But it happened. The paper trail said one thing and the electronic voting machines said another.

ES&S iVotronic, which failed so publicly in Arkansas that the election results were reversed, are widely used across the country.

Once again, BradBlog is on the case, letting us know of this terrible threat to our democracy.

BradBlog quotes chilling facts reported by Joe Lamb in Arkansas' Log Cabin Democrat:

"[T]he votes for the constable race were later found to have recorded accurately on the voter-verifiable paper trail and therefore would not have appeared erroneous to voters either." (Which means there also would have been a fight, in any contested recount, about which numbers actually reflected voter intent!)

"What makes the situation all the more baffling, [Faulkner County Election Commissioner Bruce Haggard] added, is that the machine in question, along with its associated software and coding, were found to have worked to perfection during early voting."

Find links at the original BradBlog report. Says BradBlog:  "By all means, let's not pay attention to this report until after November."

I post this bit of information because, as I have tried to make clear before, as a technology professional, with 25 years programming experience, the thought of electronic voting machines with no paper trail scares the (*Y^ out of me. I know how easily such systems can be subverted. Experts have demonstrated how easily they can be subverted again and again.

For this reason, it has made me really unhappy and disappointed to see growing tension and mutual attacks between the website The Brad Blog, its proprieter Brad Friedman, and the leadership of Daily Kos (by that I mean the front page story posters and editors).

The mutual antagonism seems to have reached a fever pitch a couple days ago, when Friedman posted a blistering denunciation of Daily Kos on his site.

Note: I post this after having search stories and diaries for past week and found no reference to this article at bradblog.com.)

More below the fold.

The Great Orange Overlord has spoken on the New Hampshire Primary recount.  All is well in the world of Kos, and we should be greatful.

New Hampshire Recount: Already Worth It w/ poll
is frontpaged in a provocative post on Brad Friedman's site, www.bradblog.com,
with the poll results from earlier today reproduced.  
(Scroll down the bradblog page, it's now the second item.)

In case you don't know bradblog, it's a site devoted to election integrity news.  Brad has been reporting on election integrity stories since November 2004, his bio is here.  He's now doing daily reports on the New Hampshire recount.

Citing the poll results in rjones2818's diary -- 86% as of Brad's writing, now 87%, of those responding to the poll think that the NH recount is a good idea -- Brad questions whether Kos is out of touch with Kossacks on the issue of election integrity, and asks whether we and Kos deserve to be called 'progressive.'  Which is not a question we should be afraid of asking, I think.  But my favorite part of Brad's piece is in the comment section, reproduced below.

This is a stunning read and Bradblog I believe has always been doing good work in showing election boo boo's as they happen. You do know that Diebold Machines were used in this one. Keep in mind none of this is me, but a crosspost after reading at bradblog.

http://www.bradblog.com/...

What's going on here? Before proceeding, I recommend you read the third section of the post I just ran an hour or so ago, concerning the way the ballots are counted in New Hampshire, largely on Diebold optical-scan voting systems, wholly controlled and programmed by a very very bad company named LHS Associates.

Link to the post.
http://www.bradblog.com/...

Those Diebold op-scan machines are the exact same ones that were hacked in the HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy. See the previous report, as I recommend, which also includes a video of that hack, and footage of the guy who runs LHS Associates.

More below

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has offered to tell us everything she knows - regarding illegal weapons sales, money laundering, drug trafficking, nuclear black market, terrorism and the corruption of the US Govt - if one of the major broadcast networks will let her tell her story.

Not surprisingly, the silence from the corporate media is still deafening, but I've got some other tidbits for you while we wait. And wait. And wait.

Bradblog has been chasing the story about former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds' offer to 'tell all.'

Brad has an update here.

Sibel has had an abundance of offers from the MSM since her announcement. Unfortunately, not a single one of them has come from the US MSM.

Ellsberg says:

"I'd say what she has is far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers"

I never thought I'd see the day when suddenly out of nowhere I'm the intrepid blogging reporter who is responsible for breaking Google news stories. See, I just have never had any authority before now. Never really particularly wanted it either. There are a lot of bloggers around who are much better writers and reports than I am. Hat tips to all those of them who are actually trying to restore our country to what we once thought it was. But then one spooky Hallowe'en, along came Bradblog, Google news and the ghost of Sibel Edmonds and they changed my life forever (well, hopefully not).
Read more below the fold.

Former FBI translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has promised to tell us everything she knows about treason at the highest level of the US government - with one proviso:

"Here's my promise to the American Public: If anyone of the major networks --- ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, FOX --- promise to air the entire segment, without editing, I promise to tell them everything that I know."

Edmonds, "the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America," has been trying to expose criminal activity, treason, at the highest levels of the US Government - Congress, Pentagon and State Dept - since she became aware of the crimes in 2001 and 2002.

Edmonds has exhausted every conceivable channel in the courts, Congress, and elsewhere, and is now willing to risk criminal charges to ensure that the American people learn how their government really 'works.'

BradBlog has the exclusive.

I hope I didn't break the rules but I deleted my other diary so I could post this instead. I searched but couldn't find anything on this horrible bill - HR-811. This is VERY important.

The good folks over at BradBlog and OpEdNews are screaming about this resolution coming to a vote as early as Thursday.

