Given the potential disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters, and maybe even hundreds of thousands of voters, from Super Tuesday's Los Angeles County Democratic Primary election, which the county's current acting Registrar incorrectly claims to be "impossible" to count accurately, we believe it's time to place some blame squarely where it belongs for the entire mess.

A Los Angeles Times editorial this week, where, it seems, the paper may have finally found religion on the issue of Election Integrity, serves up a great starting point...

So it happened before. 44% of Non-Partisan cross-over ballots went uncounted in March '04 and 42% in June '06. And yet, the county went into '08's primary with no plans to change a thing.

The woman who dreamt up the ridiculous scheme, former Los Angeles County Registrar and Diebold cover girl Conny McCormack, quit just over a month before the election, and knew about the problem from years past, but did nothing about it. Or, she didn't know about, and was thus criminally negligent in her job as chief voting official for the nation's most populous county...

[UPDATED: See end of article for information on who this "DHinMI" tool actually is.]

Markos Moulitsas and the band of self-important anonymous losers that he's allowed to dominate the front page at the world's largest supposedly-Progressive blogsite continue their cowardly march towards full self-destruction.

Today's example comes by way of a comment from the anonymous (read: cowardly) "DHinMI", one of the loudest, most obnoxious and knowledge-challenged of Kos' stable of front-page sidekicks hell-bent on further discrediting the once-prestigious website:

Though, unlike Bev Harris and ourselves, who put our real names behind everything we do, "DHinMI" enjoys anonymity as he/she spews his/her unsupported, fact-free allegations. He/she does, however, offer an email address where folks might try to offer this numbskull a few facts if he/she ever becomes interested in any (which seems rather unlikely at this point): DHinMI@yahoo.com

"DHinMI's" comment, ironically enough, is posted in support of a front page article by Moulitsas himself today, in regard to a NYTimes article reporting that some 80 precincts in some of NYC's most African-American dominated precincts registered 0 votes for Barack Obama in their unofficial tallies. Kos then goes on to wonder if the article thus indicates that NYC's "voting machines don't spit out paper ballots? That should be SOP for these things."

NYC, of course, still uses the old lever machines which, of course, do not "spit out paper ballots", something that it seems great champions for the cause of Election Integrity, such as Kos and "DHinMI", ought to know by now.

What "should be SOP for these things," is that people who write at high-profile, influential Internet sites ought to learn what they're writing about before they write about them so that they don't mislead folks into believing they know what they're talking about.

Today's Daily Dose of Daily Kos loser-dom comes on the heels of yesterday's report in which they ominously threatened former CIA agent, Larry Johnson, with permanent banning should he have the temerity to continue his support of Hillary Clinton on their site. Why they seem hell-bent on proving Bill O'Reilly right over there remains a mystery to us, and further begs the question of how long it'll be before the dKos readers who tend to "get it", even as the front-pagers don't, will continue on at that place.

Previous BRAD BLOG-reported examples of dKos front-pagers, including "DHinMI" and Kos himself, busily destroying dKos' previously good name can be found here.

UPDATE: "DHinMI" isn't that anonymous after all. And whaddaya know, he's a member of the official Democratic Party machine. Knock us over with a feather...

The conspiracy theorists at the New York Times today tell us something is amiss, but proceed to ultimately tell us nothing about why it happened, suggesting that all is just fine...and that it'd be even better if the city "upgraded" to new electronic voting machines...

So how did the numbers change from 141-0 to 261-136 and from 118-0 to 118-116? No confirmed explanation is given, but some lazy guesswork about how votes are counted on NYC's old lever voting machines is proffered by local Election Officials, and dutifully passed on by the Times who --- before proceeding with a misleading "ad" for new electronic systems --- soothes our concerns by informing us that an unspecified number ("a handful") of districts also reported zero votes for Clinton in the original, unofficial tallies...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

It has been a very slow day today. Secretary of State Bowen has now sent a letter to the Los Angeles Registrar asking him to provide information back to the state with regards to the tens of thousands of uncounted “Double Bubble” ballots. She has also suggested that the county actually count many of those ballots where they know the voter intent. When “Decline To State” voters went to the polls and asked for a ballot to vote either American Independent or Democratic the poll workers were supposed to annotate the party (AI or DEM) in the poll book. If all of the DTS voters at a polling site asked to vote DEM then all of those ballots can be counted because the voter intent is clearly known. Only when an AI voter is thrown into the mix does the count become more difficult....

