Yesterday, the White House denied a claim made by Arizona's Republican Sen. Jon Kyl that he was told personally by President Obama that he would not work to secure the Mexican border unless it was part of comprehensive immigration legislation.

"The president didn't say that and Senator Kyl knows it," White House Communication Director Dan Pfeiffer told POLITICO yesterday in their story which includes video of Kyl's claims being made to supporters in Phoenix.

Today, Media Matters has a long list detailing Kyl's well-documented history of blatantly false claims.

But we had our own run in with Kyl --- and his proclivity to just pull stuff out of his hind-quarters when speaking to the press --- during the 2008 Democratic Convention, both outside, and then inside the Pepsi Center.

Remember this BRAD BLOG exclusive from August 28, 2008? When we seemed to be the only member of the media willing to press Kyl on his bullshit?...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

Coinciding with an internal Senate Democratic Caucus debate over health care reform that Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) described as only “slightly less raucous than the town hall meetings,” the non-affiliated progressive activist group Democrats.com has launched a petition campaign aimed at curtailing donations to official Democratic fundraising organizations [emphasis in original] until "the Democratic Congress passes --- and President Obama signs --- healthcare reform with a robust public option."

That "robust public option" is defined in the petition as being "based on Medicare rates, not negotiated rates," available "nation-wide, with no state opt-outs," "administered by Medicare, not a for-profit insurance company." and "available immediately."

The idea that the public option would be managed by a private insurance company has recently emerged in reports of Congressional negotiations aimed at merging various versions of the legislation passed by separate committees in the House and Senate, as noted by RAW STORY's John Byrne today.

The progressive activists campaign calls for signatories to respond to requests for donations from the three major Democratic campaign/fundraising organizations --- the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) --- with a http://www.democrats.com...rike-for-public-option\">link to the petition, instead of funds, until such legislation has been passed and signed by the President.

"Until then," the petition states, "I will only support individual Democrats who support single-payer Medicare for All (the 88 sponsors of HR 676)."

"We elected solid Democratic majorities in Congress and a Democratic President to fulfill Democratic promises of progressive change," the statement continues, "We did not elect Republican Senator Olympia Snowe to break those promises."

The complete short petition follows in full below...

Wide-spread voting machine failures have been reported to the Obama/DNC election protection hotline in Nevada since early voting began more than a week ago in the state, The BRAD BLOG has learned. All voters who vote in person in the crucial battleground state are forced to cast their votes on 100% unverifiable Sequoia EDGE touch-screen voting machines with the VeriVote "paper trail" printer add-on.

Attorneys monitoring the incident reports coming in to the hotline have taken no action in regard to removing the failed machines from service, despite reports of the presidential race not appearing at all on some ballots; voters having problems selecting their preferred candidates; machines not starting up at all; "paper trail" printers jamming or running out of paper, and; a number of machines at a number of sites which refuse to work at all.

And this is just during early voting. A number of those startling reports are posted at the end of this article...

-- Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG

Why corporate mainstream journalists have a need to identify everyone as either "liberal" or "conservative" is beyond me. But setting that aside, of far more import is the substantive information in Washington Independent journalist Jonathon E. Kaplan's report today featuring lead Obama attorney Bob Baeur's attempt to defend against my fervent critique of the campaign's woefully inadequate and dangerously misguided efforts in dealing with the massive voting machine problems occurring around the country since early voting began (and, of course, well before even that)...

[Note 11/3/08: An updated version of the article, now posted here, scales by on the "liberal" thing, after I sent a gentle complaint to Kaplan.]

The article does nothing to assuage my concerns about the Dems' self-proclaimed "behind the scenes" efforts on these matters. Bauer was still unable to offer a shred of evidence that the campaign or the DNC has taken such concerns about the use of wholly unverifiable voting systems --- and worse, allowing and actually encouraging election officials to access those machines during the election, at the time they are most vulnerable to tampering, for "recalibration" --- with the gravity the issue deserves.

Incredibly (though no longer surprisingly), the Democrats persist with their tortured logic that taking action on problems with voting machines will somehow depress the electorate, before quickly changing the subject to concerns about Republican chicanery on the front-end voter suppression stuff.

As an Election Integrity advocate recently noted rather eloquently, the front-end voter suppression issues and the back-end voting machine failures are two sides of the same coin. You can't worry about one without worrying about the other. The Dems, unfortunately, are still worried about only one side of the coin, as Kaplan's report demonstrates all too clearly (yet again) today...

