We're just back in town, with lots of catchup work to do. But with Wisconsin's Recall Elections tomorrow, here are some important actions that folks (of any party!) who care about accurate election results can do to help protect the election results.

Remember, WI mostly votes on paper ballots. Unfortunately, however, most of those paper ballots are tabulated in secret inside of computers systems similar or identical to ones which have failed time again elsewhere, as seen most recently in places like Palm Beach County, FL and New York City. In WI, there is no mandated manual examination of paper ballots after the computer tabulates them in order to make sure they were tabulated accurately. That's a very bad (and dangerous) system.

In Palm Beach, several candidates incorrectly declared to be the "winners" by the Sequoia Voting Systems optical-scan tabulation computers in a March election this year had, in fact, been the losers of their races. The failure was discovered during a manual post-election spot-check of a tiny percentage of the paper ballots. WI does no such post-election spot-check of ballots to test the accuracy of their computer systems. Only a full hand-count of all the paper ballots in the Palm Beach elections revealed the correct winners. The identical tabulation system are used in WI's very Republican-leaning Waukesha County, as well as elsewhere in the state.

In New York City, it took nearly two years, but finally last month, ES&S, the company which manufacturers the paper-ballot optical scanners now used there, admitted that it was a flaw in their scanners which led to thousands of votes going uncounted during the 2010 elections. The company admitted to the system failure after the New York Daily News confirmed an error rate of 70% during the primary election and 54% in the general election in just one precinct in the South Bronx after a public records request and hand-count of the paper ballots. Those same flawed systems, the ES&S model DS200 paper-ballot op-scan system, are used in much of Lincoln, Portage and Wood Counties in WI.

There are many other systems used across the Badger State which have similarly failed in election after election. As always, "Democracy's Gold Standard" is a full public hand-count of ballots by actual human beings on election night, at the precinct, in front of all parties and video cameras, with results posted right there before ballots are moved anywhere. Unfortunately, that is rarely, if ever, done in Wisconsin. So it's up to you to try and help ensure the results on Tuesday are as accurate as possible, at least until those paper ballots are actually hand-counted and confirmed to have been tabulated accurately --- if they ever are.

To that end, here's a few things you can do tomorrow in Wisconsin (and one thing you can do even if you're not in Wisconsin), to help cover at least a few of the bases where computer tabulation systems can either be gamed or might simply malfunction to report inaccurate results...

New paper ballot optical-scan computer tabulator systems used to tally millions of votes in New York --- as well as "swing states" such as Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin --- do not tally votes correctly. That stunning admission comes courtesy of a new report released by the private company which manufactures, sells, services and programs the systems which are now believed to have mistallied tens of thousands of ballots in New York in 2010.

The votes of more than ten million voters could be affected by a newly revealed failure in the voting systems set for use in those four states in this year's Presidential election, and in more than 50 different jurisdictions in Wisconsin during next month's historic recall elections.

Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), the largest e-voting machine company in the U.S. and the maker of the paper ballot op-scan tally systems in question, have confirmed that their systems may overheat when used over several hours (for example, during an election!), and that they then may mistally and/or incorrectly discard anywhere from 30% to 70% of votes scanned by the machines.

The only way to know that a hand-marked paper ballot had been mistallied by the system would be to examine the ballots by hand to assure that the computer had read and recorded the voters' selections correctly.

The New York Daily News editorial board --- which has been persistently forcing the issue on state Election Officials who initially ignored massive mistallies discovered in the South Bronx during the state's 2010 election --- reports on ES&S' confirmation of the latest failure in a story headlined "We told you so: Newfangled voting machine screwed up". Their article today begins this way...

Earlier this year, the newspaper discovered --- through public records requests for the paper ballots in a single precinct in the South Bronx --- that the ES&S model DS200 op-scan system had failed to count some 70% of paper ballots correctly in the 2010 primary election. In that November's general election, some 54% of the ballots were mistallied at the same precinct.

The result, as confirmed by ES&S, tens of thousands of perfectly valid votes may have gone uncounted, while thousands of "phantom votes" in races that voters hadn't intended to vote in at all were counted as valid votes.

The Daily News characterizes the initial response by election officials in NY, after the paper had discovered the massive failures, as "a statement of severe psychological denial."

All of the above likely sounds very familiar to long-time readers of The BRAD BLOG, where we are considering changing the name of our news site to "We Told You So: Newfangled Voting Machines Screw Up," as a tip of the hat to the NY Daily News, and to better reflect a great deal of our nearly 10 years worth of content here.

