The voting systems in use for the nation's first three all-important electoral contests in the 2012 primary --- from Iowa to New Hampshire to Saturday's South Carolina Primary --- go from pretty great to intolerably horrible. And then comes Florida, which deserves its very own special category, thereafter.

The "First-in-the-Nation" caucuses in Iowa allowed voters to vote on hand-marked paper ballots, counted by hand in front of the public at the caucus site, with results announced to everyone right then and there before being called in to GOP headquarters and before ballots were move anywhere. The wonderfully transparent system allowed for Republican voters by the Iowa GOP (which they hypocritically fight against allowing for everybody else in other states, and even in their own during general elections) is just about as close as we general get in this country to Democracy's Gold Standard. It's also what allowed reporting errors to be discovered and confirmed by the public after an election with some 122,000 votes counted transparently within an hour or so of polls closing, leading to almost nobody charging "fraud" even though just 34 votes are said to separate first and second place in the certified results of the impossibly, and historically, close election.

As of the "First-in-the-Nation" primary in New Hampshire, however, election transparency for voters and their ability to oversee their own elections began to disappear. While a lucky 10% of voters enjoyed hand-marked, publicly hand-counted paper ballots, the rest of the state's voters were allowed to vote on hand-marked paper ballots, but forced to tolerate secret tabulation on oft-failed, easily-manipulated Diebold optical-scan systems programmed by a company (LHS) with a history of criminal behavior and convictions. The results from those 90% of Granite State voters may have been tallied accurately by the Diebold op-scanners or, as seen in the disastrous 2008 Presidential Primary, not. Since NH doesn't bother to actually check to see if their machines tallied the hand-marked paper ballots correctly, we're unlikely to ever know if they did --- barring a recount request where, by then, the secure chain of custody of the paper ballots would be uncertain (to put it mildly.)

And now we come to the "First-in-the-South" Republican primary in South Carolina, where all evidence of how voters vote disappears entirely as the voters will be forced across the entire state to vote on easily-manipulated, oft-failed, 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems made by the nation's largest voting machine company, ES&S. When the machine-reported results are announced tomorrow night they will either be accurate or not. Either way, there will never be a way for anybody to know one way or the other as there will be nothing to prove how voters voted and nothing to "recount", even if anybody wanted to.

Appropriately enough, perhaps, Saturday's primary in the Palmetto State will offer 100% "faith-based" voting, since it will be scientifically impossible to prove that even a single vote for any candidate on the ballot has been recorded accurately by the ES&S iVotronic touch-screens as per any voter's intent. Known what we mean, Alvin Greene?...

As of today, I'm happy to say, my show on Pacifica Radio's KPFK here in Los Angeles has been expanded to a full hour. We made pretty good use of all of those minutes today, thanks in no small part to Rick Santorum (of all people) raising the issue of felon voting rights at Monday's GOP Presidential Debate in South Carolina. (And one heck of a largely unnoticed Freudian slip by Mitt Romney on that topic!)

Joining me to discuss the issue and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD)'s proposed "Democracy Restoration Act" --- and the shameful state of 4 million American citizens disallowed from exercising their franchise, many of them even after they've served all of their time and have completed all probation and parole, just cause they happen to live in the wrong state --- was Deborah Vagins, Senior Legislative Counsel of the ACLU.

I was also joined by Desi Doyen for the latest Green News Report as well as today's breaking news on Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline scam.

Plus 1 million signatures for the recall of Gov. Scott Walker in WI, other news of the day and a bunch of callers to boot! Listen to the entire show, commercial-free, below. Enjoy!

Download MP3 or listen online below [appx 58 mins]...

P.S. As I don't always get the chance to post all of my KPFK shows here (which is now LIVE Wednesday's from 3p-4p PT) you can catch all of 'em by subscribing to the podcast feed here or via KPFK's archive page for the show here.

P.P.S. Anybody wanna submit a suggestion for a cool logo for "The BradCast"? Happy to crowd source ideas, especially since you all actually came up with that name for the KPFK show in the first place! If so, here's a photo or two that may, or may not, come in handy.

This is just too hilarious!

Over the weekend religious activists met somewhere in Texas to try and agree upon a "conservative" non-Romney to coalesce behind in hopes of stopping the former Massachusetts Governor's "inevitable" GOP nomination. After three ballots, reportedly, the group of some 150 religious activists finally agreed to throw their support behind Rick Santorum.

Or did they?

According to a supposedly "legitimate" rightwing news outlet today, the evangelical protestant backers of Newt Gingrich are now accusing the Catholic supporters of Santorum of election fraud and actual voter fraud!

If they did, it would hardly be the first instance of actual election fraud in the GOP camp to rear its ugly head during the Republican primary process to date...

This distressing news was flagged for us by Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org late Friday...