The Republican women of Snohomish County, WA, seem to be lacking a bit in the self-respect department. While we're sure that's not the case for every Republican woman in the county, that's the message that's just been sent with the following photograph that appeared in this morning's local paper...

Though he claimed during last night's appearance with the proud shameless, self-loathing Republican women of Snohomish that "we're neutral as a state party," and aren't endorsing a candidate, The BRAD BLOG has previously noted "Esser the Suppressor's" fealty to John McCain's state campaign chairman, AG Rob McKenna, Esser's old chum, and the man responsible for helping to push the last state chair (a woman) out of the job, in order to replace her with Esser.

He arguably returned the favor during last Saturday's GOP caucus in the Evergreen State by halting the counting with just 87% of the returns in, just after McCain, who'd been trailing Huckabee for most of the night, finally took a 242 vote lead...

Glad to see it's not just us. We've had our own problems with the self-destructive, control-bots of the Kossack Army Guards of the Gate. Note: The Daily Kos readers, by and large, should not be blamed, since they seem to get it, but founder Markos Moulitsas and his front-page diarists and automatons are a different matter.

Now they've managed to raise the ire of BRAD BLOG friend and former CIA analyst Larry Johnson of NoQuarter, who, believe it or not, was far less politic in his response to Kos than even we were.

And, unlike most of the folks who have been banned and/or purged at dKos for having the temerity to discuss issues of Election Integrity, at least Larry was given a "warning" about his "unacceptable" behavior before it was demanded that he sign the equivalent of a loyalty oath to regain his ability to post over there again...Which, understandably, he has no interest in doing...

What a bunch of goddamn, Orwellian fascists. Here’s the message waiting for me when I checked in tonight:

Okay Mr. Kos. Here’s a word for you: GO FUCK YOURSELF. (Actually, that’s three words. My bad.)

This wannabee poseur and his gang of Animal Farm pig imitators have lost touch with reality.
...
Well Markos and crowd. Orwell was right. Fuck you people. I won’t post and I won’t read. But most of all, I won’t apologize. I have nothing to apologize for other than making the false assumption that you clowns gave a shit about freedom of expression or liberty. You guys are John Bolton and Dick Cheney in drag. You are welcome to kiss my ass.

The graf explaining the initial root of the problem is removed in the above, in hopes that you might go give Larry's excellent site a read to find out what his particular violation was.

UPDATE 2/17/08: A senior Daily Kos front-pager takes yet another shot at The BRAD BLOG following this post, referring to us as a "nutter site" doing "more harm than good" for the cause of election integrity. Go figure. The dKos poster, "DHinMI", also fails to fully disclose who he actually is. But we've been able to connect a few dots, making his Swiftboat-style attack on us a bit easier to understand. Complete shameful details here...

(Deddicated to Dredd)

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

There are about 1 Million ballots still to be counted in California not including the “Double Bubble” ballots in Los Angeles Co that may or may not be counted. New Mexico is still counting ballots since their “Super Tuesday” state caucus. The Colorado Senate Majority Leader intends to file legislation that would require that the state’s August primary and November general election be done on paper ballots and not e-voting machines. He has the support of the Governor. Colorado Secretary of State Coffman is now facing two ethics complaints filed yesterday. Ohio Secretary of State Brunner is in court today, where a judge will decide whether she has the power to require counties like Union Co to offer paper ballots at the polls.

Those stories, and all of the other notable voting news items today, linked below as usual...

That's "one small step for freedom of speech," our friend Jesse Dyen writes to us this afternoon.

Dyen was arrested, along with a number of other freedom fighters who had the temerity to show up near Bush's "brush ranch" in Crawford, Texas, several years ago to protest against the war, only to be arrested (twice) by police enforcing an ordinance, passed by the locals after Cindy Sheehan's original stand there in the Summer of 2005, that no such protests on public lands were to be allowed.

Today, he writes to let us know that the guilty charges were overturned by an appellate court that decided [PDF] in favor of the U.S. Constitution, the First Amendment, and other quaint old notions such as those.

