Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Lou Dobbs has taped a one-hour "Democracy At Risk" special to be aired at various times on CNN this coming Sunday. Be sure to tune in. / The Washington Post has found that new system boards were installed in Diebold voting machines used in Maryland. These modifications were made in several thousand machines in 2005. The modification was meant to fix a problem with touch-screen freezes. The WaPo investigation seems to reveal that the modification was made without the knowledge of State Board of Elections members. / The cutoff of names by Hart machines in Texas is frustrating for election officials. "I don't like it. We've been asking the vendor to address this issue for a couple of years now," Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir said. The names are cut off because of the size of the letters onscreen, which "causes longer names to truncate," Hart InterCivic Vice President Phillip Braithwaite said. / “It’s really terrible,” said Robert J. Antonetti Sr., elections administrator in Prince George’s Co Maryland about the late delivery of paper ballots by Diebold. “Time is running out. It’s going to deny people the right to vote.” I ask again; is Diebold doing to Maryland what they did to Kevin Shelley and Bruce Funk and attempted to do to Ion Sancho?...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.Org

Last night Kitty, sans Lou who is in Texas, reported on election judge training in the state of Maryland. Taking place at the University of Maryland, all election judges, whether experienced or not, are subject to the new training. However, with elections less than two weeks away, officials are questioning the preparedness of the volunteer poll workers who must learn the new Diebold e-voting system. Let's hope Diebold will not be able to blame all of their failures on the voter and the poll workers. (That's probably too much to wish for though)

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

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

And so it begins! Today the Washington Post has revealed, in a superbly written and investigated story, that Diebold secretly made modifications to thousands of their voting machines in Maryland and that everyone involved seems to have forgotten to tell the State Board of Elections about it.

It seems that after the state bought machines in 2002 they began experiencing intermittent and wide-spread screen freezes. Finally in 2005 Diebold installed all new systems boards in all 4,700 machines.

And, oh by the way, they forgot to tell the State Board of Elections that they had done anything. The State Elections Administrator, Linda Lamone, and her staff seem to have known but members of the SBOE seem to have been left out of the discussion.

UPDATE FROM BRAD: This is a very detailed story with a duplicitous cast of characters and it is very well investigated and told. Kudos to WaPo's Cameron W. Barr for this coverage! We look forward to seeing much more of it!

Also see Baltimore Sun's coverage which offers still more damning details about the duplicity of both Diebold (who still has the MD contract and hasn't yet been sued) and the MD State Board of Elections as headed by the Democratic Diebold-apologist Linda Lamone (who still has a job, remarkably enough.)

UPDATE FROM JOHN 10/26 4:45am PT: A coalition of candidates in Maryland has now asked that only paper ballots be used in the upcoming election. The coalition, with candidates for different offices and representing different political parties, has joined together under the banner of the non-partisan Candidates Alliance for Recountable Elections (CARE). A media release explains their stance on this subject and is below...

NOTE: The coverage of the Hart Intercivic screen display problems in Virginia having been found now in other states such as Texas and California has been moved to it's own item here....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

As reported by The BRAD BLOG on Tuesday, Hart Intercivic machines being used in Virginia are cutting off the names of candidates when they appear on the review screen. Thus James H. "Jim" Webb shows as James H. "Jim" on the screen.

Well, when a problem is found in one place it is going to be found elsewhere too. Now counties in Texas are reporting the same problem according to the Austin American-Statesman.

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 mandates that a voting machine must provide the voter with an ability to review their vote before they finalize the process. These machines may be in violation of that law but that can be left to the attorneys. It might be nice if those attorneys showed up now, instead of after the election when it'll be too late.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Tucker Carlson speaking today to Missouri Senate candidate Claire McCaskill about the Michael J. Fox stem cell research ad she is running in her effort to unseat Republican Jim Talent:

So Tucker is a bit uncomfortable with the video because he feels like it makes his views appear immoral. But, since that cannot be the case, it must be McCaskill's fault for putting him in the awkward position in the first place. How dare she play on his emotions by showing a real person being ravaged by a horrible disease. Really, what does any of it have to do with the stem cell debate?

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Enlist at www.VideoTheVote.org.

