but we just got, *sigh*, another assignment: Henceforth we must start following judicial races. Because guess who’s started taking an interest?

Here is where it gets more interesting. The phone number for Scheiderer isn’t a Wisconsin one, but belongs to a PR firm called CRC (Creative Response Concepts) Public Relations headquartered in Alexandria, Va.

And who is CRC Public Relations? Hold onto your hat. It’s the same public relations outfit that did a lot of the dirty work for the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the sinister organization that sought to destroy John Kerry’s military record. Among its other clients are the Republican National Committee, the Christian Coalition, Grover Norquist’s National Taxpayers Union, and Regnery Publishing, the right-wing book producer.  Read more 

I feel shitty for not posting this a month ago, doubly so because I recently spoke with a friend who didn’t quite understand the deadlines and bullshit between him and casting a ballot; my friend may not be able to vote this year because of it. Anyway, I voted today. I sent off my absentee ballot with all that “we guarantee it will get there and by a specific date” stuff, I consider the extra postage well spent. I’ve bitched and moaned and griped about our Scary Voting Machines here for years, so I won’t remind you, except to say that you shouldn’t pop the champagne just yet. As always Brad will tell you why. Check him out if you haven’t lately. If the Democrats are sitting around counting chickens and committee chairmanships, they’re stupider than I thought. But you, gentle reader, are smarter than that. You know as well as I do: there’s nothing Rove won’t do to win, and all it takes is one carefully selected precinct’s worth of “unforseeable problems” to turn an entire state. I hope all of you used your absentee option this year. I know I feel better for doing so.  Read more 

Go read Bradblog’s transcript of the unaired 2006 interview with Rev. DeForest Soaries, Former U.S. Elections Assistance Commission Chair. The whole thing is one humongous money quote, but this is the bottom line:

“There is no prototype. There are no standards. There is no scientific research that would guarantee any election district that there’s a machine that can be used to answer these very serious questions. And so, my sense is that the politicians in Washington have concluded that the system can’t be all that bad because, after all, it produced them. And as long as an elected official is an elected official, then whatever machine was used, whatever device was used to elect him or her, seems to be adequate. But there’s an erosion of voting rights implicit in our inability to trust the technology that we use and if we were another country being analyzed by America, we would conclude that this country is ripe for stealing elections and for fraud.

Gosh, a “major network” didn’t air it. I wonder why not?  Read more 

Josh asks: Why are Rove and Bush seemingly confident about this fall’s elections? Many have answered, “Diebold.” For you skeptics out there, let me remind you of just who it is we’re talking about:

 Read more 

WaPo says that Bush and Rove remain inexplicably confident.

Amid widespread panic in the Republican establishment about the coming midterm elections, there are two people whose confidence about GOP prospects strikes even their closest allies as almost inexplicably upbeat: President Bush and his top political adviser, Karl Rove

[Original photo of Diebold van with Bush bumper sticker.]

What do they know that we don’t know?  Read more 

Registration table clarification. What I found interesting is that a majority of the election officials making this decision are Democrats. I suppose it’s a “decent” compromise, it’s sure better than the absentee ballot mailing “solution” proposed earlier. Still, I wonder about those laws that require any campaign signs to be so many yards away form the polling place. Oh well, it’s Florida, so I suppose this is the best we can hope for.

By Michael C. Bender
Elections supervisors in Florida’s 16th Congressional District plan to post notices at polling places next month to inform voters of the change in Republican candidates as a result of U.S. Rep. Mark Foley’s resignation.

Supervisors in seven of the district’s eight counties agreed during a conference call to post notices at the registration tables of all polling locations to inform voters that ballots cast for Foley will count for Joe Negron.  Read more 

So I can bang my head on it.

A week after the primary election was plagued by human error and technical glitches, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) called yesterday for the state to scrap its $106 million electronic voting apparatus and revert to a paper ballot system for the November election.  Read more 

Oh. My. God. Via the really smart people at Freedom to Tinker:

On Wednesday we did a live demo for our Princeton Computer Science colleagues of the vote-stealing software described in our paper and video. Afterward, Chris Tengi, a technical staff member, asked to look at the key that came with the voting machine. He noticed an alphanumeric code printed on the key, and remarked that he had a key at home with the same code on it. The next day he brought in his key and sure enough it opened the voting machine.

This seemed like a freakish coincidence—until we learned how common these keys are.

Chris’s key was left over from a previous job, maybe fifteen years ago. He said the key had opened either a file cabinet or the access panel on an old VAX computer. A little research revealed that the exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and hotel minibars. It’s a standard part, and like most standard parts it’s easily purchased on the Internet. We bought several keys from an office furniture key shop—they open the voting machine too. We ordered another key on eBay from a jukebox supply shop. The keys can be purchased from many online merchants.

Nuts, anyone?  Read more 

The Baltimore Sun has a good autopsy today on the train wreck which was the Maryland primary of Tuesday last. From the headline—“ELECTION JUDGES NEEDED”—and repeated over and over again in the story is the refrain that should tell you what you can, and should, do now:

Call your county clerk’s office and ask how you can become an election judge. If that office isn’t in charge of the process-it is most places I know of—they can tell you who to call instead.

This is late in the game to be joining the team but this year is unique because of HAVA and the electronic voting machines. No you do not need to know UNIX to take part. You do not need to be any kind of uber-geeky-nerd with mad hacker skillz. You need just as much computer knowledge as you have already proven you have by reading this fucking blog.  Read more 

We really did, you know. So did lots of other people. From the WaPo, breaking news on broken elections:

Election Day in Montgomery County and parts of Prince George’s opened in chaos and frustration this morning, as a series of problems and missteps left thousands of citizens unable to vote or forced to cast provisional ballots.

[snip]Montgomery County’s Board of Elections held an emergency meeting and agreed to petition the Circuit Court to extend voting times until 9 p.m.

No electronic voting machines were operational when polls opened at 7 a.m. in Montgomery County, because election officials failed to deliver the required voter authorization cards to the county’s 238 precincts. Voters were supposed to be given provisional paper ballots instead. But several precincts quickly ran out of those backup ballots.

LambMaster Kos is running with this hard so check there for closer-to-realtime updates than we can provide.  Read more 

Charles is on the case:

The electoral court has dismissed all of the complaints filed in the recent election.

Considering that some of those involved precincts where ballots were completely missing, precincts with massive miscounts, and a shift of roughly 0.25% of the vote just from the recount, I don’t see how the PRD can view it as anything except a corrupt decision. The court will annul a few precincts, but it is chopping down a couple of trees while pretending there’s no forest.

Sound familiar?  Read more 

So, who does Pravda on the Potomac hire to write an Op-Ed full of sage advice to Calderon and Obrador? Who is their Go-To Guy? Drumroll, please:  Read more 

Sound familiar?

In Mexico, there is a form of recount where voting tally sheets are compared to the actual ballots. It’s like comparing your shipping manifest to what’s actually in the packing case. This form of recount has already been undertaken in some states, When you look at the real votes, what happened? Did the errors favor the conservative?  Read more 

Alert reader Tinfoil Hat Boy directs us to the most excellent Brad Blog:

A damning and detailed feature article, written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for Rolling Stone and documenting evidence of the theft of the 2004 Presidential Election is set to hit newstands this Friday, The BRAD BLOG can now confirm. The online version of the article will be posted tomorrow (Thursday) morning.

The article — headlined on the cover as “Did Bush Steal the 2004 Election?: How 350,000 Votes Disappeared in Ohio” — has been several months in development and will contend that a concerted effort was undertaken by high-level Republican officials to steal the Election in Ohio — and thus the country — in 2004!  Read more