a few key points and lessons from this story which I'd like to underscore, despite the fact that the mainstream corporate coverage has been pretty decent here for a change.

Additionally, one of several key remaining mysteries in the story --- a story that I've been trying to make sense over the past several weeks, since learning of it --- may now have an answer, or at least a new and troubling clue...

As it is said when it comes to voting technology: As California goes, so goes the nation. To that end, there is some disturbing news on the horizon from BlackBoxVoting.org as the Internet Voting virus threatens to spread to the Golden State.

If you're not familiar with the many insane dangers of this idea, and if the Academy Awards' recent nightmare wasn't enough, here's an article or two or three or four from the past year or two here which should do well to appropriately scare the hell out of you.

In the meantime, here's how BBV cuts to the chase --- and the core --- of the real concerns of Internet Voting, as the anti-democratic profiteering vultures descend into the state...

To put this into blunt terms: It's not whether Internet Voting is or isn't secure. (It's not, but that's actually beside the point.) It's whether you, or anybody else, can ever know that it's secure. And the hard, cold, scientific fact is that you cannot.

More on "Ting's Thing" from BBV here...

Last week we asked (mostly) satirically: "If Lincoln ends up winning this year’s Best Picture Oscar, how early in the night will Karl Rove admit it?"

Well, now, given the Academy's latest Titanic disaster, a certain Hollywood blogger would be within her rights to say, "TOLDJA!"

The Oscar nominations that were announced last Thursday provided clear evidence that the experiment with Internet Voting by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) was exactly the disaster some members had expected --- and that the reason wasn't technological befuddlement on the part of older voters, as AMPAS had unpersuasively claimed. Rather, the problem was a simply crummy online voting system that stymied the ballot-casting efforts of even computer-savvy "youngsters" like documentarian Morgan Spurlock.

The nominations list is so devoid of internal consistency and logic that show-biz pundits are using terms like "baffling" to describe it. That's a far cry from the supposed cross-category bias toward edgier, more youthfully skewing pictures we were supposed to see after the Academy's old guard supposedly gave up on learning how to use the Internet. Instead, the lack of any pattern whatsoever to the noms shows that Internet Voting was every bit the nightmare for the Oscars that it has been for the American and even the Canadian elections systems as a whole, as The BRAD BLOG has detailed for many years.

But so far, it seems, no mainstream journalist or Academy member is willing to voice the unavoidable conclusion that this year's contest is now hopelessly tainted, and its results even more meaningless than usual. If your nominations basically represent a compendium of votes that were able to get past a firewall of interface and design ineptitude --- not to mention the votes of anybody else who might have inappropriately succeeded in entering and perverting the system --- legitimacy for this year's supposed winners is now largely gone with the wind.

Of course, Oscar results have never been overseeable or "verifiable" by the public. Unlike organizations like the National Society of Film Critics, the Academy doesn't reveal the number of votes received by each winner, nor does it even name the runners-up. It's always lacked the transparency required for legitimacy of any small "d" democratic "election". But under the old, paper-ballot-only system, at least Pricewaterhouse Coopers (the pedigreed professional-services firm that is AMPAS' official vote tabulator and certifier) could see with their own eyes who had won. We could either trust their accounting or not.

But now, not even they know who won or lost, since there's no way for them to verify the accuracy or completeness or integrity of the online vote by the time it got to them. Thus, nobody --- least of all the Academy --- will ever know who "won" the Oscars. Ever!

The calamitous insecurity of untransparent e-voting --- whether in person at the polls or via the Internet --- is something interested parties are loathe to acknowledge. That's why opportunistic companies like Everyone Counts --- which provided the Oscar voting software despite their rich history of gumming up the works in more important, governmental races --- get to fail ever upward.

If we as a society can't cry foul when a shady but well-connected software firm louses up something as comparatively inconsequential as the Academy Awards, how are we ever going to confront the reality of what they and their ilk are doing to our democracy?