Unfortunately, the latest example of secret vote-tallying computers made by private companies failing to accurate tally our once-public elections, is not only affecting New York. Moreover, the failure isn't isolated to the ES&S model DS200 paper ballot optical-scan system. As we've reported here for years, and on a number of recent occasions over just the past few months, similar failures have been discovered in other states and on other similarly designed paper ballot optical-scan systems.

If you think that simply because you are not forced to vote on a 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting machine that your ballot will be counted and counted accurately this year, think again...

There have been a few pieces of noteworthy news out of Wisconsin over the last few days in advance of their recall election primaries on May 8th (one week from Tuesday) and the recall general elections on June 5th. Some is largely positive for fans of democracy, but some of it, however, is both puzzling and a bit disturbing.

In the upcoming contests, Republican Gov. Scott Walker, his Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and the seats of four Republican state Senators will all face a referendum by the citizenry at the ballot box. The historic elections come more than a year after the GOP took over all branches of state government during the 2010 wave election before proceeding to release the Kraken spark a popular uprising through the tyranny of Big Government removal of a number of citizen rights --- such as collective-bargaining and voting --- along with the heavy-handed implementation of a number of other extreme Rightwing policies.

Here's are several of those late developments --- not concerning the horse races, but concerning the actual track conditions for those races...

Several weeks ago we told you that Kathy Nickolaus, the controversial and oft-failed County Clerk of Waukesha County, WI, was stepping aside for the state's upcoming recall primary and general elections on May 8 and June 5.

The news that she would not be performing her usual election administration duties came on the heels of yet another embarrassing debacle in the state's most Republican county during their April 3rd Presidential Primary.

Nickolaus' decision to temporarily hand over her duties to Waukesha's Deputy Clerk Kelly Yaeger for the two recall elections was prompted after calls for her resignation by the chair of the County Executive Board as well as local newspapers. The most recent mess was said to have been caused by a failure of her computer system to upload computer-reported elections results of county municipalities until 6am on the morning following that election.

Shortly after the latest mess, during an interview while we were guest hosting the Mike Malloy Show on April 6th, election integrity expert John Washburn of Wisconsin Fair Elections explained to us that Yaeger had been both hired and trained by Nickolaus herself.

The temporary replacement by her Deputy offered little comfort for Washburn. Prompted by recent disturbing news that elections run on electronic tabulation systems identical to those used in Waukesha County had recently been found to have named several losing candidates as "winners" in elections in a different state, Washburn, a Republican, suggested he had little basis for confidence in whatever reported results might come out of the state's most Republican-leaning county in the upcoming recalls.

It appears that Washburn is not alone. Late Friday, it was reported that a number of the municipalities in Waukesha will be bypassing the County Clerk's office entirely by first sending their election night results straight to the Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.), the state's top election agency. But it may be new concerns about computer-tallied results in the Badger State that present even greater problems for the historic elections beginning next month in the Badger State...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives below. Enjoy!]

We're back tonight guest-hosting the nationally-syndicated Mike Malloy Show tonight and it's gonna be a busy one!

We'll be BradCasting, as usual, LIVE from 9pm-Mid ET (6p-9p PT), coast-to-coast and around the globe from 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:

• JOHN WASHBURN of Fair Elections Wisconsin on the breaking news about Waukesha County, WI's Kathy Nickolaus, the upcoming state recall elections of Gov. Scott Walker and friends, and what you all need to know and do in order to make sure we can all have confidence in the reported results!
• PAMELA SMITH, President of Verified Voting Foundation and DAN MCCREA, President of the Florida Voters Foundation on the March 13th election disaster that struck Palm Beach County, FL as Dominion/Sequoia optical-scanners declared several losing candidates as the "winners", requiring a court to approve a hand-count last weekend to determine the real winners of the elections. And on why the hell we just don't start, finally hand-counting ballots in the first place, as per "Democracy's Gold Standard".
• GABRIEL REY-GOODLATTE of ColorofChange.org on their Anti-ALEC campaign calling on corporations to stop their funding of the American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC) due to their voter-suppression advocacy and much more.
• MARGOT PAEZ of KPFK's Evening News on the fall out from students who were pepper sprayed at Santa Monica College this week while trying to express their opinions to the Board of Trustees on a 400% tuition hike.
• PLUS! Much much more than we don't have time to detail here, your phone 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 our Sante Fe affiliate KTRC 1260, or our Minnesota affiliate KTNF 950 (use code 55447 when asked). Also, you should be able to listen live at WhiteRose Society if the radio gods are with us.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: All three "hours", busy ones, commercial-free, now follow below. My Easter/Passover gift to you. Enjoy! (And no, Elijah never showed up, even though we kept an open mic for him all night. Slacker.)...