Watch for more from VelvetRevolution.us soon.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

"The use of electronic machines to count ballots cast in last year's municipal elections was a fiasco, Quebec's chief electoral officer said Tuesday. The machines weren't quicker, more economical and more accurate than manual counting" said Quebec, Canada's chief elections official. One of the suppliers of electronic voting machines underestimated its ability to simultaneously service several municipalities. Sound familiar? / "Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho has a starring role in a new HBO documentary that raises serious questions about the security of vote-counting machines used in Florida and many other big states. The program, titled "Hacking Democracy," is scheduled to debut on the cable channel on Nov. 2, running through most of the month." / Diebold, as seems to be their nature, is punishing Maryland for asking voters to vote absentee. They print the state's ballots and they are late in delivering them a majority of the ballots to many counties....

Last month we reported on the Defense Department's newly announced scheme to allow military and overseas ballots to be cast via the Internet. It was pointed out, among other concerns, that in many cases troop and overseas citizen votes would be subject to conversion from unsecured email voting into faxed documents by a private company who, in turn, would then forward the vote to the appropriate county jurisdiction.

The San Jose Mercury News quoted experts at the time who charged the system was "ripe for fraud" as military voters would apparently not be warned that their ballots might be seen by others and transferred into faxes, etc. by "a private contractor whose top executives have made political contributions to Republican Party organizations."

Underscoring those initial reports today, a group of independent computer scientists and E-Voting experts including David Jefferson of Livermore National Laboratories, Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins, David Wagner of UC Berkeley, and Barbara Simons, a former researcher for IBM, have released an alarming short paper warning of "significant risks" found in the newly announced plan from the DoD's "Federal Voting Assistance Program" (FVAP).

The group had been members of a scientific peer review panel for a previous DoD Military and Overseas Internet voting scheme in 2004. At the time, they found the plan featured "a large number of security risks and vulnerabilities, including denial of service attacks, insider attacks, viral attacks on voters' PCs." That experimental program was subsequently cancelled after the findings.

But now, in September of this year --- just over one month ago --- the DoD announced and implemented their new scheme for military and overseas citizen voting via the Internet, to be used this November 7th without any public testing or peer review whatsoever.

According to today's report, the new DoD voting scheme --- known as the "Interim Voting Assistance System" (IVAS) --- has been put in place without any "publicly available external security examination" and has "never been used in a public election before (not even in a primary)."

The scientists say that security concerns about the new, untested system include loss of privacy and identify theft for the military and overseas voters and, even more troubling, they found the system to be vulnerable to hackers and tampering by governments both foreign and domestic.

The six page report is now available here [PDF].

From the report's troubling introduction:

In an email received by The BRAD BLOG this morning, Simons summarizes the report's three main findings, characterized as "serious concerns about the security issues posed by this new system."

Her succint, yet alarming, email is posted in full below....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

The Chicago Tribune is reporting that the city of Chicago Board of Elections Commissioners has decided that they may hold back payment on their new voting machines because they are afraid of 'potential glitches.'

Cook County's election board, a separate entity, will not be paying their portion of the $26M still owed to Sequoia until after the election in two weeks. Now the city has openly voted, at least for now, to see what happens in the election before they make a decision to make their final payment.

The guinea pig voters may end up giving up their democracy in the bargain, but at least they may save a few dollars!

Sequoia's president, Jack Blaine, told the paper that he felt the company had done all they could and that they deserved to be paid. As the Trib reports...

What with all the talk of the disaster that is Diebold, Inc., other Voting Machine Companies such as ES&S and Sequoia have gotten a far too easy ride over the past several months. The easiest ride of all, however --- of the big four democracy-hating American Voting Machine Companies --- has gone to Hart InterCivic, which deserves no such benefit of the doubt.

So to be clear: Hart InterCivic voting systems suck just as much as the others.

Washington Post today has details on how their machines are sucking in the hotly contested U.S. Senate race in Virginia between George Allen and "James H. 'Jim'"

The "good news" reported in the article: "Hart InterCivic officials yesterday said they hoped to correct the problem by next fall."