Read my full story on this year's epic Oscar Internet Voting collapse, posted at Orlando Weekly, right here. It starts this way:

Steve Schneider is an Orlando-based media critic who writes about the intersection of popular culture and public policy. He holds a master's degree in Media, Culture & Communication from New York University. Read his blog, "Vision Thing", at Orlando Weekly and follow him on Twitter: @Schneider_Stv.

Last week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) had to extend its deadline for Oscar nominations, after outlets like The Hollywood Reporter spread the news of extensive difficulties with AMPAS' new online voting system.

Yes, Oscar has caught the dreaded Internet Voting disease, and it seems to be working out about as well as it did for Canada in 2012 and just slightly better (as far as we know) than it did for Washington D.C. back in 2010 or for Honolulu in 2009 (where the same company ran that particular Internet Voting disaster.)

From rejected passwords and missed deadlines to fears of system hacks and depressed participation, the whole thing has apparently been a colossal clusterfudge --- not to mention a chilling echo of the catastrophic insecurity of the American election system as a whole in the age of electronic balloting.

Of course, AMPAS should have known better when they hired the disastrous Everyone Counts outfit to run their Internet Voting scheme. But this would hardly be the first time the Academy swooned over the influence of a former Washington power broker. The revolving door between the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and Everyone Counts may finally be paying off for the Internet Voting democracy-be-damned company.

Making the situation even worse, AMPAS and its surrogates have attempted to recast the meltdown of their system as mere techno-confusion on the part of older Academy members, thus smearing anyone concerned for the legitimacy of this year's Oscar as a clueless adversary of "progress."

Sound familiar?

Watching this offensive and destructive meme take hold everywhere from Deadline Hollywood to Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is a sobering reminder of how important it is to fight for paper balloting in every governmental contest in the nation, and how much P.R. firepower we'll have to overcome in the process.

Read my full story on the entire fine mess, posted at Orlando Weekly, right here. It starts this way:

UPDATE 1/12/13: It's official. The "baffling" nominations are now out and no one can ever know who really won this year's Oscars. Details now here...

Steve Schneider is an Orlando-based media critic who writes about the intersection of popular culture and public policy. He holds a master's degree in Media, Culture & Communication from New York University. Read his blog, "Vision Thing", at Orlando Weekly and follow him on Twitter: @Schneider_Stv.

Meanwhile, as the War Over Which Americans Get to Exercise Their Right to Vote rages on, concern about how the votes of those who do get to vote, will (or won't) be tabulated, goes largely unnoticed. Again.

USA Today takes a moment to mention that point in an unbylined editorial headlined 'Electronic voting is the real threat to elections'. Their headline may understate the very real concerns about access to the polls, because these two issues --- both access to the polls and accurate, transparent tabulation of ballots --- have always been two sides of the same coin.

Both issues must be assured for an election with anything close to integrity.

But, given the, necessarily, extraordinary focus on the first issue this year, access, it's nice that the paper has taken a moment to highlight just a few of the continuing causes of concern for the actual tabulation of votes. Nothing has gotten better since 2010 or 2008 or even 2004. We've covered all of the examples for reasons to be concerned that they point to in the editorial, of course, and many more, over the years here at The BRAD BLOG.

And, naturally, since the paper is still a corporate media outlet, they just had to "balance" their fairly decent, fact-based editorial with an additional "opposing view" editorial, filled with a bunch of misleading, dishonest bullshit about Internet Voting, of all things, from a corporate lobbyist hack...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives from tonight's show below!]

Mike's got the night off, so we're back in tonight guest-hosting the nationally-syndicated Mike Malloy Show on your public airwaves, on the Internet (streaming links below) and on SiriusXM ch. 127!

As usual, we'll be BradCasting, LIVE from 9pm-Mid ET (6p-9p PT), coast-to-coast and around the globe from 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:

• DAN AUERBACH of Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on the effort to stop the bi-partisan Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) bill passed today in the U.S. House and its companion bill soon to be debated in the U.S. Senate.
• JOYCE BLOCK, the 90-year old Doylestown, PA voter who has voted, without fail or problem, for 70 years, on her fight to vote now that the GOP has passed a polling place Photo ID restriction law, and since she was denied a so-called "free" ID to vote by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Transportation.
• PLUS! Much much more as usual! Along with your phone 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 our Sante Fe affiliate KTRC 1260, or our Minnesota affiliate KTNF 950 (use code 55447 when asked). Also, you should be able to listen live at WhiteRose Society if the radio gods are with us.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Fun show tonight! Hope you'll agree! All three "hours" are now posted below, commercial-free! Enjoy!...

