(Deddicated to Dredd)
  w/ Brad & Desi
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  w/ Brad & Desi
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BARCODED BALLOTS AND BALLOT MARKING DEVICES
BMDs pose a new threat to democracy in all 50 states...
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VIDEO: 'Rise of the Tea Bags'
Brad interviews American patriots...
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'Democracy's Gold Standard'
Hand-marked, hand-counted ballots...
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GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal 2012...
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The Secret Koch Brothers Tapes...
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MORE BRAD BLOG 'SPECIAL COVERAGE' PAGES... |
(Deddicated to Dredd)
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...
So now the ball's in Attorney General Michael Mukasey's court. He's expected to decline to enforce the citation of contempt, since both Bolten and Miers declined to testify as a result of an assertion of executive privilege.
The resolution included both a criminal contempt citation and the authorization for the House Judiciary Committee to sue the White House if Mukasey refuses to enforce the citation. You can read those here.
Update: Here's the final tally.
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...
Not since Watergate...Not since Watergate has a President so openly disregarded the will of Congress. Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers have blatantly ignored Congressional subpoenas, thumbing their nose at Congress and our obligation of legitimate oversight. The power of the Congressional subpoena safeguards our liberty. It protects against an all-powerful President. The Constitution demands that we hold these renegade officials in contempt of Congress. Thank you Madame Chair, Madame Speaker.
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...
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, 2002Election 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...
Former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson says the recent disclosures in the UK's Sunday Times concerning the sale of U.S. nuclear secrets to the foreign black market, as aided by high-ranking government officials, are "stunning."
The previously covert agent, who had worked in the agency's counter-proliferation division for years monitoring traffic in the nuclear black market under the guise of a cover company named Brewster Jennings until being outed by Bush Administration officials, was asked about the recent series of explosive stories in the British paper during an interview this morning with Florida radio host Henry Raines of American AM.
Those disclosures include allegations that Brewster Jennings' real identity as a CIA front company was outed to Turkish officials by then-Asst. Sec. of State for European Affairs Marc Grossman as early as 2001...
He will, indeed, be missed. At least by those of us here at The BRAD BLOG. See ya in a few years, Mittens!...
The strange situation with Washington state's Republican Caucus over the weekend keeps deteriorating by the hour, the more we learn about it. It all underscores, of course, why full transparency is useful when it comes to elections.
And yes, the process overseen by the state's GOP chair Luke Esser "the Suppressor" --- where Huckabee led McCain for the bulk of the day as returns were coming in, only to stop the counting at 87% once McCain took a 242 vote lead --- was anything but transparent.
Seattle's NBC affiliate KING 5 is now questioning the reported vote totals out of Snohomish County:
Throughout the vote reporting process, State Party Chairman Luke Esser has said the party is reporting the presidential preferences of the delegates who were elected at the caucuses. But today we learned that Snohomish County, the third-largest county in the state, reported the preferences of all caucus attendees instead of the elected delegates.
One Snohomish County caucus chairman told KING 5 that the delegate preferences are "dramatically different" than the attendee counts.
The Snohomish County Republican Party does not have the delegate preferences from many of its caucuses and is working to obtain them.
This is all made possible, as the WA state bloggers at HorsesAss (who have been doing some terrific work on all of this) helpfully report, due to the bizarre way in which WA Republicans determine delegate proportionment from the caucus voters.
Unlike the state's Democratic Caucuses, where delegates are essentially selected by a mathematical formula to mirror the way caucus goers voted, on the GOP side, participants at each precinct may determine how to proportion delegates any way they wish. For example, even if, say, Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul were to receive the most votes at a precinct, the organizers could still choose to give the most delegates to John McCain.
As the KING 5 report above points out, there is now a question of consistency with the numbers that state party chair Esser the Suppressor was reporting.
Adding still more worries for the Huckabee camp, or even the Paul camp who currently follow Huck with a close third place, David Goldstein at HorsesAss also points out that Esser has long served as a reliable hatchet man, for years, to WA State Attorney General Rob McKenna, who helped him get the job, and who just happens to be the state campaign chairman for, you guessed it, John McCain...
