So, we are holding a press conference tomorrow morning with Rep. Barbara Lee (D, CA-09).  We are going to highlight the importance of supporting the Democrat in a close race where a Green is running.

Especially when that Democrat has a Progressive message and agenda, such as John Garamendi and Debra Bowen.

This is late notice, but I wanted to get the message out.  We would like there to be as big a show of support as we can get.  Unfortunately, it is being held during business hours, so that will be a challenge.  It is being held at 9:30 tomorrow morning, but if you can make it please try and be there at 9:00AM to help set up.

The location is in Richmond, CA at 3431 D Macdonald Ave (at 35th).  This is our West Contra Costa County UDC campaign HQ.

Press release on the flip...

Before I get into the meat of the diary, you really need to check out Debra's web ad.

Ok on to the meat.

What happens when men face women who don't back down?  They start calling them pushy, aggressive and combative.  You see, in their world, a woman who is willing to go to the mattresses is a bitch.  In politics it becomes an attack line to try and keep a woman from being elected.  Debra Bowen is the only woman running for statewide office in California and she is being attacked for not being a pushover when it comes to protecting our right to vote.

Fellow Kossacks,

Thanks so much for your continued support of my campaign for California Secretary of State!  I just wanted to stop by and give you a quick update on our campaign, with only 15 short days before November 7th.

This past Wednesday, I debated my Republican opponent, appointed Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, before the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board.  (Thanks to ollieb who already posted a summary of the debate here!)  Hat tip to the Chronicle:  what they did was open up their editorial endorsement process for all to see.  What a fantastic idea!  

The editorial board debate gave me a great opportunity to highlight our differences and to demonstrate why I am the best qualified candidate to clean up our elections system.  And yesterday, the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed me as their choice to be California's next Secretary of State.

(cross-posted at surf putah) While most of Yolo County uses optical scanned ballots, the cynically-named Help America Vote Act a couple years back required that Yolo County drop its old reliable punch card system and use electronic voting machines (not Diebold, to be clear), ostensibly to provide better access for blind voters, but more likely to funnel millions of taxpayer dollars to voting machine manufacturers (who are then, unsurprisingly, big Republican donors) and, some argue, to leave backdoor flaws that enable election fraud.

Luckily for Yolo County (and notably unlike incumbant Schwarzeneggar appointee, Republican Secretary of State and Diebold pusher Bruce MacPherson), our county clerk Freddie Oakley is on top of things, an e-voting skeptic, a proponent of paper trails, and generally on top of things. No absentee ballot monkey business on this side of the causeway , thank you very much. So when Oakley was testing out the e-voting machines ahead of time, she discovered this weird glitch where the instructions to blind Yolo voters were inexplicably in Vietnamese:

Man oh man, today was the one and only debate between the current Secretary of State of California, Bruce McPherson, and his Democratic challenger (and netroots all-star) State Senator Debra Bowen and she kicked some serious ass.

The debate was held in the context of a meeting with the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle and was aired over the web. The debate will apparently largely influence which candidate the paper chooses to endorse.

The debate is up HERE or you can read my liveblog of it over at The Courage Campaign.

More on the debate over the flip.

Just when you thought it was safe.....to go back into the voting booth.  Just when you thought your vote would be counted as it was cast - the Republican money and the Republican spin machine has geared up in full force to take the top offices in California.

According to both the LATimes and Bowen's own internals released to campaign supporters via email last week Bowen has a solid lead on current SOS Bruce McPherson.

But this mornings San Francisco Chronicle makes light of an amazing phenomenon in one of the most historic elections for Democrats.    

There has been lots of talk about how important Secretary of State offices are to preserving the right to vote.  Here is one specific example from California.  We have a huge freaking ballot this year, with 13 statewide proposition and loads more local ones.  It has made for some really long absentee ballots.  Mail in voting started Tuesday.  As I was driving to a Bowen fundraiser I heard an interesting piece on NPR.  Evidently, the ballots are so big that it takes extra postage to mail them back.  Bruce McPhereson did nothing to prepare voters for this.  Now they are scrambling to cut deals with the post office and warn voters with extra mailings.  It is a total mess.

Bowen is hitting back.  This is from her press release:

A new article in the San Jose Mercury News finally acknowledges what we have known all along:  

Debra Bowen will win on November 7th and this race is perhaps the more interesting of the California Statewides

"As elections go, the campaign for secretary of state is generally a sleeper: Voters rarely pay attention to the issues -- and the incumbent almost always wins.
But this year's challenge between incumbent Bruce McPherson, a Santa Cruz Republican, and state Sen. Debra Bowen, D-Redondo Beach, is shaping up to be one of the more competitive races."  

In honor of the many many exciting things that have occurred in the past few days since I've had time to post I decided to go a gaggle of boondoggles and non-stop props to some of my fav braves and the stanker wankers.

Come... take my hand... don't be afraid... we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dream

Schwarzenegger appointed California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson went negative against his opponent Senator Debra Bowen chair of the California Elections Committee last night when he sent out an email claiming that Sen. Bowen is funding her campaign with Wal-Mart stock.

So, how is it that the current Secretary of State, who is in charge of all of the official records - i.e. reporting for candidates and lobbying, how is it that he could have received such bad intelligence??Could McPherson just not find the right FPPC file?    

I think Mr. McPherson must have used a DIEBOLD electronic search to get his information!  OOPSY!

 VOTE PAD CRISIS:  PRESS CONFERENCE AT 9!