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.Org

In this segment of 'Democracy At Risk' Lou and Kitty cover the latest cautionary report on voting and elections, in this report from Electionline.Org, a national non-partisan, non-profit group. Lou also reports on yesterday's breaking story from The BRAD BLOG regarding the elections security breach discovered in the Chicago, Illinois voter registration data base.

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

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Officials on Chicago, Illinois acknowledged that for the last five or six years it would have only taken a few keystrokes for a knowledgeable computer user to obtain the personal information for more than half of the 1.3 million identities in the system. / "Look, I think that it's time for us to make our elections work in this country, Lou. I mean, that's the bottom line. And obviously we have a great deal of work to do to make that happen. It's time for us to bring together the best and brightest from the high-tech industry, Lou, the business industry, election officials, et cetera, for us to make things work." ex-EAC Commissioner Ray Martinez told Lou Dobbs. "It's time, four years later, Lou, six years removed from Florida in 2000, it's time for us to achieve a consensus on exactly what we have to do to really improve the process of election administration." / Summit Co. Ohio ballot printing problems seem to be coming to a head with calls for federal investigation and anti-trust issues....

The endorsement from Esquire magazine is short and sweet, and is now added to the list --- along with the Daytona Beach News-Journal's endorsement of publications supporting Clint Curtis over the corrupt Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff) in Florida's 24th U.S. House Congressional District:

So much for Feeney's discredited attempts to sell the idea that Curtis is "not fit for Congress." Looks like the nation's newspapers and magazines seem to think it's Feeney who's not fit for the post.

And the voters, in yesterday's Zogby poll showing Curtis and Feeney in a "virtual toss-up," would seem to agree. Notable numbers, if only because Curtis has had almost zero money to use in his campaign while Feeney has had more than $1 million.

(Donate to Curtis here if you'd like to help --- unlike Feeney, Curtis is currently getting no money from either the national party or huge corporate PACs.)

In the meantime, the Curtis campaign has just released two new one-minute radio spots. They're both linked below. In the first one, he challenges Feeney to a public polygraph test for the both of them. (Clint has already passed one himself in re: his allegations about Feeney.)

-- Curtis for Congress, Audio Ad: "Take the Test, Tom!"

-- Curtis for Congress, Audio Ad: "Vote for Clint Curtis!"

Let us know what you think, and remember that donations made above will help to get these things on the air all over the 24th district in Florida to counter Feeney's disgraceful smear campaign against Curtis.

One last thought, posted below the fold is a comment sent to the Clint Curtis Blog from someone who claims to be a professional pollster who says about that Zogby poll showing the dead heat that the "That poll is even better news than advertised. That's not a dead heat --- you may well be winning!"

He goes on to add, "I'm a professional pollster and let me give you a polling insider's tip about how to interpret a poll like this one." Those "insider tips" are beneath the fold...

In a WaPo article from Saturday (we were outta town, and are just now getting caught up with much) on the possible origins of the double-super-secret Diebold source code which showed up out of the blue in a Maryland candidate's office last week, Diebold's leading spokesliar Mark Radke is quoted as saying the following...apparently with a straight face...

Heheh..."dampen innovation in the field." Those Diebold spokesguys and their crazy sense of humor.

By the way, as we were looking for a nice photo of Diebold's top mouth-piece, we came across a new little factoid --- new to us anyway. Seems that before Radke came to his new post as Diebold's chief liar, he had been Chief of Staff to George W. Bush's crony SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt. Small world. Go figure.

Diebold's chief obfuscator is a former Bush Administration official. Just one of those wacky coincidences, we guess.

CORRECTION 10/25/06: Good news! After digging around on this one, trying to figure out how it could possibly be that Radke was a former Bush Administration official and none of us knew about that until now, Russ Michaels, one of the filmmakers of HBO's Hacking Democracy writes to let us know that there is a different Mark Radke out there! The Diebold Radke is different from the Bush crony SEC Radke. Details on the other one, Mark S. Radke, right here...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.Org

In this segment Lou interviewed two ex-Commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission. Ex-Chairman Deforest Soaries and Ex-Assistant Chairman Ray Martinez. As revealed in an earlier interview reported by BradBlog, Chairman Soaries is speaking out and speaking out loudly.

Of note in tonight's interview is this exchange:

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