Wow. An amazing find by HorsesAss. Here's Washington state GOP Party chairman Luke Esser --- he who unilaterally stopped counted votes from Saturday's Republican Caucus at 87%, once McCain finally took the lead from Huckabee by just 250 votes --- from his earlier days as an aspiring vote-suppressor...
Now your average leftist loudmouth is a committed individual and can almost never be persuaded to ignore his constitutional rights. The deadbeats, however, are a different matter entirely. Years of interminable welfare checks and free government services have made these modern-day sloths even more lazy. They will vote on election day, if it isn’t much of a bother. But even the slightest inconvenience can keep them from the polling place.
Many of the most successful anti-deadbeat voter techniques (poll taxes, sound beatings, etc.) that conservatives have used in the past have been outlawed by busybody judges.
The only means of persuasion left available to us are Acts of God, who we know is exclusively on our side. I’m talking about seriously inclement weather. I want Biblical floods and pestilence. I will settle for rain, sweet rain. The deadbeats won’t even go out in the rain for their welfare checks (they send one of their social workers to pick it up). There’s no way they’ll vote if it’s raining.
That 'splains a bit, don't it?
Thus was the Republican party's now de rigeur "win"-at-all-costs atmosphere created by Esser over the weekend, leading Huckabee to say this morning on CNN: "That is not what we do in American elections... Maybe that's how they used to conduct it in the old Soviet Union, but you don't just throw people's votes out and say, 'well, we're not going to bother counting them because we kind of think we know where this was going.'"
Think again, Huck.
Be sure to factor all of the above in the next time you the hear the wingnuts tell you about "Democratic voter fraud" in the razor-thin Washington state Gubernatorial election eventually won by the Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire. They will tell you there was massive fraud in the race, though if you bother to look up what really happened, you'll learn the GOP never alleged fraud in their court case, which was thrown out and not even appealed, after no evidence of fraud was ever presented by them.
UPDATE 2/11/08 7:14pm PT: Seattle's NBC affiliate reports "inconsistencies" in votes as reported by Snohomish County. ALSO: Esser the Suppressor's ties to McCain's state campaign chairman. Details now here...
Following a short "dead cat bounce" at the end of last month, after a precipitous six-month stock price plunge devaluing the company's net worth by more than 50% since an insider sell-off last August, Diebold's fortunes began turning south again late last week as the company was forced to begin restating previously-inflated revenue figures from 2006 and 2007.
The company's stock price is continuing to plunge today towards a seven-year low, after it admitted last week that it had over-estimated revenues of its election systems division by more than 300%.
As well, the company announced it will soon be laying off 5% of its full-time global workforce. The restatement of revenues comes as part of a deal worked out with the SEC, which continues its ongoing investigation into the financial practices of the once-great, now-disgraced company. Diebold also acknowledges that it is still being investigated by the DOJ, although the reasons and details of that particular investigation remain undisclosed at this time.
The 50% decrease in the company's share price began just after a number of company executives sold off several thousand shares of stock, all on the same day in August of last year, at $53.05/share, very near the company's 52-week high of $54.50, as The BRAD BLOG reported exclusively at the time. In the following week, the company's share price fell 15% just before the management attempted to misdirect investors by renaming their election division in order to offer "a fresh identity for our company."
Following the insider trading and fresh identity, now dubbed "Premier Elections Solutions," the company's share price has continued to fall ever since. The stock is down more than 3% so far today, selling currently at $24.64/share.
A statement released by the company late last week reveals once again that, despite the attempted name change bait-and-switch, the company still bears the liabilities of the old Diebold elections division; the company admits that the SEC and DOJ investigations continue and sales are sharply off for its voting systems, which have been decertified by several states after being found easily hackable and error-prone in study after study over the past year.
As well, there is a Securities Fraud class action lawsuit still pending against the company, as investors cast the only vote that counts --- the one that hits the 150-year old company in the pocket book. The company that made its bones in the security business has tumbled quite a ways since untouchable crime-fighter Eliot Ness served as chair back in the 1940's.
In the wake of its latest round of misfortunes/karmic return, Diebold announced plans for layoffs of some 800 workers last week. We're not happy to hear that. Though if any of those who find themselves out of a job due to the arrogance, corruption, and general failure of this company to perform as a responsible corporate citizen would like to share any inside information, we'd be delighted to hear from you. Your confidentiality, as needed, will always be respected by The BRAD BLOG.