[What's this about?  Scroll down for the what McPherson's crew has, and has NOT, provided to California taxpayers]

 Let your views be known, please attend the hearing & press conference:

Date :  Wednesday, August 9, 2006

 Time :  9:00 a.m. sharp

 Place :  Secretary of State's Office at 1500 - 11th Street, Sacramento, CA

[More below the fold]

Bradblog reports that Kelley Services is looking for workers to deliver electronic voting machines in California for the primary election.

So much for those vaunted claims by California's Sec. of State Bruce McPherson and his partners at Diebold, Inc. about increased security surrounding the physical access to electronic voting machines in light of newly revealed vulnerabilities to easy tampering.

A tip received by The BRAD BLOG on Monday reveals that Temp Workers are currently being sought in San Francisco for California's upcoming primary election to "assist in dropping off election voting machines and picking these machines up when voting is complete," as the says.

A classified ad seeking the workers is currently posted on the Internet at Monster.com by Kelly Services. (A screenshot of the complete ad is posted at the end of this article.) The salary offered to temp workers hired for the job -- who will have private unsupervised access to the state's voting machines before and after election day -- is $11.99/hour according to the posting.

Recently, Democratic Congressional Candidate [CA-36] and election protection activist, Marcy Winograd attempted to deliver an arrest warrant to Republican appointed California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson.

"Secretary of State Bruce McPherson was "NOT IN!" according to an unnamed press person sent to meet with Winograd and her supporters."
-- Linda Sutton

wu ming sets a Vichy Dem* straight in the comments section:

Winograd's charges that "certification of diebold machines that had been found by the CA state govt to be untrustworthy and unworthy of certifiction, pushing "exact match" database requirements that are throwing tens of thousands of voters off the rolls, and closing the decision-making process to both CA dems and regular vioters bnefore making these decisions - are accurate, whether you believe them or not. they have all been widely reported in the mainstream press, and are a 180 degree reversal from what the previous SoS and the CA state government had begun doing before mcpherson got appointed."

* thanks to Rico for the term "Vichy Dem"

please follow me below the jump...

Thanks to resnska, msinla, lorelynn, norm, and so many other members of the DailyKos community for keeping the serious elections problems in California and across America on the front-burner!

As many of you know, there's alarming news in our fight for fair and transparent elections:  California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson entered into an agreement with the Bush Administration's Justice Department last year to implement a statewide voter registration database system that will disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters in California.

Please join me in emailing Secretary McPherson now, demanding that he undo his agreement with the Bush Administration and roll back the regulations he adopted to implement it.

The special election to fill the San Diego Congressional seat vacated by Randy "Duke" Cunningham is next week, as well as over 20 municipal elections, and the registration deadline for the June 6 primary is May 22.  We don't have much time!

More below the flip.

To date 43% of newly registered Angelinos (26% of California voters, statewide), have been deemed ineligible.

California, per the 2002 "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA) is required to create a single voter database. There are unverified claims that Diebold has written the software that will transform the current CalVoter sytem, which I believe was identical software used in multiple county-level databases -- into a single database for all of California, VoteCal.

From Secretary of State candidate Debra Bowen's site:

Thousands of voters dumped off California's voting rolls
March 29th, 2006
I just learned of an alarming development in our fight for fair and transparent elections: The current Secretary of State, Bruce McPherson, launched a statewide voter registration database system last year that will disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters in California.

More than 14,000 new voter registration and re-registration applications just from Los Angeles County were recently invalidated under this new stringent set of regulations -- and other counties are seeing similar results.

This is a 43% rejection rate! In fact, virtually all of these applications would have been accepted before Secretary McPherson rolled out his new statewide voter registration database. Typically rejection rates are 1-2%. This is outrageous.

A little more at the link:

http://www.debrabowen.com/... More on the flip:

Californians Recently Moved: You May Not Get Your Sample Ballot or Absentee! Hmm.  It looks like due to problems of California's state-wide voter registrastion verification system, thousands of recently moved or new voters are not getting registered, causing backups to voting registrar county offices across the country according to today's Los Angeles Times:

"Designed by Secretary of State Bruce McPherson to authenticate voter registrations has blocked otherwise valid registrations because of computer glitches, slight discrepancies in spelling or incomplete applications."

The problems have required registrars to contact voters -- a time-consuming process that is already taxing some counties facing elections next month.

San Diego County is racing to rectify rejected registrations in time for the April 11 special election to fill the seat vacated by convicted Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham."

http://www.latimes.com/... Updated: Debra Bowen, Candidate for Secretary of State of California, just posted this announcement: http://www.debrabowen.com/blog/?p=20

Tue. March 21: Voter Action News Conference, 10:30 -11:30 AM, PST

Lowell Finley, the lawyer who cost Schwarzenegger $4 million on a campaign finance violation lawsuit, the attorney who cost Diebold $2.6 million for fraudulent claims in California, and the lawyer who handled the groundbreaking litigation for VoterAction.org in New Mexico (the first time a voting machine vendor has been successfully brought to discovery in a public case) -- will file suit on behalf of VoterAction again.

This time, the case will be filed against California for wrongfully certifying the Diebold TSx.

According to the VoterAction press release:

"Diebold's TSx touch screen voting system is a severe security risk, and does not accommodate all disabled voters as required by law. The Diebold system is difficult if not impossible to audit or recount, and has been proven vulnerable to malicious tampering in tests and studies. Diebold technology contains "interpreted" code, which is easily hacked, and illegal for voting systems in the State of California."