No matter the strongest admonitions against it, for years, by virtually all computer science and security experts to offer an opinion on it --- ya know, the folks who actually know how this stuff works, or doesn't --- proponents of Internet Voting are relentless in their advocacy. Kind of how the proponents of polling place e-voting used to tell us that such schemes were tamper-proof, error-free and much more secure than paper.

No matter how many Internet Voting schemes fall flat on their face (voter participation plummeted 83% when Honolulu tried it), get entirely hacked (even by computers in Iran and China) or are taken down by a 10,000 computer denial of service attack (but that was in Canada, so no biggie, right?), some seem to care so little about transparent, oversee-able democracy and self-governance, that they are willing to risk entire elections and the verifiable votes of the citizenry in order to carry out such dangerous and ill-considered adventures.

And so, yet again, with all of those warnings ignored, we find another online election has been wholly compromised --- and now cancelled --- after it was discovered that a business school student hacked into it and stole hundreds of passwords and IDs, so that he could fix the results of the election...

From The Gazette in Montreal...

And we know the attack by 10,000 computers "in no way compromised the sanctity of the vote" how, exactly? Well, because they say so, silly!

We know Scytl's elections are secure because, as we noted in January when the Spanish-based company purchased S.O.E., the largest "election management company" in the U.S. (they do online results reporting, etc.), they told us so in their own press release announcing the acquisition. And they told us twice! They couldn't tell us they were secure unless they really were! Am I right, Sequoia Voting Systems?

Other than that --- oh, and other than this --- voting by Internet is a great idea! Am I right, Americans Elect and Michael Eisner?

The Gazette also goes on to note at the end of their coverage:

Oh, well, if officials insisted, then certainly they must be right about that.

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

Brad Friedman has often compared the task of Election Integrity (EI) advocates to a game of Whac-A-Mole. One moment they expose an "it's the machines transparency, stupid" moment when the 100% unverifiable ES&S iVotronic touchscreens announced that the unemployed and virtually unknown Alvin Greene had somehow defeated the respected circuit judge and former state legislator Vic Rawl in the 2010 South Carolina Senate Democratic Primary. The next moment we learned that DC officials had planned a live experiment to use "an untested and unverifiable Internet Voting scheme on real voters, in a real election…" --- an experiment that Friedman described as "insane."

More than 16 months after that disastrous experiment came to a crashing halt following a spectacular hack, as initially reported by The BRAD BLOG, the PBS News Hour produced a short documentary, Internet Voting: Will Democracy or Hackers Win? (see video below), which touched upon the D.C. Internet Voting Hack.

The now-legendary hack was carried out by a team of white-hat hackers, led by Univ. of MI Computer Science Prof. J. Alex Halderman. Within hours after D.C.'s 2010 Internet Voting scheme was opened to the world for a hack test (just days before it was scheduled to go live for the real thing), Halderman and his team of U. of M. students found and exploited a vulnerability which gave his group almost total control of the server software, allowing them to rewrite every single ballot and even take over command of the security cameras inside the D.C. server room. Team Halderman not only acquired the ability to change votes and install the Univ. of MI fight song to be played at the end of every vote cast, but discovered and thwarted an intrusion attempt by Chinese and Iranian computers.

Disturbingly, the new PBS documentary also reveals that, despite the spectacular failure and warnings from virtually every computer science and security expert, election and Pentagon officials are still pressing forward with what MIT Prof. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Ronald L. Rivest describes, as seen in the short PBS report, as an "oxytopian" solution. "'Secure Internet voting,'" Rivest charges, "is a bit like the phrase 'safe cigarettes'"...

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...