And how do we know SCYTL's electronic (Internet!) "voting technologies" are "secure"? Well, they tell us so themselves -- twice --- in their press release, silly!

They couldn't just say it was "secure" if it wasn't! Right?!

In any case, here's a bit of the red flag Harris waved on Friday to help unpack what all of this actually means for the future of what's left of our small-d "democratic" elections...

[Now UPDATED with tonight's nightmarish audio archives below! Enjoy!!!]

Mike has the night off! So we're back! Guest hosting the nationally-syndicated Mike Malloy Show on Friday the 13th! It's a Nightmare on Malloy Street!...

We'll be BradCasting all the horror LIVE from 9pm-Mid ET (6p-9p PT), coast-to-coast and around the uprising globe from the studios of L.A.'s KTLK am1150 in beautiful downtown Burbank. Join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! Our LIVE chat room will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG, as usual, while we are on the air. Please stop by and join the fun while you're listening! (The Chat Room will open at the bottom of this item a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

Scheduled tonight (so far):

• YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE! Me! With three hours over our public airwaves to talk about Iowa, New Hampshire & South Carolina voting nightmares! The nightmare that is Election 2012! And other related and unrelated nightmares!
• GRAEME ZIELINSKI, Spokesman from the Wisconsin state Democratic Party, with some late breaking news on the "Recall Scott Walker" effort in the Badger State!
• PLUS! The fraud that is James O'Keefe; the "cold" War against Iran; the failure that is the NY Times; the GOP wants more corporate money in campaigns; and all the nightmares on your minds, via your calls over your public airwaves at 877-520-1150 and your tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates across the country and also on SiriusXM Ch. 127. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate KPTR 1450 in Palm Springs or at WhiteRose Society or via MikeMalloy.com.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Tonight's show was a NIGHTMARE! Don't believe me? You can now listen to the full show, sans commercials, in the archives posted below. (You can also read the nightmarish chat room archives below too!) Be afraid...Be very afraid!...

Just one quick update to our full dismantling of James O'Keefe's latest hoax video, this one purporting to show "voter fraud" in NH (as carried out by O'Keefe and his co-conspirators!). As ThinkProgress details today, the liberal Democrat Mayor of ... I mean, the conservative Republican Mayor of Manchester is now calling for O'Keefe and his pals to be "arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law"...

TPM reports tonight that others are now piling on, furious at O'Keefe and calling for accountability. Moreover, as TPM's Ryan Reilly notes, O'Keefe's latest fund-raising plea touts that he received $50,000 from an unnamed "extremely generous funder," to create this two-bit "voter fraud" scam, and now he's asking for more to help float further projects and line his own pockets. As his ironically-named Project Veritias has somehow been approved as a tax-exempt, "non-partisan," non-profit 501(c)3, he'll have to disclose who that "generous" funder is eventually though it'll take a while. (Anybody wanna place some guesses what that is in the meantime? There are plenty of suspects here!) In the meantime, O'Keefe previously disclosed on his application for tax-exempt, non-profit status that his salary is scheduled at $120,000/year for heading the propaganda outfit.

Oh...and by the way. Please note that O'Keefe has been pimping yesterday's video as "part one of the Voter Fraud investigation" with a promise of "More to come!" Um, what do you suppose the odds are that "Part One" will prove to be the only part of this particular O'Keefe "investigation"?

• Read our complete dissection of O'Keefe's latest scam from earlier today here.

UPDATE 1/13/2012: Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org in BRAD BLOG comments on our previous article on O'Keefe's latest fraud scam:

She goes on to point out that had those 2,470 different people been paid to commit felonies across the state, to vote on Election Day as "dead people" (assuming there are even enough recently deceased people who hadn't yet been removed from the voter rolls), the effort would have yielded, at best, a 1% tamper rate. Yes, that's just the way to defraud an election! Better to risk one person getting caught in a huge conspiracy, than simply paying off, say, one or two guys to remove legal voters from the voter rolls or change the results in the computer tabulators with just a few keystrokes or --- well, just institute polling place Photo ID restrictions and keep thousands of your opponents' legal voters from being able to cast a vote at all..."legally"!

Long ago discredited, federally convicted criminal, Rightwing con-artist, pretend journalist, and accomplished liar James O'Keefe is pimping another secretly-taped and selectively-edited video sure to be a sensation on Fox "News" and at other Republican propaganda venues. It purports to show several voters showing up at polling places during New Hampshire's primary on Tuesday and giving the names of recently deceased voters to poll workers before procuring ballots to vote under those names.

The video, about which O'Keefe lies on his own website, is certain to add more phony fuel to Republicans' long-unsupported claims that people are regularly impersonating dead people at the polling place in order to vote illegally, an allegation which has absolutely no evidence to support it. The aim of the video is clearly is to shore up GOP attempts to institute polling place Photo ID restrictions, meant to do little more than disenfranchise Democratic-leaning constituencies such as the elderly, minorities and student voters, under the fraudulent guise of curbing "voter fraud."

