For months, supporters of Rep. Rush Holt's Election Reform Bill (HR 811) - from computer scientists such as David Dill and Avi Rubin to extremely powerful advocacy groups such as People for the American Way (PFAW) and VoteTrustUSA --- have been telling critics who believe that Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) touch-screen systems are antithetical to democracy that an amendment to his bill, requiring a ban on such systems, could not be passed by Congress.

They appear to have accepted the talking point as gospel, and thus have argued that any attempt to amend the current bill (and the matching one in the Senate) is a fruitless endeavor, and we should therefore support the bill as is because something is better than nothing.

In the case of PFAW, they've actually been responsible, in no small part, from selling that line to the public.

Never mind that if the many respected Election Integrity advocates and computer scientists repeating that unsubstantiated argument actually announced they would not support any federal Election Reform legislation that failed to include such a ban --- one which most of them have said they'd support (PFAW not included) --- we might actually get such a ban added to the bill.

Nonetheless, despite my best efforts, I have yet to be able to find a single congress member who supports the bill as currently written, without such a ban, who will go on record --- or even admit off-record --- that they would vote against the Election Reform bill if it included a ban on DREs.

I have yet to be able to find one.

Anyone have a name for me? Even just one?

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

When people try to make elections issues into a partisan issue we always tell them it’s not partisan; it’s about democracy. Actually it is very hard not to be partisan because we all are one way or another. It’s also not easy to be non-issue oriented. Some have said that because we feel a particular way about certain legislation that “Daily Voting News” will be used as our ‘bully-pulpit’ to spread the word only about our view point while stifling the other side.

Well, we are not Fox News Network. There’s a disclaimer at the bottom of every DVN that says that our view may not always match the views given in the articles we link to. That’s because we post articles from all over and we don’t take sides when we post. In fact, about the only things that I have consciously left out of DVN are articles that attack people or organizations that are in the Election Integrity community. If there are few articles posted that meet your particular view point it’s because none were written or I could not find them in my normal search places. Write an article/blog and get it posted somewhere and let me know. I’ll post it....

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Hapless Democratic strategist Bob Shrum's comments on this morning's Meet The Press are fascinating in their own right but have added resonance considering U.S. House candidate John Russell's Guest Post early today, concerning last November's Florida elections. Shrum believes (and allegedly Gore too) that Gore won Florida and the 2000 election. He also tells an interesting story about Gore joking about Bush getting caught cheating the day before the election. Cheating, elections, Florida, seems like an epidemic.

Guest blogged by John Russell, 2006 Democratic Candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Florida's 5th Congressional District

Just prior to the 1pm start of a recent U.S. House Administration Committee meeting, about which I had received third-hand notification that several contested Congressional elections from 2006 (including my own) were to be brought up and recommended for dismissal, I made several calls to House offices in the vain hope that I might be able to have our Constitutional rights protected and upheld.

Pragmatist that I am, I offered House Administration Committee Counsel, Tom Hicks, my thoughts, hoping that he would bring my concerns to the Committee’s attention. Understanding fully the genesis and context of this meeting --- held without notice to the contestants --- Mr. Hicks was apparently poised to enter one of those smoke-filled rooms we used to hear about.

Apparently, at that point, there was no citing of Constitutional rights convincing enough for this group of rascals to interfere with their plans to “slide our contests under the rug” and hopefully out the doors of Congress. I concluded my voice mail plea not to ignore our Constitutional right to due process by asking Mr. Hicks, “This is still America… is it not?”

The blatant disregard of the Federal Contested Elections Act and the U.S. Constitution by members of Congress exhibited in this meeting is beyond the pale. The Committee members’ audacity is only exceeded by the dearth of factual information regarding policy and political issues provided to the general public by the now defunct Fourth Estate, which has been replaced by the corporate media. As a candidate for federal office, I have now become completely acclimated to the ways and means of the liberally right-wing media in how candidates are at once dismembered, or accordingly contrived, by “The Establishment's” voice...

Guest blogged by DES

We started out the long holiday weekend last week with a delicious rant from HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher --- so sad to see him go on hiatus again, since the news never takes a holiday...

We found out that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff doesn't really keep track of pesky details like casualty numbers for our troops. Greg Palast followed up his bombshell post from the week prior with a snarky rebuttal to critics of his evidence regarding electoral machinations by RNC-opposition-researcher-Vote-"Cager"-turned-Rove-aide-turned-partisan-U.S.-Attorney, the newly-resigned Tim Griffin. The revelation on late Thursday night that House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) is examining Palast's evidence should help to quell the quaking boots, who appear to fear there is no "there" there...