Waukesha County's oft-failed election administrator, Kathy Nickolaus will not participate in the upcoming recall elections for Gov. Scott Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and four Republican state Senators.

The BRAD BLOG first learned the news from a Wisconsin Election Integrity advocate late this afternoon, and it has now been confirmed with a statement issued by the office of Waukesha County Executive Dan Vrakas.

Her decision to recuse herself from the May 8th recall primaries and June 5th recall general elections comes on the heels of yet another embarrassing election administration failure this past Tuesday by the controversial County Clerk in one of the Badger State's most Republican counties.

According to Vrakas' statement, the elected Nickolaus --- who will face her own re-election contest later this year --- was given two choices by the County Executive, either resign or step aside for the upcoming recall elections.

"In a meeting this afternoon I presented two options to Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus," Vrakas' statement reads, "resignation, or designating the deputy clerk to run the upcoming recall election."

"Kathy agreed to hand off her election duties to the deputy county clerk in order to avoid my public call for her resignation," says Vrakas. "In stepping aside, Kathy also agreed to allow outside consultants and county staff to work side-by-side with the deputy clerk to help restore confidence in our election process. The county will move swiftly to examine the election night procedures in the County Clerk’s Office and make changes as necessary to restore public’s confidence in our elections."

Calls for her resignation occurred once again following her failure to post local election results online in a timely fashion on the night of the April 3rd primary elections this week.

The BRAD BLOG has been reporting on the many election administration failures of Nickolaus going back as far as 2010 when she refused to change a number of procedures at the request of County Executives after an audit found serious deficiencies in her security processes, such as failing to post election results online, and tracking them only on a personal computer in her own office. But it was the April 5, 2011 election for state Supreme Court (exactly one year ago today) that brought national infamy to Nickolaus...

A public hand-count of paper ballots in Palm Beach County, FL over the weekend has decisively determined the winners and losers of several disputed elections after paper ballot optical-scan computer tallying systems made by Sequoia Voting Systems (now owned by Dominion Voting) declared the incorrect "winners" of several races in a March 13th election.

But a dispute over who is to blame for the initial failure flared up again over the weekend as Dominion issued a statement that seems to contradict their previous admission that their software was to blame.

"The hand-count was 100%. We weren't missing a ballot," the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher told The BRAD BLOG this afternoon about what happened over the weekend. "Frankly, without paper ballots and without audits, we would have let the wrong winners serve."

What will happen next, however --- for Palm Beach County, one of Florida's largest, as well as the other 285 jurisdictions across the country where the very same voting system is currently in use --- is anything but clear...

The computers got it wrong. The losing candidates were declared and certified as the "winners." But they didn't actually receive more votes than their opponents. This time, we happened to find out.

As long-time readers of The BRAD BLOG know, there's a reason we routinely slam election officials and media for announcing wholly-unverified computer-reported results of elections before any of the ballots are actually examined by human beings.

So called, post-election "random audits" of a tiny number of paper ballots --- where paper ballots exist, where officials even bother to do that much --- are almost always useless, easily gamed, and, at any rate, almost always poorly carried out. Post-election spot-checks are no substitute for actually, ya know, counting actual ballots.

Nonetheless, election officials and media simply presume that optically-scanned ballots have been correctly tallied on Election Night because, after all, "computers are more reliable than human beings," as they like to say, and any result, apparently, is far more important than an accurate result reflecting the actual will of the voters.

The situation is made still worse in states like Florida where horrible election laws actually prohibit human beings from examining paper ballots to assure they've been tallied accurately after they've already been processed by a computer system. And it's all made even worse than that in Florida as the state has turned election results verification on its head by requiring results be certified just six days after the election, long before results can actually be canvassed by officials for any type of accuracy.

With all of that in mind, and all of the warnings The BRAD BLOG has long offered about optical-scan tallying systems, guess what's just happened in Palm Beach County, Florida --- one of the absolute most disastrous counties for elections in the entire country?...

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

The revolution may not be televised...but it will be radio-active as we #OccupyYOURPublicAirwaves!