See below for Dyen's missive explaining what happened back then, and in the court decision today, to the courageous arrested "Prairie Dogs" (who happened to include legendary "Pentagon Papers" whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, as well as a number of other notables), and a video made from one of our favorite songs, as written by Dyen, during the original historic tipping point moment in Crawford back in the Summer of 2005…

Buried by a number of other things today, we refer you to Paul Kiel's coverage with a note that Harry Reid's Senate has yet to hold a floor vote on similar contempt citations against Karl Rove and Josh Bolten, as recommended to him by a bi-partisan Senate Judiciary Committee vote last December...

UPDATE: Our favorite House member of late, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL), speaks in favor of the contempt resolution for a minute and a half. Video at right, full statement below...

You can read The BRAD BLOG's previous detailed explanations of the current Los Angeles County "Double Bubble" ballot debacle here and here.

If you've yet to sign the Courage Campaign's petition demanding that these ballots be counted immediately, please do so right now!

As the clock ticks towards the date required for final certification of as many as hundreds of thousands of currently uncounted ballots in Los Angeles County --- due to an idiotic, ill-conceived, and possibly illegal scheme by the county's Registrar of Voters --- it is imperative that those ballots be counted immediately.

While the acting Registrar has claimed, incorrectly, that it is "impossible" to accurately determine the intent of the voters on those ballots, he is wrong.

Almost every single uncounted ballot can be counted today with absolutely certainty that the intent of the voter is being accurately recorded.

With current the miscount/error rate of those uncounted ballots --- on which the voter's intent has currently been inaccurately recorded by the optical-scan voting machines as "no vote" --- now standing at 100%, almost every single ballot counted will only lower that rate at best. At worst, in a tiny (almost infinitesimal) percentage of ballots, the current error rate will be not be lowered, though it will not be increased.

Thus, the error rate can be reduced to almost 0% if the Registrar's office will simply begin counting the ballots --- immediately.

Here's what everybody, (including apparently the Registrar!), needs to know about the currently miscounted ballots...

The good guys win one for a change, in the never-ending battle against those who don't want you to vote.

This time, it was the Blackwellian Republican legislature of Ohio which got slapped down by a federal judge who found their 2006 restrictions on voter registration drives to be unconstitutional.

John Michael Spinelli has the details...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

The issue of 50,000 to 100,000 ballots that may not be counted in Los Angeles Co. is still alive and well. Every one of those ballots that can be counted must be counted. The Courage Campaign has a petition to Acting ROV Dean Logan telling him to count all of the “Decline To State” votes possible.

The news from the “Potomac Primaries” has been very quiet. The biggest problems seem to have been e-pollbooks that had voters who were registered as either Democrat or Republican listed as unaffiliated. This clearly kept many voters from being able to vote. The other huge problem was the reports from all over the area about polling places running out of ballots early. This caused lines and many people simply walked away without voting.

Those stories, and all of the other notable voting news items today, linked below as usual...

In an incredibly heated exchange today during a U.S. House hearing (see video at left) Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) grilled Sec. of State Condoleeza Rice on whether she ever saw pre-war intelligence that countered the administration's claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In a statement just released by his office, Wexler says she "falsely testified" in response to his questions...

"A voter who casts a vote in an election in accordance with the laws of this State shall have that vote counted."
- Article II, California Constitution
Added overwhelmingly by California voters in Prop 43, on March 5, 2002

Election Code requirements "shall be liberally construed so that the real will of the electors will not be defeated by any informality or failure to comply with all of the provisions of the law."
- California Elections Code, Sec. 19001

Los Angeles County's acting Registrar of Voters, Dean Logan, says in a report delivered to the County Board of Supervisors yesterday on the "Double Bubble" debacle from last Super Tuesday's Presidential Primary Election, that he believes it will be "impossible to determine with absolute certainty" the intentions of some 100,000 non-partisan voters who chose to vote in either the Democratic or American Independent Party's open primary, despite selections having been made for one of the Presidential candidates on their ballots.

The intent on almost every one of those uncounted ballots CAN be determined with absolute certainty. So, allow me to put this as nicely as I can: Dean Logan is full of shit...