I'm including all the needed information and links below, intact, from Joan Brunwasser, Voting Integrity Editor, OpEdNews . Please study it and make an informed decision. Then call or email your congress critter.

Let's defeat this democracy killer once and for all!

The clock is ticking.

The House of Representatives is poised to vote on NJ Rep. Holt's "election reform" bill (HR 811), perhaps as early as tomorrow, Thursday. Organizations ordinarily aligned with the common good have pulled out all the stops to ram this legislation through. Unless - and maybe even though - we make a LOT of noise, this bill will become law and our elections will take more irrevocable steps away from democracy.

New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are STILL disaster areas, almost two years after Hurricane Katrina, despite reports of progress coming from charitable organizations and the government. See this article:
http://www.tiny.cc/...   Common Ground Relief is making a difference in New Orleans. This 501c3 organization, listed with Guidestar, started with $50 and three people. Common Ground relief runs medical and legal clinics and four distribution centers offering food, water, and clothing. Common Ground volunteers do everything from tarping, gutting, and cleaning homes to "bioremediaton" of soil contaminated by sewage and toxins.  So far, Common Ground has offered relief to 50,000 residents in four parishes. If every American gave just $1 to this group to say Thank You to New Orleans for music, food, Tabasco Sauce, or a moment of enchantment, the City That George Forgot could soon be put to rights.

Via Thinkprogress

A former West Virginia federal prosecutor said Friday the White House fired him in 2005 in the middle of a corruption and vote-buying investigation but never told him why.

Karl K. "Kasey" Warner said he has "concerns" and sees parallels between himself and eight other ousted U.S. attorneys. Congress and an internal Justice Department agency are investigating whether those firings were politically motivated.

Oh no, here we go again!

In case you haven't followed it, the BradBlog has an excellent rundown of events and documents that tend to show that Ann Coulter committed voter fraud and perjury in Florida last year.  You can read about it here.

Joe Conason gave Coulter a short mention today in his New York Observer column.

The other 3THREE3 Contested Congressional Elections in Florida for 2006 are...

John Russell along with Clint Curtis, who opposed Tom Feeney, as well as Frank Gonzalez, who opposed Diaz Balart in South Florida, have been working with attorney Mark Adams to develop evidence that the votes in these elections were not accurately accounted for. Evidence gathered from voters who are officially listed as having voted in various precincts across the state in these elections has demonstrated SIGNIFICANT differences between the official count/results and the sworn statements of voters obtained via affidavit.

Having been convinced by the weight of the accumulated evidence that problems may well be far reaching, the team is now moving to use the power of our election contests/lawsuits to gather direct evidence from the Florida Department of State and County Supervisors of Election.  We need just a minimal bit of help to positively effect history going forward while revealing the evidence that demonstrates truth from thr past.

We are seeking to raise several thousand dollars to cover these expenses of discovery.  

Please read below.  Minimal participation is all that is required.  Thank you.  John Russell

A few definitions and a little background:

undervote=someone voted but no vote was recorded.
This occurs when:

• a voter signs in for a ballot but fails to vote,
• a machine screws up and does not register the vote (or someone messes with the count.)  

An undervote rate of .5% is normal in a presidential race. In 2004 New Mexico saw undervote rates up to 34 times higher than normal (almost 17%) in many minority precincts.  Undervote rates were higher in DRE than paper precincts, especially minority precincts.

DRE=Direct Recording Electronic device (A DRE is a voting machine, either touchscreen or pushbutton- like an ATM). Not to be confused with This DRE which is an equally unpleasant process.

And a little more history: After the travesty of elections in New Mexico in 2004, the state got rid of DRE voting machines in favor of optical scanned paper ballots for the 2006 election.

And how did that work out for them? Let's see after the flip....

Election Systems! My #1 priority for Democracy, closely followed by Media Reform.

There's been a rush (no pun intented) to pass this bill, but we need to proceed with caution.

Rush Holt's new bill, H.R. 811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007, supposedly fixes problems in election systems.

However, I believe the Daily Kos community should follow up on the objections raised by key citizen activists before "jumping on the bandwagon" to support the bill.

Can you help?
Objections and links are listed below the fold:

Oh boy...when it rains it pours.  It seems that Ann Coulter could be in a little more trouble than originally believed.

Brad Friedman at The Huffington Post is reporting Ann could be charged with up to 3 felonies.  He links to an article in today's Palm-Beach Post story by Jose Lambiet and notes:

Added to the previously known allegations of Voter Fraud when Coulter used her realtor's address instead of her own on her Voter Registration Application, is the allegation by the Palm Beach Police Department that Coulter seems also to have given that same, incorrect address when applying for a drivers license after moving to the tony Sunshine 'hood where her fellow GOP propagandist, Rush Limbaugh, has recently had his own troubles following the rule of law.

The allegation concerning Drivers License fraud would be yet another third degree felony, according to the Palm Beach Police Department report!

More below.....

The letter to talk show host Stephanie Miller from "Sock" has spurred me once again to need to say that things are worse than we want to believe. A portion of the letter appears below (warning, the language is nasty); the unredacted version appears on Brad Blog. (http://www.bradblog.com/...)

I wrote an email to Stephanie that I've included also. This is the best I can do to put into words the threat we all face (every American). I don't want to believe this, no one does, but if we continue to turn a blind eye, history repeats itself.