As New Hampshire does not require a Photo ID before one is allowed to cast a legal vote, O'Keefe uses the video to try and create the impression that voting under the name of a recently deceased person is both simple and regularly done. It isn't. But that's his scam this week.

As usual, O'Keefe's video looks as if it represents something that is damning. That's his stock in fraudulent trade, and that's usually more than enough to reinforce the biases of the incurious who've been long-brainwashed, through a well-organized and well-funded GOP effort, into believing that something Rightwingers say is happening certainly must be happening --- despite a dearth of evidence to show that it actually is happening.

The video was released Wednesday morning at the website of O'Keefe's ironically named Project Veritas organization. It was also published "exclusively" by Tucker Carlson's rightwing pretend news site, Daily Caller. Naturally, the websites of Andrew Breitbart, a fellow professional liar, as well as O'Keefe's employer and a co-conspirator on his phony ACORN "Pimp" Hoax videos, quickly followed suit in publicizing the same misleadingly-edited version of the video.

At the Project Veritas site, O'Keefe lies about the video, claiming at the end of his short article accompanying it, that "the unedited videos from part one of the Voter Fraud investigation" have been made available as well. They haven't. He has lied about that. Again. Moreover, as several other sites reported on Wednesday, it's possible that O'Keefe and his band of merry fraudsters have also broken both federal and state laws.

But setting his various lies and possible criminal actions aside for now, let's first look at the supposedly "unedited" version of the videos O'Keefe offers up, and then I'll be happy to dismantle the underpinnings of this ruse below it...

I've been busy doing a lot of media and a lot of digging today. So until I can get free to follow up here on some Iowa Caucus issues, here's my latest appearance on The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, from last night...

Last week, the Rachel Maddow Show picked up on a story we'd first reported here, concerning the hypocrisy of Newt Gingrich's massive "voter fraud" in the state of Virginia, as compared to what the GOP and Fox "News" and even Gingrich himself had been decrying as massive "voter fraud" when it was carried out by ACORN. When Gingrich did the same thing --- but far worse --- he called it "just a mistake."

Last night, as her top story, Maddow picked up on our coverage of the indescribable hypocrisy of the Iowa GOP, which sets it's very own rules for the Iowa Caucuses tonight and, in doing so, chose to not require Photo ID restrictions on voters for either voting or registering to vote at the caucus on the same night.

As we originally noted last week, while the GOP has long claimed disenfranchising polling place Photo ID restrictions are necessary to stop rampant "voter fraud" during elections in which Democrats will be participating, apparently they have no such concerns about their own elections. Even when they are allowed to set all of the rules for them. Or, more accurately, they don't wish to disenfranchise their very own voters, while they do hope to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters in normal elections. It's also worth highlighting that they have fought against allowing same day registration and voting in regular elections as well, while having no problem with it here in the Iowa GOP caucuses.

Maddow was as amused by it all as we were. Here's her coverage from last night. Also, read on for details on one point of information that her guest, Doug Heye, former RNC Communications Director and current Sr. Advisor to the Iowa GOP, seems to have gotten blatantly wrong during his interview with Maddow...at least according to our confirmed reporting...

Heye claims in the video above that while no Photo ID is required for voting at the IA caucuses, it will be required for folks who wish to first register and then vote at the caucus sites tonight. His assertions is a direct contradiction of both information posted by the Iowa GOP itself on its own caucus website, as well as info on the website of Iowa's Republican Sec. of State Matt Schultz. Moreover, it also contradicts the information that his office confirmed to me when I called them last week before reporting my original story...

Over the past week or so, while the rest of the media has been covering the "horse race" non-stop, The BRAD BLOG has, as is our wont, been keeping a close eye, as usual, on the otherwise ignored "track conditions" which can make as much of a difference in the results as anything else.

We've been reporting on a number of key points about the way the voting and counting will be carried out in tonight's Iowa Caucuses (beginning at 7p CT), all of which are worthy of quick summary here today, as all of the rules for the Republican Caucuses in the Hawekeye State --- who can vote and how those votes will be counted --- are not set by the state, but by the Republican Party itself.

The Iowa GOP has, therefore, determined that...

• No Photo ID is necessary for any voter in the Republican Iowa caucuses.
• No Photo ID is necessary to register as a Republican at the caucus site, even if you're not already a registered voter. You may then cast your vote at the caucus on the same day you've registered (without a Photo ID).
• All caucus votes will be cast on hand-marked paper ballots.
• All of those paper ballots will be counted, by hand, in public, with the results announced at each of the 1,774 caucus sites before the results are called in to a central GOP headquarters (where the results will subsequently be compiled and announced to the public and media.)

