Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Diebold responds to criticism from Avi Rubin. Diebold's Radke claims the e-poll book problems were just a minor 'glitch' though reports are that it took three software patches to correct this minor 'glitch'. / Louisiana is conducting an election today with local and state elections and issues / Voters in Caddo Parrish, Louisiana had problems with some races on some machines today. The media hid that fact under a headline discussing voters finding their polling places. ...

A great column yesterday by Andrew Kantor in USA Today on the failure that is Diebold's electronic voting systems. An amusing (if painfully so) piece as well. He covers the mountain of evidence against Diebold's e-voting systems ("We send people to death row on flimsier and more circumstantial evidence," writes Kantor), the damage to our democracy, and the state of denial that officials, and the other dead-enders who support this technology, are now in.

His column includes this...

...And this...

...Amongst other gems.

I hope he'll broaden his coverage to include the other manufacturers (ES&S, Sequoia, Hart InterCivic et al) soon, since there is no reason to believe their machines are any less shitty than Diebold's.

Only complaint is the headline and sidebar encouraging folks to vote by absentee ballot. On that, I sent Kantor the email below which I hope he (and you) will consider when advising folks to vote by absentee...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

It appears that the qualification to become a voting system technician in Maryland has gotten a bit tougher. They now require a high school diploma. Class work only will not make the grade any longer. / The Nov. 7 ballot in Belmont Co. Ohio will be 12 pages long. Look for long lines here. / Lou Dobbs of CNN has been doing semi-regular segments on voting machines for several months now. He is now being joined by CBS Evening News and ABC Radio News to name a few. / Boone Co. Missouri is withholding $800,000 from ES&S until the vendor fixes faulty machines it has delivered. / A majority of the House of Representatives has now endorsed HR-550 ...

In an Atlanta Progressive News article today, Matthew Cardinale advances the ball forward a few steps concerning Diebold's chicanery and undocumented and/or questionable software patches down in Georgia just prior to the 2002 election.

Georgia, along with Maryland, was one of the original Diebold "showcase" states where paperless touch-screen voting machines were originally, and disastrously installed by the now-outgoing Democratic Secretary of State (and Diebold apologist) Cathy Cox.

Cardinale's coverage --- which has a quote or two from us --- picks up from RFK Jr.'s recent Rolling Stone piece covering this matter (and many others) as discussed by former Diebold contractor Chris Hood and others.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

"Congress today heard alarming testimony on the threat of electronic voting machines and experts at the hearing testified that e-voting machines are vulnerable to tampering, outright fraud, and political manipulation. They also testified it's uncertain whether the votes of millions of Americans will count on election day," said Lou Dobbs at the top of yesterday's report.

Thursday's Lou Dobb's Tonight Democracy at Risk segment centered on a hearing before the House Administration Committee yesterday where experts told the committee about the possibility of tampering, fraud, or political manipulation.

Dobbs closed with: "I think, we're at the point...that this country [has] got to start thinking about going to paper ballots because these machines --- it's obvious. The training is not there. The backup, the lack of a paper trail. If there is a close election anywhere in this country, we're in deep, deep trouble."

Princeton University's Ed Felten was on hand among those testifying to demonstrate his Diebold Virus Hack originally reported by Brad the week before last. Here's a taste:

The text-transcript of Thursday's segment on Lou Dobbs Tonight follows in full...

Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) became the latest in a growing line of Republican Congressmen to suddenly resign and/or drop their re-election bid in the face of scandal.

Creepy e-mails had recently been released from Foley to a 16-year old boy. RAW STORY has the series of emails. ABC News has the story of Foley's resignation just moments ago.

UPDATE: ABC News now has text of sexually explicit Instant Message conversations between Foley and a teen boy. We should have pointed out previously, in addition to being a part of the GOP leadership in Congress, Foley was also Chairman of the House caucus on missing and exploited children! From ABC...

Guess he was just doing research...

