Guest Blogged by John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org

The California "Top-To-Bottom Review" of state certified voting systems was to include four investigations; Security (Red Team), Accessibility, Code Review, and Document Review. All of the reports were released soon after they were presented to the Secretary of State, Debra Bowen; all but the Document Review.

Why has the Document Review been kept from the public? What is contained in those reports that we should not know? The Secretary of State's Press Office will only say, "We don't know when they will be released."

In his "Not Quite a Blog 2.0" Joseph Lorenzo Hall, one of the members of the document review team, reveals that each team member had to agree to the following secrecy:

On Sept. 6 those 45 days of confidentiality had passed and Joe spoke about some of the basics with regards to the reports. He did not go into any specifics. In his blog he revealed the following...

Guest Blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review

During the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today:

If the head of our military in Iraq doesn't know if the war there is making us safer, who does?

Blogged by Brad from somewhere in the Nevada desert...

On the road for many hours today, hopefully for the last time this "Summer."

Have been working hard over the last day or two, and again today, to try and help move things forward with some sensible federal Election Reform in time for 2008. We'll see if we have any success. Even on the roll.

But as I'll be off the net for the bulk of today/tonight, here's an open thread to keep you busy on 9/11's sixth anniversary when I know that you, like most Americans, have just one thing on your mind: Was Britney's performance all that it should have been on MTV's Video Music Awards?

Guest Blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review

After months of hype, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified before the House Armed Services Committee yesterday about the status of George W. Bush's war in Iraq. Although neither of Bush's men uttered the exact phrase, the essence of their testimony could be summed up in three little words: "Stay the course."

Republicans --- especially the half-dozen or so GOP senators facing election in unsafe seats next year --- will take comfort in Petreaus's promise to recommend ending the surge by next summer. But even if Petreaus recommends reducing deployments to pre-surge levels, and if Bush agrees to it, the only surprise will be that the surge strategy itself was not a false cover for a permanent troop build-up. (And that remains to be seen.)

The stark reality is that Bush's current Iraq policy draws heavily from the playbook of his predecessor from Texas, Lyndon Johnson. The Vietnam War decimated LBJ's presidency, forcing him to leave office with no resolution in sight. Just as LBJ left the mess he created for Nixon and Ford to clean up, now Bush intends to leave his war in Iraq to his successor. As Ken Pollack at Brookings put it: "Bush has found his exit strategy."

Nothing matters --- not the safety of the troops, the lives and well-being of Iraqis, the viability of the U.S. military, or, certainly, the anti-Iraq war sentiments of a majority of Americans --- none of it matters in the face of Bush's urgent desire to rewrite his epitaph so that it won't say the war he started based on deception, divisiveness, and rank ineptitude was lost on his watch.

This strategy is as flawed as it is cynical. Look again at Johnson. Handing Vietnam to Nixon did nothing to improve his legacy. What saved Johnson's reputation was the fact he signed the Civil Rights Act, plus his stoic leadership in the wake of the Kennedy assassination.

Bush has no accomplishments --- nothing --- to weigh against this disastrous war. And the fact that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of U.S. troops and innocent Iraqis will die for the impossible goal of salvaging his place in history just compounds his disgrace.

UPDATE FROM BRAD: The good Pokey Anderson sends us this toon, which meshes neatly with Jon's commentary above...

Plus...Liberal, terrorist-loving, America-hating, cut-and-run, surrenderer George Will says "the surge has failed"...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

The 2006 elections cost the tax payers of Cuyahoga Co Ohio $47.86 per voter. Franklin Co paid $16.04 and Hamilton Co paid $21.30 per voter. Part of the cost for Cuyahoga Co is that every election they must spend $800,000 for 6000 new memory cards. The cards from the previous elections have to stay in storage for 22 months. Blackwell sold these systems to the counties based on the fact that they were supposed to be inexpensive and easy to use. He lied.

Meanwhile the state legislature has told SOS Brunner that she will have to wait for two more weeks before they can announce whether they will release the funds she needs to complete a review of the state’s voting systems.

Last Nov. ES&S had a lot of problem with delivering paper ballots for their op-scans and electronic ballots for their voting simulators (DREs) to their customers on time. The excuse? Too much work to do all at one time. Now, St. Francis Co Arkansas wants to do a school election and begin early voting tomorrow. ES&S has delivered no paper or electronic ballots. What’s your excuse this time, ES&S??

