Well this item from Washington Posts' "The Fix" blog today is rather troubling. It seems the the media consortium which previously ran Exit Polls on Election Day --- the best indicator of fraud and failure in election results (as opposed to pre-election polling which is far less accurate) --- is being scrapped in some 19 states, for the very first time, in the upcoming Presidential Election...

That would seem to be an invitation to fraud in those states, since Exit Polls have traditionally served as a helpful check and balance against fraudulent or simply inaccurate election results, particularly for the almost 100% unverified election results that the media now count on to report results in all 50 states. Those results come from often-failed, easily-manipulated computer tabulators used across the entire country.

This news is disturbing, as you probably already noticed, for a number of reasons...

As there are still a number of brain-dead and/or entirely corrupt and/or entirely dishonest phonies who, even now, pretend they're unclear on what Occupy Wall Street's message is, Dahlia Lithwick smartly dispatches with their hooey today. Those folks aren't really worth our time.

But the fact is, the wholesale takeover of the American government by corporate "persons" --- and the (at least) 30 years of corruption and crapping on the middle class that has come with it --- has some 99% of us with a long, 30 year-list of complaints. They don't easily fit on one single bumper sticker. Ultimately, though, there seems just one thing that underscores all of those complaints: the end of any real accountability for every one of those corrupting influences and often criminal acts.

It has become almost unimaginable that flagrant lawlessness by the elite --- be they in government or corporatist America --- will ever be met with any sort of real accountability, any kind of accountability that might actually dissuade others from the same behavior in a way that might serve to reverse the ever increasing race to lower the bar below ground. That, I suspect, is the frustration at the heart of every Occupation and ever Occupier or those who support them in the country.

Two back-to-back interviews on Tuesday night's Rachel Maddow Show seemed to make these points as plain as could be, and one even offered some hope in the bargain. The first was with NY state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman who actually suggests he gets it, and is actually pursuing real accountability, with real investigations into criminality by the banks and the banksters before, during and after the explosion of the mortgage crisis. We'll see if he means it (or if he gets "caught" with a hooker first.) The second interview was with Constitutional attorney, Salon blogger and author of the new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful, Glenn Greenwald.

Key points on accountability from both interviews are excerpted below, and the full videos of each are embed below that. Both are worth reading and/or watching in full if you haven't. It's about the accountability, stupid...

I'm no good at raising money for The BRAD BLOG - so let's see if I have any better luck helping out progressive filmmaker John Wellington Ennis to complete his newest documentary, Pay 2 Play: Democracy's High Stakes, covering the Supreme Court's Citizens United disaster and other related bastardizations of our democracy by the highest corporate bidder.

As his website describes the new film: "The cost of running for office makes candidates beg, borrow, and steal. PAY 2 PLAY shows how our elections encourage extortion, and how to stop it."

John is also the director of 2008's high-lariously informative Free For All: One Dude's Quest to Save Democracy (which features yours truly, but is brilliant nonetheless!)

Unfortunately, progressives are not shoveled barrels of free money as partisan scammers Andrew Breitbart, James O'Keefe, and the other liars and snake-oil salesmen on the Right are. Progressives actually have to beg for funds and then produce actual, truthful material in the bargain! That takes time, effort, and funding. So it's gonna take money to get money out of our politics once and for all! Please help. Ennis is doing his part, big time, so please help him out to finish the film if you can afford to toss in a few dollars!

If you need any more convincing, here's a slightly shortened version of an appearance I made at one of his fundraisers in Santa Monica last week [apologies for the echoey sound, it gets easier to see and hear as it goes forward!]...

Yesterday's hotly contested race for the GOP's U.S. Senate nomination in Delaware ended in victory for the state's moderate, much-beloved former Governor and nine-term U.S. Congressman Mike Castle --- at least according to the tabulation of ballots cast in the race which can actually be verified by anybody as having been recorded accurately as per the voters' intent.

From the State of Delaware's Elections website with 100% reporting:

Nonetheless, the Tea-Party/Palin/DeMint-endorsed Christine O'Donnell, who was getting trounced by the popular Castle in pre-election polls until only recently after losing twice before in her quest for a U.S. Senate seat, was declared the "winner" of yesterday's race and --- as The BRAD BLOG detailed yesterday --- nobody can prove whether the voters of Delaware actually selected her or not.

Appropriately enough for the far Rightwinger, the "victory" was 100% faith-based, since it's strictly impossible to know if even one citizen's vote cast yesterday on the 100% unverifiable e-voting machines Delware forces voters to use on Election Day was recorded accurately...

In addition to the primary elections being held in New York today --- where long-ago predicted failures are reported to be occurring with their new e-voting system as we described earlier --- elections are also underway today in Delaware, D.C., Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.

To find out which type of voting system will fail and/or or be 100% unverifiable in each of those states, please see VerifiedVoting.org's Verifier for details.

One of the races certain to get most attention tonight will be the Republican U.S. Senate primary in Delaware where the Tea Party/Palin/DeMint-backed Christine O'Donnell has seen a last minute surge in support, according to pre-election polls, against GOP-establishment supported Rep. Mike Castle. The popular Castle was thought to have been a shoo-in for the Republican nomination until recently, as well as the likely victor over the Democrats presumptive nominee Chris Coons.

But Coons currently cleans O'Donnell's clock in pre-election polling, so the GOP race has become a contentious one.

We point all of this out by way of noting that Delaware has just three counties, all of which force voters to use 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen, but in this case push-button) voting systems on Election Day. The systems are made by Danaher Controls, one of the smaller, lesser-known e-voting companies in the U.S., though large enough to have been made infamous when hundreds of their machines reportedly broke down during Philadelphia's May 2006 trainwreck election. In 2004 Verified Voting and the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a short paper [PDF] detailing various other problems with the systems in Tennessee and Ohio elections going back to 1992.

While we've yet to hear of problems today on the machines in the "First State," we thought it might be a good time to mention that no matter whom the voting machines report as the winner in any of the races, including the hotly-contested GOP Senate primary, there will largely be next to nothing that can be done to challenge the results --- other than, perhaps, counting the smaller number of paper-based absentee ballots for accuracy. (The paper-based absentee ballots will initially be tabulated by Diebold AccuVote op-scan systems, the same type of system used to flip the results of a mock election in HBO's Emmy-nominated documentary Hacking Democracy. You can watch that hack here as it occurred live.)

The Danaher DREs being used in Delaware today make for 100% faith-based elections. As with all DREs, after the polls close tonight it will be strictly impossible to verify that even one vote cast on them was recorded accurately as per the voter's intent, for any candidate on the ballot.

In the event that the e-voting systems report a close election tonight, well, too bad.

UPDATE 7:15pm PT: With 85% of the vote "counted," and a reported 54%-46% margin, AP has declared O'Donnell the winner. Details...

UPDATE 10:32pm PT: Castle actually defeated O'Donnell! But, um, only on the ballots that can actually be verified. Details in comments...

UPDATE 9/15/14 1:44pm PT: More on the virtually reversed "paper versus plastic" numbers in DE's GOP U.S. Senate primary now here...