I'll be guest-hosting the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show tonight, tomorrow and Friday as Mike heads to D.C. to emcee the kick off of the October2011.org demonstration and we'll be

As ever, we'll be BradCasting LIVE 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 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):

• MIKE MALLOY, host of some radio show or another, checking in with a preview of the October2011.org/OccupyWashingtonDC.org protests in D.C.
• JESSE LAGRECA, the protester who gave Fox "News" what for in an interview that will not be airing on Fox "News" from the #OccupyWallStreet demonstration.
• DR. ROGER JOHNSTON, of Argonne National Laboratory's Vulnerability Assessment Team on his recent, chilling $26 remote control hack of a Diebold (and Sequoia) voting machine.
• PLUS! Calls from "Occupations" and "Occupiers" around the nation (leaving Hour 3 open for calls from you guys! #OccupyYOURPublicAirwaves!) and anything else that you'd like to talk about at 877-520-1150 and with 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 GREEN 960 in San Francisco or at WhiteRose Society or via MikeMalloy.com.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: The uprising begins. A helluva show tonight. You can check it all out below in the commercial-free audio archives (along with the chat room archives). Enjoy!...

This afternoon on my Pacifica Radio show on KPFK here in Los Angeles (and up and down the West Coast) I interviewed Dr. Roger Johnston of Argonne National Lab's Vulnerability Assessment Team on their $26 "Man-in-the-Middle" attack on a Diebold touch-screen voting system as I reported yesterday in my exclusive at Salon (and here at The BRAD BLOG.)

While yesterday's reports included information on the team's previous, similar-ish hack of a Sequoia touch-screen system, and the fact they feel they could do the same with most other e-voting systems, among the interesting new points raised during our discussion on KPFK today is that Johnston believes they could use a similar method to manipulate the vote count on a paper-ballot based optical-scan system as well!

So, in other words, the low-rent attack Argonne has demonstrated --- requiring no knowledge of the voting system software, $10 to $26 in off-the-shelf computer parts, and little more than an 8th grade computer lab education --- could also be implemented not just on touch-screen e-voting systems, with or without a so-called "paper trail," but also on the paper ballot op-scanners used to count the majority of votes that will be cast in the U.S. in next year's Presidential election.

(And if you're now wondering: "Well, what the hell should we be using to tabulate our elections?!" I'll refer you to this "Democracy's Gold Standard" special comment of mine, as taken from a recent Mike Malloy Show which I posted a few months ago.)

Here's my interview with Dr. Johnston today...

Download MP3 or listen online here [appx 28 mins]..

P.S. There's been a fair bit of follow-up coverage of my Salon article yesterday, here's a few of the better reports I've seen, at The Register, ComputerWorld, CNET and MSNBC.com.

Note: Of the media outlets listed above, only CNET got the ownership of Diebold voting equipment correct in their reports. Both The Register and ComputerWorld incorrectly report that ES&S now has ownership of what had been Diebold Election Systems, Inc. In fact, while ES&S, the world's largest e-voting company, did purchase the company (that some refer to as DESI, but I do not, for personal reasons) in late 2009, the DoJ ordered them to sell it off due to anti-trust concerns. It was then purchased by Canadian firm Dominion Voting, though ES&S was allowed to retain a fair number of the contracts from Diebold jurisdictions that preferred to stay with ES&S. So while Dominion officially owns what was Diebold's election division, ES&S still maintains and services many Diebold machines as well. Dominion also took over Sequoia --- and lied about it --- shortly thereafter.

[UPDATE 9/28/11: I interviewed Argonne National Lab's Roger Johnston on my Pacific Radio show on KPFK today. In the interview, Johnston concedes that it's not only touch-screen systems of the type described below which are vulnerable to this newly developed hack, but that paper-ballot based optical-scan systems can likely be manipulated by the same techniques. My interview with Johnson is now posted here. - BF]

The Vulnerability Assessment Team (VAT) at the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois has managed to hack a Diebold Accuvote touch-screen voting machine in what I describe at my exclusive today at Salon as perhaps "one of the most disturbing e-voting machine hacks to date."

As noted by the computer scientists and security experts at Argonne's VAT, largely all that's needed to accomplish this hack is about $26 and an 8th grade science education.

"This is a national security issue," VAT team leader Dr. Roger Johnston told me, echoing what I've been reporting other computer scientists and security experts telling me for years. "It should really be handled by the Department of Homeland Security."

Johnston should know. While the VAT folks have been dabbling in the security (or lack thereof) of e-voting systems in their spare time of late, most of the work they do is related to issues like nuclear safeguards and non-proliferation.