Links to those stories, and the other notable voting news today, all below...05

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Women serving in the military today are unlikely to share General Petraeus' rosy outlook given during his "Surge" testimony before Congress today. Because, as NOW on PBS reported last Friday, government compiled statistics show that nearly 1 in 4 active duty women in the military are victims of sexual assault. By contrast, during the much shorter first Gulf War, "about 15% of the women were raped."

The problem is compounded because many female soldiers fear the consequences of reporting such incidents. Also, little appears to happen when assaults are reported. According to the broadcast, there were 1,400 investigations of sexual assault last year which have resulted in only 72 court-martials.

Guest Blogged by Bob Bancroft of VotersUnite

Just over a month has passed since California Secretary of State Bowen’s ground-breaking “Top to Bottom” review was made public. The study, conducted over the course of nearly half a year, took a comprehensive look at electronic voting machines that directly record and tabulate votes. The results were unambiguous.

According to the report, “all systems analyzed were inadequate to ensure accuracy and integrity of the election results”. Computer scientists found that the secret software “contains serious design flaws that...attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes.” Despite the oft-cited rationale that e-voting expands the franchise for people with disabilities, the report starkly concluded that “[N]one met the accessibility requirements of current law”.

This report, along with countless others, leaves little doubt as to the correct course of action. As the New York Times put it in a recent editorial, “Electronic voting has been an abysmal failure.” The editors of "The Paper of Record" joined election integrity activists and watchdog groups across the country in calling upon Congress to ban these machines.

In fact, some members of Congress have caught on. Rep. Susan Davis (D-CA) said in a recent statement, “The wealth of data and opinions on this topic are so strong that I feel Congress would be remiss if we do not allow a debate on the question of whether and how Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) Voting Machines should be used in federal elections.”

Despite all of this, Democratic House leadership continues to push Rep. Rush Holt's HR 811, a bill so badly compromised that one member of the powerful House Rules Committee reportedly referred to it as “Microsoft 811”. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) was referring to the fact that some of the bill’s most vital protections were stripped, replaced by new, vendor-friendly language allegedly supplied by Microsoft.

So it seems the most vocal opposition to this Democrat-sponsored bill comes from fellow Democrats. The irony was not lost on House Republicans, who took some satisfaction pointing out the in-fighting. All of this begs the question: why does House leadership continue its stubborn support of e-voting?

Only Majority Leader Steny Hoyer knows for certain.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Mississippi’s election laws are very questionable. During the August 7 state primary some voters who were not able to use Wilkinson Co’s DRE machines used paper ballots. These would be absentee, affidavit (provisional) and curb-side (for voters with disabilities). In Mississippi the political parties administer their primaries. When all of the votes were counted three incumbents were re-elected. However, there were allegations of wrong-doing in regards to some Democrat paper ballots so the county Dem. Executive Board disqualified all paper ballots which then caused the three incumbents to lose their elections. How many good ballots were disqualified? No one knows.

Next week we can look forward to something being done in regards to HR-811; or nothing at all.

Will California finally release the results of their Document Inspection portion of the “Top-To-Bottom Review” and will the media even know about it? Will the state of New Jersey finally provide an alternate plan for when the vvpat printers are not ready for use? And there is supposed to be a follow-up on “Dan Rather Reports” as early as next week....

Meant to post this some time ago. As seen a few weeks ago on a street corner lamp post in Kansas City, MO, at the intersection of Baltimore and 38th...

* With apologies to the legendary Freeway Blogger...who actually has a new, killer 60 second video demonstration of how he plies his trade. So here's that as well. Perhaps more germane, if not nearly as amusing as the above (at least to me). Buckle up...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

According to a transcript of the Rules Committee meeting on Wednesday, Congressman Alcee Hastings had the following to say about HR-811: “I need to be persuaded. Otherwise I would do something that I have not done since I have been here, and that is vote against a proposed rule. If we ain’t gonna fix it all, then we oughtn’t fix something that ain’t a fix and is not an assurance that we have done the best we can. This isn’t good enough for me.” Meanwhile a Cuyahoga Co Election Commissioner ranted, “We should sue Diebold,” when the discussion came around to the growing cost of the county’s voting machines. ...

From Crain's Cleveland Business...

Bravo, Mr. Dimora. Of course you should!

But, ah, here's the rub...

We'll leave you to parse the phrasing of that last quote as you may.

The article goes on to point out that Dimora wants to "scrap the Diebold touch-screen system" after it turns out the county paid "$6.5 million above the $1.9 million originally budgeted for extra help and training before the November 2006 election."

Yes, but think of all the trees they saved! (That would be irony. For all of you Republicans following along.)

By Brad Friedman from Richfield, UT...

As we reported from a source late last night, today's scheduled hearing in the House Rules Committee for Rush Holt's Election Reform Bill (HR 811) has been canceled. The same source had also said that if the hearing was canceled, it could mean an "indefinite hold" for the controversial legislation.

Today, Republicans are predictably enjoying what has been termed as a Democratic "split," by The Hill, and a Democratic "revolt," by Politico, in the majority-led Rules Committee, once known as "The Speakers Committee" since it's generally the last stop before legislation hits the House Floor. It's also the place where the leadership determines whether amendments will be allowed to be brought for such legislation.

Of course, what Republicans seem to find most amusing is that Democrats in Congress don't necessarily march in lock-step, as they do. Instead, the Democrats seem to have this crazy idea that in a democracy, there should be actual, responsible debate, care, and attention to details for an Election Reform bill which would have enormous national consequences to every local, state, and federal race in the union for decades to come. Go figure.

"Democrats believe in democracy, unlike that monolith we had before," committee chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY) told The Hill.

Nonetheless, the Republicans are attempting to make partisan hay from the situation. Minority Leader John Boehner's website described the situation as a "House Committee Meltdown" yesterday. A spokesperson for David Drier (R-CA), the ranking member on the House Committee described the situation as "chaos."

They're all right. Democracy is chaos. Though the Holt bill has been largely dysfunctional from the get-go as its lead author, Rush Holt (D-NJ) began with a very open process, inviting many voices (including our own) into the bill's drafting process, but then shut down the process in favor of both fear and agenda-driven interests...

Blogged by Brad Friedman from Richfield, UT (Bruce Funk Country!)...

[UPDATE: As we reported from our source late last night in the article below, the Rules Committee hearing today was indeed canceled. See below for more details.]

Have been on the road all day, so playing late-night catch up. So here's a few tid-bits, items, rumors, and innuendos as we've been able to collect them from various sources concerning the latest on the fate of the Holt Election Reform Bill (HR 811) in the U.S. House and the proposed Susan Davis (D-CA) amendment for it.

To briefly recap, Davis's amendment, if allowed by the House Rules Committee to be considered with the bill, would limit use of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines to one per polling place on Election Day, but allow their full use during Early Voting periods. Unlike CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen's similar restriction, her amendment, as currently drafted, would not require a 100% manual count of the touch-screen "paper trails." Many more details on that amendment reported here yesterday, followed by a full statement we received from Davis herself later in the evening, in which she described the matter of whether to use DREs or not as the "800 pound gorilla" that folks in Congress, up until now, have been largely afraid of debating at all.

But that seems to be changing quickly.

The New York Times last night gave the idea of a full ban on DREs a boost when they called for exactly that in a long-overdue editorial in this morning's paper calling E-voting an "abysmal failure." They said, "It is unfortunate that the [Holt] bill does not contain a provision banning the use of touch-screen voting machines," adding, "There is still time before the bill becomes law to add a ban on touch-screen voting." And, "If the House fails to do so, the Senate should," and that putting it off to 2012 --- as Davis's amendment as currently drafted does --- is "too long to wait." Huzzah.

Now to the latest updates at this hour...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Today’s news includes more and varied articles on HR-811, including an editorial against the use of DREs from the NYTimes.

It appears that the bill will go back to the Rules Committee for another shot at a decision from that body. If it clears the Rules Committee in some form it will go to the floor. What is still unknown is if and how amendments will be handled. There is also more from the New Jersey court decision.

Also reported is that the Ohio SoS has named the firms that will be involved in the state’s attempt to copy California’s “Top-To-Bottom” Review. The problem is that one of the ‘firms’ that will be involved is also an Independent Test Authority that probably tested some of the voting systems used in the state. That fact is a real “head scratcher.”

Another county has stepped up and decided that DREs are garbage and they will be reverting back to optical-scan. Good decision Taylor County, West Virginia.

All of those voting news stories, and more from today, linked below...

Our buddy Mike Rogers (who feels I should call him my Blogfather) of BlogActive.com owned Sean Hannity during his appearance on Hannity & Colmes. Rogers --- whose name is misspelled as RoDgers by Fox "News" --- originally outed Sen. Larry Craig last October, even though the mainstream media ignored him until the Idaho Statesmen picked up the story last week.

Atta boy, Blogfather! Check him out...