After all these years, believe it or not, it was my first appearance on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! this morning. I was happy to appear along with my friend Harvey Wasserman of the great Columbus Free Press to discuss our many concerns about Election Day 2008, touch-screen vote-flipping, voter roll purging, and the woeful effort by the DNC and Obama Campaign to take steps to correct these enormous problems. So happy, in fact, that I almost didn't mind waking up at 4am to do the show. Almost. I hope you'll not mind the fuzzy webcam I had to use from my dark, pre-dawn cave this morning during my appearance.

The video follows in three parts, the text transcript is here...

The Charleston Gazette reports still more ES&S iVotronic touch-screen vote flipping in WV, including reports now from Jackson, Putnam, Berkeley, Ohio, Monongalia, and Greenbrier Counties.

Add those to the reports of vote flipping on ES&S machines in at least four different states. We're also trying to find a moment to report on votes flipping in other states (including NV) on the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) systems made by other private companies including Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic.

Today's report mentions that these are older ES&S machines. We'll again remind everyone that Dan Rather produced an hour-long investigative report two years ago in which he reported on the touch-screens that ES&S was using and how they were causing these same problems even then. No one recalled those machines and now they continue to flip votes.

The DNC and Barack Obama campaign now tell us they are doing something about these problems "behind the scenes," they just won't tell us what it is they are doing, and the machines continued to be used, and votes continue to flip in WV, so far always from Democratic to Republican, and officials continue to blame the voters...

-- Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG

We've been reporting for the past week on what we see as the dismal failure of the DNC/Obama's much-vaunted team of "thousands of attorneys" ready to pounce on any reported problems in the electoral system around the country. In one article after another, we've reported here on votes being flipped on completely unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting machines from Democratic candidates over to Republicans and others. We've so far reported on that occurring in 4 different states, and have since received reports from at least two more on different DRE systems doing the same thing, which we're trying to confirm and/or report here as soon as possible.

We've had to report on Democrats in PA being sued by the NAACP, because neither the DNC nor the Obama campaign was willing to stand up for voters to demand that emergency paper ballots be made available to voters in PA before every machine in a precinct breaks down, as decreed a month ago from PA's Democratic Sec. of the Commonwealth.

We haven't even had time to report that the Republicans have attempted to intervene in the case, to take the side of the PA Democrats to keep paper ballots from being given to voters. (Republicans' Motion to Intervene here [PDF] Note: it's incorrectly labeled as a "motion to intervene on behalf of plaintiffs," but it's actually a "motion to intervene on behalf of defendants," the Democrats.) How far are the state Dems off the mark, when Republicans agree with them on a matter like this? And yet, Obama and the DNC have done nothing over the past month to fight on behalf of the voters who, as we saw during the Primary mess in PA earlier this year, will surely find themselves unable to cast votes at all, in thousands of cases, due to machines that simply do not work.

We've taken no joy in any of that criticism, or in our assertion that the effort appears to be a slightly beefed-up version of John Kerry's 2004 effort. But as an independent election integrity advocate and journalist, supporting the voters rather than any of the Presidential candidates, we've had little choice.

But now, it seems, the Obama/DNC has finally come out of hiding to share what they are doing. Unfortunately, they just can't tell us what that is...

The following report, of another Obama vote lost, comes from Nashville (Davidson County, TN), as did the similar one last week. ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting machines failing again, harming Democrats each time. The same machines are failing in one county and state after another, are still in use, haven't been impounded, and voters still do not get to vote on paper ballots.

The "thousands of attorneys" from Obama and the DNC are still completely AWOL. [Note: See update at bottom of story.]

From the Tennessean...

Have we mentioned that the "thousands of attorneys" from Obama and the DNC are still completely AWOL?

Quick links to our previous coverage, of similar incidents, in at least three other states, follows --- along with a quick list from experts about what you need to do (since Obama and the DNC apparently won't) when/if you have a similar problem with a touch-screen voting machine...

This is just getting worse and worse. Now it's happening in Texas. (And in MO, if you read to the end of the article). And the vaunted "thousands of attorneys" from the Obama campaign and the DNC are still nowhere to be found.

With every incident so far reported of touch-screen vote-flipping during early voting in this year's general election --- from county to county in WV and in Nashville, TN) --- it's been the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machine that has failed, flipping votes from one candidate to another not chosen by the voter. In most every instances [see update below], it's been an attempted Democratic vote, flipped to a Republican, or another party.