If it seems that all of the items mentioned above are ones that Republicans --- even Republicans in the Iowa statehouse and the Iowa Secretary of State's office within the past year --- have fought virulently against allowing, for years, for elections in which Democrats will be participating, you would be correct. Nonetheless, when the GOP is able to set any rules they like for their own elections --- including tonight's all-important "First-in-the-Nation" Iowa caucuses --- those are the rules that they've selected. Go figure.

So with that very good, if breathtakingly hypocritical, news out of the way, here are five quick points, from Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org, on how folks on the ground tonight can fight to try and ensure and/or oversee the accuracy of caucus results...

Votes in next Tuesday's Republican caucuses in Iowa will be cast on paper ballots and hand counted publicly at each and every caucus site, according to a report late this week from Politico's Jonathan Martin. In other words, Republicans will be relying on "Democracy's Gold Standard" when it comes to casting and counting ballots in their own election, in which they set all of the rules, even if they will not allow the same standards to be applied to elections in which Democrats will take part.

Martin's story should come as great news for Election Integrity advocates and, in particular, Ron Paul supporters who have very good reason to be concerned about the process after witnessing --- first-hand and on video-tape --- blatant voter fraud carried out by Mitt Romney supporters in years past. The news is also welcome in light of a recent report suggesting the GOP would be counting votes in secret to avoid a purported "threat" by the hacktivist group Anonymous to disrupt next week's caucuses.

Though the article, if accurate, is wonderful news, it underscores, yet again, the Republican Party's almost indescribable hypocrisy when it comes to elections. Over the years, as we have detailed on hundreds (if not thousands) of pages at The BRAD BLOG, Republicans have eschewed both paper ballots and their public hand-counting at the polling place, insisting that computer cast and counted "ballots" are far more reliable than anything human beings, with their own hands and eyeballs, are able to do themselves with everyone in the public watching. (That is, except in cases where they are challenging the computer-tabulated results of an election, in which case they insist, appropriately, on publicly hand-counted paper ballots.)

Moreover, as we reported on Wednesday, even though the GOP has worked overtime, since coming to absolute power in many states around the nation during the 2010 elections, to institute polling place Photo ID restriction laws for elections in which Democrats will take part (and be disproportionately disenfranchised by they), when Republicans are able to create all of their very own rules for their very own elections --- as is the case with the Iowa Caucuses --- they require absolutely no Photo ID for any voter, even those registering as Republican for the first time and voting on the very same day (something they also have long fought against allowing everywhere else!)...

The blatant good-for-me-but-not-for-thee hypocrisy, even for this jaded independent journalist, after this many years of covering such issues, is remarkable..

The BRAD BLOG was the first to report that the former disgraced Speaker of the House turned Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich had admitted to committing massive "voter fraud" --- thousands of cases --- in his failed attempt to qualify for the Republican Presidential Primary ballot in his home state of Virginia.

Our report on Wednesday came just minutes after Gingrich's caught-on-video admission to a voter in Iowa that his campaign had "hired somebody who turned in false signatures."

"Oh, it was just a mistake," the one-time front-runner for the GOP nomination claimed. "We turned in 11,100 — we needed 10,000 — 1,500 of them were by one guy who frankly committed fraud."

To our knowledge, however, Gingrich has yet to divulge the identify of the "one guy" who "frankly committed fraud" to law enforcement officials.

We noted that by the same (completely disingenuous) standards that the GOP and its cable TV arm, Fox "News", has long applied, for years, to the now-defunct community organization ACORN (which never committed any actual "voter fraud" or even "voter registration fraud", though a few of its workers committed the later, as discovered by ACORN themselves who promptly turned them into authorities), Gingrich was, himself, the purveyor of "massive voter fraud".

Last night, while guest hosting the Mike Malloy Show (listen to top of Hour 1), we even encouraged folks to contact the special email address that Fox "News" long ago set up for reporting such instances of "voter fraud" at VoterFraud@FoxNews.com to let them know about this massive destruction of "the fabric of democracy" as then GOP Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain hypocritically described it in 2008.

And now it looks like Chris Hayes, filling in on MSNBC for Rachel Maddow last night, picked up --- "from the Department of Shameless Schadenfreude" --- on the same theme, pointing out that Gingrich himself had previously slammed ACORN in a 2009 op-ed, in which he falsely declared that "ACORN has a long history of engaging in voter fraud," due to the exact same thing Gingrich now refers to as little more than "just a mistake". (Ironically enough, in that piece, Gingrich used the fraudulent ACORN "Pimp" Hoax video tapes created by James O'Keefe, Hannah Giles and Andrew Breitbart as the basis for his entire op-ed lie.)

Here's the short video from MSNBC last night, and a few more words to follow detailing how what Gingrich Campaign did was far worse than anything ACORN was ever found to have done...