We've just received the following letter from Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA). She was the first to answer our urgent plea last week to immediately introduce Federal legislation in Congress for Emergency Paper Ballots to be made available at polling places this November. In the letter, she requests the BRAD BLOG community send email via her PAC website to their members of Congress in order to urge them to pass this incredibly important legislation before adjourning this week.

The good Senator has been there for us before (you'll recall, she was the only Senator to stand up and challenge the clearly gamed 2004 Ohio Presidential Election results on Jan. 6th 2005...Back before it was fashionable to point out what virtually everyone now recogizes!) --- so let's be there for her! CLICK HERE NOW! And then pass it on! And thank you Senator!

The silly, seemingly ineffective, and apparently expensive smear campaign being mounted by Florida's U.S. House Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff) attempting to attack his congressional opponent, a former colleague-turned-whistleblower, Clint Curtis continues.

Repeating a seemingly unsubstantiated attack on Curtis, initially posted on Feeney's "Crazy Clint Curtis" smear campaign website, a posting on the Congressman's smear blog site makes the same unevidenced claim.

Feeney's "evidence-free" charge is that Curtis has claimed Feeney knew about the 9/11 attacks before they happened.

It's an extraordinary claim now repeated several times in several places by the Congressman who was recently named one once again this year one of the "Most Corrupt Members of Congress" by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a non-partisan ethics watchdog organization in D.C.

While the claims has now been made on both his smear campaign website and blog, the "evidence" offered by Feeney for this claim would seem to disprove their own assertions. Here's Feeney's latest smearblog item in it's entirety (NOTE: We don't believe it's written by fifth graders, it just reads like it)...

That's it? Are we missing something here?

Their evidence that "Crazy" Clint Curtis claimed Feeney knew about 9/11 before the attack is that line from his self-published book?!

If we were Feeney, we'd ask for our money back from our campaign consultants. After they came home from school.

See our previous report on the smear site set up recently by Feeney and the kids, including doctored photos of Curtis and many other impressive campaign techniques.

Keep up the bad work, Tom!

For the record, in our two years of interviews and reporting on Clint Curtis' story since we originally broke the story of Curtis' extraordinary allegations [PDF] of Feeney's request to create vote-rigging sofware and much more, we have never heard him make any such claim that somehow Feeney knew about 9/11 before it happened.

On the other hand, while Feeney is spending hundreds of thousands on his less-than-dignified "Crazy Clint Curtis" smear campaign, he has yet to answer to any of Curtis' substantive allegations made in sworn affidavit, sworn video-taped testimony to members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and found to be truthful in a polygraph test administered by the state of Florida's former lead polygraphist.

What Feeney has refused to speak to includes (but is certainly not limited to) the following wholly unanswered questions...

In her role as Chair of the Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute (VRI), Donna Brazile has issued a statement to The BRAD BLOG moments ago in support of the Congressional Emergency Paper Ballot legislation now pending in the U.S. House and Senate.

Announcing that "We still have time to address the e-voting security crisis!," Brazile writes in her "Open Letter to Supporters of Democracy of America" in support of the House (HR 6187) and Senate (S. 3943) bills introduced this week calling for Emergency Paper Ballots at the polls this November, in the light of voting system failures across the country in primaries so far this year.

She calls on citizens to "pressure...lawmakers to support legislation that would help produce a fair and transparent election." (Full letter posted at the end of this article)

The "time to address" the crisis, at least on the Federal level, is quickly drawing to a close as Congress will likely adjourn tomorrow for the Election Recess. Citizens are asked to call their legislators (House switchboard: 202-225-3121, Senate switchboard: 202-224-3121) to demand they pass this bill immediately.

Maryland's Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich recently called for a similar state measure after his state turned away thousands from the polls, or handed them provisional ballots, when electronic voting machines failed to start up during their September 12th primary election.

Brazile's call to push for the Emergency Paper Ballot legislation this afternoon is notable. She has come under fire in the past from critics in the Election Integrity Advocacy movement for failing to take a firm enough stance, in her role at the DNC VRI, to alert Americans to the potential for fraud, inaccuracy and disenfranchisement via electronic voting systems.