These are the same machines that lost 18,000 votes in Democratic-leaning Sarasota County in the 2006 U.S. House Race for Katherine Harris' old seat. The Democrat, Christine Jennings, was declared the loser to Republican Vern Buchanan (whose own wife had trouble voting for him that day), by just 369 votes. Several academic studies, and even the GAO, have been unable to rule out either tampering or hardware/software error for the disappeared 18,000 votes.

As we wrote earlier this week, after there was finally one report of a vote flipping from Democratic to Republican in TN (a very rare instance, btw), these machines need to be taken out of service now, impounded and quarantined immediately, and every voter needs to be given a paper ballot where these machines are currently being used. Voters who have such problems need to inform other voters waiting in line which machine should not be used (and we offer other tips below, as well).

[Update: The rare vote-flip from Republican to Democratic now seems to have been a hoax carried out by local Republicans, according to a TN election integrity activist who did some digging and reporting. Details here...]

The latest reports today of ES&S vote-flipping come from Palo Pinto County, TX, where two voters --- one of them an alternate election judge and office manager of the Palo Pinto County Democratic Headquarters --- saw straight-ticket Democratic votes flipped to straight-ticket Republican votes. Two times for the first person, and three times for the alternate election judge!

The report is a doozy...

Finally! A lawsuit [PDF] has finally been filed today in federal District Court in Pennsylvania, against the Democratic Secretary of the Commonwealth, Pedro A. Cortes and the Commissioner of the state's Election Commission, Chet Harhut, over Cortes' recent directive that paper ballots only need be given out to voters in the event that every voting machine in a precinct breaks down.

That stunning decree was in opposition to PA's state law which allows election officials the discretion to give emergency paper ballots to voters if even a single machine breaks down in a precinct.

That neither Obama nor the DNC have said a word about this in the month or so since Cortes issued his directive has been maddening, and should be an outrage to voters of all parties in the Keystone State, sure to be another battleground state this November. The lawsuit was finally filed today by the state's NAACP in concert with the 866-MYVOTE1 Election Reform Network.

While the complaint should call for paper ballots to be made available to any voter who wishes one, or, at a minimum, to be given out if just one machine breaks down in a precinct, or even if the wait time in line is longer than 30 minutes, unfortunately, the suit calls very conservatively for emergency paper ballots to be given out if 50% or more of the voting machines in a precinct break down. But at least it's something, we guess, particularly in lieu of Obama and/or the DNC taking any action at all here, given they have the most to lose by the ridiculous action from state Democrats.

Pennsylvania uses unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) machines across most of the state, and saw machine failure after failure, as we documented in detail during their April primary this year. The failures resulted in untold numbers of disenfranchised voters, as noted in news reports, and logged by calls to the 866-MYVOTE1 hotline...

-- Brad Friedman

I've been quite critical of the Obama/DNC plan (or lack thereof) for "election protection" this year, noting that it looks, smells and sounds a lot like a slightly beefed-up version of the Kerry/DNC "we'll have thousands of lawyers in place on Election Day should anything go wrong."

On Election Day, of course, if DNC lawyers are still trying to keep up with what's going on, it's already game over. While for years Osama Bin Laden and Muslim extremists had supposedly declared war on the U.S., as the legend goes, America paid little attention until it was too late. So it is with the raging Republican War on Democracy, where proactive steps are necessary (beginning long ago, but we'll take what we can get at this point) to join the war and push back against the GOP's assault on the most democratic of all values, the right to freely cast one's vote, to have that vote counted, and to have it counted accurately.

Back in 2006, after speaking to a group of DNC election attorneys in Chicago, I wrote about the "Dysfunction at the DNC" and the persistent cluelessness they had displayed at the time concerning a number of very real threats to our electoral system. While Obama has certainly displayed a tendency to understand at least some of the issues at stake --- far more so than his '04 counterpart --- the party, from every sign I'm able to get, remains out of touch with the serious threats they face: from the massive front-end disenfranchisement efforts, about which they are at least somewhat aware, to the back-end disenfranchisement efforts via manipulation and/or often-undiscoverable "tabulation error" of completely un-transparent electronic voting systems used in virtually every county, in every state in the union.

So we may be grasping for any optimistic straw we can find here, but at least today we have one such sign of proactivity from the Obama/DNC that we can tell you about...

Had planned to run this on what I thought would be a "slow" Labor Day weekend. Oh, well.

Goofin' with talk radio pals Jim Ward (of The Stephanie Miller Show) and Randi Rhodes (of The Randi Rhodes Show) last week at the DNC...