Obviously, The BRAD BLOG believes there is plenty of "there", but no need to take our word for it --- even the DNC (here and here) and Slate finally noticed "vote-caging" just this week, and the Department of Justice is looking into allegations of illegal partisan hiring practices at the DoJ, too!

Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald confirmed, again, in a new court filing that Valerie Plame was indeed covert at the time of her unprecedented outing, and he directly implicated VP Dick Cheney in the scandal. Did the rightwingnuts admit they were wrong? Of course not! Video Blogger Alan Breslauer gave us a personal montage of New Orleans, a living monument to preventable outcomes of incompetence --- still destroyed, still struggling nearly two years later. Maybe Karl Rove can drop in with some of that butter, root beer, and toilet paper ...

Read on and be prepared for what the cat drags in this coming week...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

It’s good to be back from my well deserved trip to Alaska. A great time was had by all; except the fish.

Journalist, radio personality and friend Pokey Anderson opened her excellent article, “Peering Through The Chinks in the Armor of High-Tech Elections” thusly:

That voting news story, and many other important ones, all linked below...

NOTE FROM BRAD: Welcome back, Big John! And perhaps your regular readers would enjoy a photo of the man behind the DVN. Here he is enjoying much happier times off the grid last week. Here's to hoping he got plenty of rest to go with all that fish...I think he's gonna be needing it...

...And now back to your regularly scheduled Daily Voting News...

Following up on our earlier piece, praising the DNC for their media release concerning vote caging issues, we find this superb and scathing condemnation also released today by the DNC, headlined "Bush Administration Owes Apology Over Assault on Voting Rights"...

The release goes on to list a panoply of Republican voter disenfranchisement efforts from FL to WI to OH to CO to NV and more. Kudos. Had they been as aggressive in their report on Ohio after the '04 Election, we might not be fighting our way out of the nightmare we now find ourselves in.

(Listen to my '05 radio interview with the report's Exec. Dir. Vincent Frey [MP3] admitting that they didn't find any fraud in Ohio, essentially, because they didn't look for any!)

And sadly, as Democrats seem destined to shoot themselves in the face with ill-conceived Election Reform bills in both the House and Senate, the nightmare will likely continue no matter what. As we've tried to explain to DNC folks many times, you can fight to ensure every legal voter who wants to vote gets to vote, but if those aren't counted correctly, it ultimately means absolutely nothing.

Nonetheless, we'll keep our eyes forward for the moment, and hope the DNC continues to realize the breadth of what has been going on, and what will continue to go on unless they do something about it and finally stand up once and for all for both American values and voters.

Even the DNC seems to finally have taken notice of the vote caging as mentioned in last week's testimony by Monica Goodling (and subsequently covered in some detail here --- most recently in this late-breaker last night --- if almost nowhere else, until yesterday's excellent Slate article by Dahlia Lithwick).

Describing her piece as a "MUST READ," the DNC issued an alert this morning linking to and quoting several excerpts from her piece. The alert begins this way...

No new information here really, other than the fact that the DNC itself is at least partially getting into the game. They have, of course, notoriously stayed far far away from aggressively contesting or questioning election fraud issues --- including even this vote caging business, which was first reported back in 2004 --- until (perhaps?) now. Even this much took them more than a week, since Goodling's bombshell admissions during her testimony occurred a week ago last Wednesday.

But now that a Republican has acknowledged it, we guess it's safe waters for the DNC to wade into.

What, us snarky? Anyway, we'll take what we can get, and are happy to see them finally on it. A little. Let's hope they continue...

UPDATE: Dems issue scathing release, 'Bush Administration Owes Apology Over Assault on Voting Rights." Good for them. Details here...

From this week's San Diego Reader...

If you don't understand the above, a) You need to visit The BRAD BLOG more often, b) See this, and then c) See this, and then d) Pray for the good voters of the People's Republic of San Diego.

Thanks to artist Neal Obermeyer for paying attention! More good stuff from his own official site.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Out on the campaign trail today John McCain tackles the question of whether the U.S. can reclaim the moral high ground in light of torturing prisoners of war. In addition to stating his disappointment that all the other GOP presidential candidates expressed their approval for torture during the second Republican debate, McCain noted the "sharp dividing line between those who have served in the military and those who haven't." McCain continued:

McCain also blows up many other oft-given reasons for torture in this short clip (2:55).