The DNC endorsement for the legislation by Brazile is the latest in a growing drumbeat of politicians and non-partisan Election Integrity organizations calling on supporters and members to help pass the 11th hour legislation, co-sponsored in the Senate by Senators Boxer, Dodd, Feingold and Kerry and in the House by Rep. Rush Holt and several other co-sponsors.

The BRAD BLOG originally proposed this legislation early last week. As of this hour, not a single Republican in the U.S. Congress has publicly endorsed the legislation or joined as co-sponsor to help ensure that all registered American voters will actually be able to cast a vote at all this November.

The complete open letter from Brazile, issued this afternoon on behalf of the DNC's Voting Rights Insitute, follows in full...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Maryland Gov. Ehrlich feels so negatively about his state's use of e-voting machines that he is actually using an automated phone message to encourage his supporters to vote absentee in Nov. / Overseas e-mailed ballots from the military are handled by a Pentagon contractor with partisan ties, according to an article in the San Jose Mercury. / Mississippi may disenfranchise all voters who use absentee ballots. They cannot get them mailed in time. How can that be all right? How can the military not be given time to vote? / Today was the House Admin. Committee hearing on voting technology. The AP reporter who attended must have fallen asleep after ten minutes. He only touched on one small part of what was discussed in the hearing. / The Tarrant Co. Texas Democratic party is preparing a federal lawsuit against the SoS for refusing to allow the county to have a vvpat. ...

An AP reporter, who left early druring this morning's hearing in the U.S. House Adminstrative Committee on Electronic Voting security issues, has filed what would appear to be a remarkably skewed account of the session in an article today headlined, "Lawmaker questions e-voting paper trail."

The reporter, David Hammer, AP's "Ohio Regional Reporter" in DC, who --- according to two different BRAD BLOG sources --- left very early in today's proceedings, covered the hearings from a clearly "anti-paper" angle, as you'll see in his report.

That, despite the first witness of the morning, Dr. Ed Felten of Princeton University, who demonstrated both his team's viral vote-flipping hack of a Diebold Touch-Screen voting system to the reportedly packed hearing room, and then the inability to discover the election stealing malicious code via a machine "recount."

(DISCLOSURE: The machine was supplied to Princeton University by VelvetRevolution.us, a non-partisan election ingegrity organization co-founded by The BRAD BLOG.)

Hammer goes on to report almost exclusively on those who testified in today's hearings against the use of paper "trails" and/or "records" with Electronic Voting Systems...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon (Augmented by Brad Friedman)

Wednesday's Lou Dobbs Tonight on CNN picks up on the Emergency Paper Ballot legislation now filed in both the U.S. House and Senate.

Additionally, the story was also covered on MSNBC's Hardball yesterday (video with RFK Jr. here) and the NY Times picked it up the day before.

The Media is beginning to get it, the Democrats in Congress (those who have sponsored it, anyway) are beginning to get it. So where are the Congressional Republicans? Do they not want American citizens to be able to vote this November? We're just asking.

Said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), one of the original sponsors of the Senate legislation to Kitty Pilgrim on CNN last night: "I really have lost a lot of faith in these machines and it's expensive. Why not just go back to the simple paper ballot, at least until we're really sure that we've resolved all the problems?"

Dodd, Feingold and Kerry have now joined here on the Senate bill (S. 3943) and Holt's bill has several Democratic co-sponsors in the House (HR 6187).

The BRAD BLOG proposed the idea of Emergency Paper Ballots early last week, but the legislative session will likely adjourn this week for the Election Recess. Action is needed now in order to mitigate the possiblity of millions of Americans being disenfranchised this November. Please call and/or write your Congress Members of both parties now.

UPDATE: Video Now Available here... (Hat-tip BRAD BLOG commenter "Stop_George")

The complete text-transcript of Wednesday's segment on Lou Dobbs Tonight follows in full...