Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Next Tuesday is “Tsunami Tuesday,” in which 22 states will participate and of those 15 states will hold primaries. The primary states are: AL, AZ, AR, CA, CT, DE, GA, IL, MA, MO, NJ, NY, OK, TN, and UT. Whether these states will have successful elections or total meltdowns should be based, in large part, on their past history in elections using the same voting systems. Using only data such as whether a state requires a vvpat or post election audits tells only a small part of the story. Have the states experienced large numbers of machine failures, ballot programming errors, tabulating errors, long lines, and/or disenfranchised voters for instance? For instance, looking at VotersUnite’s “Election Problem Log – 2004 to Date” there have been no reported problems from Oklahoma. The risk of any major meltdown in Oklahoma is small when compared to Georgia with 13 machine malfunction reports or California with 24 machine malfunction reports. States that have a real risk of meltdown based on past record are Arkansas, California, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Utah. Those will be the states that get our extra attention....

Last week, Reps. John Conyers (D-MI) and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), both of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to the former Ohio Secretary of State and Co-Chair of the state's Bush/Cheney '04 campaign committee, J. Kenneth Blackwell, inviting him to appear next week at a subcommittee oversight hearing on voter suppression issues.

To the surprise of almost nobody, Blackwell has refused the invitation to testify, claiming his "schedule [would] not permit" him to attend the hearings.

The snub, according to both the following report from Jon Craig at the Cincinnati Enquirer and additional indications given to The BRAD BLOG by a Judiciary staffer other than the one quoted by Craig, may lead to an escalation of the longtime standoff between Conyers and Blackwell. A congressional subpoena requiring an appearance by the controversial former SoS, who presided over one of the worst-run Presidential Elections in American history, may well be in the offing.

As Craig reports today at the Enquirer's political blog...

Though our own Judiciary source spoke to the same point, if not quite as directly, the comments above from Godfrey offer an additional indication that we may be headed to a showdown.

Such a subpoena would require a majority vote of the committee, which likely wouldn't come in time for the hearings currently scheduled for next Friday, according to Craig's report.

New Hampshire's Republican Presidential Primary candidate Albert Howard has delivered a letter to Secretary of State Bill Gardner, demanding that "all ballots that have been returning from the towns and cities, including, but not necessarily limited to, the unused/uncast ballots and the 'spoiled' ballots," be counted as part of the ongoing Election Contest in the Granite State. Howard filed for the contest, where ballots are being counted again today in Concord, following concerns about reported results from the Diebold optical-scan machines used during the state's January 8th Primary.

The BRAD BLOG has also learned that problems with Diebold machines were reported in 21 different towns during the primary, according to Howard, who says he has finally received some answers to public records requests filed with the state weeks ago, asking for details of problems with the machines that occurred on Election Day.

We just spoke with Howard, who explained that counting conditions in Concord continue to be "a mess," prompting his latest demands, which echoed earlier ones that remain unmet by SoS Gardner.

The Republican Howard also told us that he'd been contacted recently by the Democratic chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, who called him personally to discuss concerns about what was going on in the wake of questions surrounding the New Hampshire Primary Election results...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer