Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Counties are still making decisions on their voting systems of the future. Wayne Co Pennsylvania has opted for central-count optical scan machines provided by ES&S and AutoMark for accessibility. This decision was forced on the county when Advance Voting Solutions could not get their DRE system through testing and EAC certification. Meanwhile officials in Cuyahoga Co Ohio have decided to lease a central-count optical scan system, including 15 op-scan machines, from ES&S. There is no mention, yet, as to what the county will do for accessibility....

Turnout at Broward County, Florida's precinct D001 was excellent in last Tuesday's primary election, according to the "unofficial results" posted on this county webpage.

With 1,028 ballots cast, and 930 registered voters at the precincts, voters having turned out, the turnout was an impressive 110.54%!

The BRAD BLOG called the Broward County Supervisor of Elections office to find out if there was any explanation for these numbers. We spoke with Patricia McCallister, an assistant to Supervisor Dr. Brenda C. Snipes...

ALERT! We just read the headline (via RAW STORY) at California's Bay Area NBC affiliate, and we are terrified:

"Huge delay"?! What? Why? How could it be? The first graf of the article said it all. My God...it's true...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Florida’s primary is essentially over. There will still be some ballots to be counted, but the last election on the state’s DREs is complete. There were some reports of problems scattered around the state. Election officials and the media were pretty successful in minimizing the reports. However, there was one small graf in one article that jumped out at me. The county clerk in Volusia County had announced that they were going to have to recount one early voting precinct because the Diebold Optical-Scan used in that precinct had not counted 4 ballots. They are doing this, according to the report, because Diebold/Premier had sent counties in Florida an advisory that the machines used in those counties may stop with a ballot partially fed through. Those ballots are not being counted when this happens. My first reaction was, “How many other states/counties that use the Diebold AccuVote OS v. 1.94w have gotten this advisory?” This is the same system used in New Hampshire and many other Northeast jurisdictions as well as various counties across the nation. Why don’t vendors of these machines recall them when there is a problem like this? Who should be responsible to ensure the word is put out that there is a problem and ensure the problem is solved? ...

After virtually ignoring the issue for some six straight years, our hometown newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, has run a two-part, 2,800-word "series" on concerns about voting machines, right on schedule, just in time to do absolutely no good at all before next week's upcoming Tsunami Tuesday election in the state. Waytago, LATimes!

The series reports absolutely nothing that has not already been reported over the last several years here at The BRAD BLOG, which is why the LATimes folks makes the big bucks and we don't.

They do, however, include an important point at the very end of the second article, in quoting from one of the country's most notable long-time voting machine apologists, Kimball Brace...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Liberty voting systems is not able to take NO! for an answer. Liberty is the company that sold hundreds of thousands of Euros' worth of voting machines to Ireland only so those machines could be found to be insecure and to have them stored since delivery in warehouses across the country; and the company whose voting machines have been banned in its home country of Holland. Last week the New York State Board of Elections chose not to allow the use of any DRE voting machines for persons with disabilities, thus leaving Liberty with nowhere to sell its machines. Yesterday Liberty decided to ignore the decision and turn to the courts, so it filed a temporary restraining order in an attempt to get the courts to change the decision made by the state. Last night the court found against the company and refused to issue an immediate restraining order. A further proceeding will now take place on Thursday. The utter gall of this company that sells voting machines that can’t be used in its home country and that are gathering dust in Ireland is amazing.

There will be a report, in this space, on the Florida primary tomorrow....

Diebold (which now calls itself Premier Election Systems) quietly released a "Product Advisory Notice" last Friday to the state of Florida, concerning an explained malfunction in the paper-based optical-scan voting machine used across the state. While reports of problems on those systems, and others, began surfacing throughout the day today across the Sunshine State.

The Diebold advisory warns that "No Error Message is Displayed when Ballot Fails to Feed Completely Through AccuVote-OS."

The AccuVote-OS is Diebold's precinct-based optical-scan ballot counter. The advisory is said to apply to "AccuVote-OS with Version 1.94w firmware" --- the same system which was used in New Hampshire earlier this month, and the one on which ballots were found to have gone uncounted or miscounted in virtually all of the precincts counted during Dennis Kucinich's election contest in that state.

Diebold's AccuVote-OS with v1.94w firmware is the identical system seen being hacked in HBO's Hacking Democracy after code found to be in violation of federal Voting System Guidelines was discovered on the system, and exploited to flip a mock paper ballot election without detection in late 2005.

Last November, The BRAD BLOG offered an investigative report on Diebold memory card failures discovered in Florida, and other states, about which both Diebold and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) --- mandated by law as a clearing house for such issues --- refused to notify jurisdictions that use the same system about the problem.

Though it was too late to check by the time we obtained a copy of the advisory, we are aware of no such notice having been sent to either New Hampshire nor any of the many other jurisdictions around the country which use the same, fatally flawed hardware and software...

Earlier today from a Palm Beach Post blog item...

For the record, although Florida's Republican governor and legislature have voted to finally trash the touch-screens and move to all paper ballot elections, today's Primary still uses the old touch-screens in many counties. Elsewhere, problems are occurring --- yet again --- with the paper-based Diebold op-scan systems in the Sunshine State. The same machines used in New Hampshire, and the same ones seen being hacked in HBO's Hacking Democracy, are reportedly failing in several locations there. More on that soon.

The touch-screen systems used by Palm Beach County, also home of voter fraud felon Ann Coulter, are made by Sequoia Voting Systems.

With "friends" like Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos, Democrats may not need Republicans to help them lose this year. Once again, the namesake of the largest supposedly-Progressive blogsite in the world misleads his readers, confuses issues of Election Integrity with unmade allegations of "conspiracy theories," and otherwise makes all-new extraordinary claims which are wholly unsupported by any evidence, extraordinary or otherwise.

The damage he and his minions are personally causing to the fight for verified, transparent elections is becoming greater than we can possibly describe. But we'll try...

Our friends over at BuzzFlash are featuring an exclusive interview with David Earnhardt, filmmaker of Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections, today.

Disclosure: Though we appear in the film, and Earnhardt advertises it here at The BRAD BLOG, we do not make money on the sale of the film. BuzzFlash, however, does, if you purchase it through BuzzFlash's sales link, which we recommend you do, in case you've yet to see this seminal film. They and Earnhardt deserve the support.

We hope you'll read the interview, as well.

We've got a small, if friendly, nit to pick with both Earnhardt and BuzzFlash's Mark Karlin in regard to one section of the interview in which they discuss the notion of ballots being printed out by machine, as opposed to marked by hand by the voter.

Machine-printed ballots can never be verified, after an election, as actually reflecting the voters' intent, and thus --- except for cases of disabled voters who wish to vote on such devices, as necessary, in order to vote privately and independently --- there is no legitimate reason to use such voting machines. Ever. That is, of course, if such machines even work at all. When they don't, voters can't even cast their votes.

The quick, scientific-study-based bullet points on why such machine printed ballots or "paper trails" can never be known to reflect voter intent follow below for those who'd like to know...

New Hampshire reportedly reaps $3 billion from its "first in the nation" Primary Election privilege. In the bargain, they have demonstrated to the rest of the nation how not to hold an election.

More embarrassing video tape, taken during the shameful NH Election Contest hand counts, as shot and posted by BlackBoxVoting.org...

Leave your Open Thread thoughts on tonight's State of the Union Speech in comments below...

POST-SOTU UPDATE: The Republicanists at Fox "News" just can't help themselves, even for the State of the Union...

UPDATE 8:10pm PT: Following the (supposedly) "centrist" response to the SOTU, offered up by the scared-to-death Democratic "leadership", in the person of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sibelius, a real response to Bush's SOTU was sent out by Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI). The short response follows below in full, and serves to remind us what reality looks like...