A partial restatement of 2007 revenue estimates, released by Diebold last week in the wake of the SEC investigation which has forced it to discontinue its previously misleading practice of declaring revenues before products were actually delivered, reveals that the company continues to be rocked by its failing election division, newly renamed or otherwise...
[Updated at bottom of article with an "explanation" from the WA state GOP chairman. This story gets more bizarre by the minute. Be sure to check the updates if you read this story earlier.]
"The Huckabee Presidential Campaign will be exploring all available legal options regarding the dubious final results for the state of Washington State Republican precinct caucuses," according to a statement posted today on their official campaign website.
It was 2:30am on the West Coast last night as we noticed CNN was reporting only 87% of precincts counted from Washington state's Republican Caucus yesterday. Just over 200 votes separated the leader John McCain from Mike Huckabee in a very close second, with Ron Paul coming in a very close third.
Throughout the day, according to Josh Marshall at TPM, Huckabee had been leading in the returns until very late, when McCain pulled just ahead of him by just a few votes.
"With 87% of the returns counted," writes Marshall, "the Washington state GOP, which runs the caucuses stopped releasing results. That left us and a lot of other news organizations in a bit of a quandary last night since it looked like McCain was going to pull it off. But as late as 1:30 AM on the east coast promised new results kept failing to materialize."
And then, in the middle of the night, the state GOP posted a press release declaring McCain the winner, even with some 13% of the votes still unreported, and just 242 votes --- out of 13,745 reported so far --- separating McCain from Huckabee who'd finished a "strong second" according to the GOP release.
"In other words," Huckabee campaign chair Ed Rollins says in their statement this morning, "more than one in eight Evergreen State Republicans have been disenfranchised by the actions of their own party."
"Now, I think it would be borderline for a media organization to declare one candidate a winner when the margin separating first and second was 1.8% with 13% of the results still uncounted," writes Marshall today. "But for the officials holding the election to declare the result on that basis is simply bizarre. But that's what they did."
Of course, none of that kept the always-responsible Reuters news service from declaring "McCain wins Washington state Republican contest" at 8:10am ET this morning.
This afternoon, the Huckabee camp is announcing they are prepared to go to court if necessary, as the candidate himself declared that "weird things" are going on in Washington while on NBC's Meet the Press.
At the same time, the results of the GOP Louisiana Primary, as announced by the state, are even closer than those so far released in Washington. Though because the election was held on wholly unverifiable electronic voting machines, everyone will simply have to settle for whatever numbers the faith-based systems reported to them, no matter how close the margin...
More voter registration problems. This time in Louisiana during today's Democratic Party Primary. From the Obama campaign website just after 7pm ET tonight...
For what it's worth, Obama reportedly won today's primary, but problems with voter registration rolls are quickly emerging this year as a huge problem in state after state. Our reporting from just the last week reveals problem after problem...
Georgia: Widespread bottlenecks for voters as problems occur with Diebold's new e-pollbook system and the state's new Photo ID restrictions. Voters waited in line for up to two hours in some places.
New Mexico: 17,000 (11%) forced to vote on provisional ballots in Democratic Caucus as previously registered Democrats find they are no longer on voter rolls recently privatized by voting machine company ES&S.
Arizona: We've begun receiving reports from voters and local officials of polling places where some 40% of voters were forced to vote on provisionals, after state registration system outsourced to ES&S. [UPDATE: One such report is now published here, from a poll worker who reports that of 1291 ballots cast at her polling place, 540 --- some 41% --- were forced to vote provisionally.]
California: Various reports of voters registered for one party to find they were switched to another, or not registered at all. Confusion about how to handle non-partisan voters in Los Angeles County leads to nearly 100,000 votes which may not be counted properly.
Many states are just now fully implementing new, statewide, computerized registration rolls as mandated by the disastrous Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. The systems are being outsourced to private companies in many states, and more and more Election Days seem to be turning into Beta Tests for the new systems...
Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer
Matthew Dowd was the chief strategist of the George W. Bush 2004 presidential election campaign and is currently an ABC News political contributor. Jonah Goldberg is a nationally syndicated conservative columnist, founding editor of "National Review Online," and author of Liberal Fascism. Neither of them knows who is the current Director of National Intelligence.