What makes this hack so troubling --- and different from those which have come before it --- is that it doesn't require any actual changes to, or even knowledge of, the voting system software or its memory card programming. It's not a cyberattack. It's a "Man-in-the-middle" attack where a tiny, $10.50 piece of electronics is inserted into the system between the voter and the main circuit board of the voting system allowing for complete control over the touch-screen system and the entire voting process along with it.

Add an optional $15 radio frequency remote control device, and votes can be changed, without the knowledge of the voter, from up to half a mile away. Without the remote, the attack can be turned on and off at certain times, or by other triggers. The voter would have no idea that their votes have been changed after they've already approved them as "correct" on the various confirmation screens, and even on the so-called "paper-trail" (on e-voting machines which offer them --- though VAT has learned how to manipulate those as well, see photo at right.)

The inserted chip can later be removed after the election without there being any way to ever know that someone had completely manipulated the system. But since election officials rarely --- if ever --- examine the inside of their voting machines, it doesn't much matter, in truth.

"The level of sophistication it took to develop the circuit board" used in the attack "was that of basically an 8th grade science shop," says Argonne's John Warner. "Anybody with an electronics workbench could put this together."

The team, he says, had no knowledge of the voting machine's computer circuit diagram or owner's manual when they devised the attack. Moreover, VAT team leader Roger Johnston told me they believe they "can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine." Indeed, in 2009, with little fanfare, they were able to carry out a similar manipulation of a Seqouia AVC Advantage e-voting system (as used across most of the state of New Jersey, for example). You can see that video demo here.

The team at Argonne has shared their demo video of the new Diebold Accuvote hack exclusively with The BRAD BLOG, as posted below. But please go check out the full details over at Salon (where we've embedded the video as well). The full details are chilling --- particularly as about 20% to 30% of U.S. voters are still set to use Diebold touch-screen systems, and others very similar to it, across the nation in the 2012 election cycle, no matter how many years The BRAD BLOG has been desperately trying to illustrate that these systems are simply antithetical to American democracy.

Among the states where voters will use these systems on Election Day in 2012, according to VerifiedVoting.org: Georgia, Maryland, Utah, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Missouri, Texas and many more.

Almost five years ago to the day, I broke the story of Princeton's landmark Diebold Virus Hack in another exclusive for Salon. So while I'm delighted to break the news of this new type of hack over there today, it's somewhat frustrating that it's even necessary at this point, as we head into yet another Presidential election cycle having changed so little despite all that we've learned. Nonetheless, please go check out my story over there today.

Beyond that, the video demonstration itself from Argonne, of the remote hack of a Diebold Accuvote touch-screen system follows below...

Wisconsin's old State Elections Board website (http://elections.state.wi.us/) appears to have been "hacked by Sovalye"...

[Hat-tip Election Integrity advocates Jeannie Dean, Neal Schulz and the folks at the Facebook Election Integrity group.]

[Update 7:19p CT: It looks as if officials have now restored the site. Sort of. Hat-tip again to Neal Schulz.]

The State Elections Board was replaced by the WI Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.) in 2008 as the state's top election authority, combining responsibilities of both the Elections Board and the State Ethics Board into the agency. The G.A.B.'s website (http://gab.wi.gov/) does not appear to be hacked. For now.

Of course, that's just a website, not an actual election or e-voting database. So just because the state's Elections Board website proved to be insecure and was hacked does not mean their actual elections are vulnerable to hacking in any way, shape or form, right? That, even though the state, shamefully, does not bother to check even a single ballot to make sure it has been tallied accurately during an election by its computer op-scanners made by Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S.

Why worry?

The BRAD BLOG has been warning about the manipulation of e-voting systems for years, along with members of the world's computer science and cyber security communities, and even the CIA, as our own Ernie Canning noted just last week. And yet, our nation continues to use the same vulnerable e-voting systems to tally our elections, rather than bothering to count them with our own, far more reliable and verifiable, hands and eyes, as per Democracy's Gold Standard.

I could link back to all sorts of e-voting hacks we've reported on over the years here, like this one from Princeton in 2006 or this one from the U. of MI in 2010 or this bone-chilling warning from the CIA in 2009, but they'll mostly likely just be ignored. Again.

Instead, we'll just tease you for now with news of yet another new e-voting hack --- perhaps the most disturbing one yet in a number of ways --- that we'll be reporting on very soon. Let's call that one a special delivery for election officials like Jones County, MS, Circuit Clerk Bart Gavin, who reportedly told his county Board of Supervisors this past week that the Diebold touch-screen voting machines used by the entire county "record every vote and there is no way for them to be tampered with."

Really, Bart? You're gonna stick with that, are ya?