Think Progress:

Today, Sister Julie McGuire had to turn away 12 fellow Indiana nuns — all in their 80s or 90s — from a polling place because they lacked a state or federal photo ID, as mandated by the recent Supreme Court decision. AP reports:

“One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, ‘I don’t want to go do that,’” Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.

They weren’t given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back in the 10-day time frame allotted by the law, Sister McGuire said. “You have to remember that some of these ladies don’t walk well. They’re in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts.”

Sister McGuire also underscored the difficulty in obtaining IDs for these women: “We’re going to take from now until November to get them out and get this done. You can’t do this like school kids on a bus. I wish we could.” More on the ID Divide here.

Machine malfunctions, long lines, registration probs reported across Keystone State..

BRAD BLOG ALERT
April 22, 2008

Pennsylvania Primary: Polling Place, E-Voting Problem Wire…

Problem reports from polling places in PA, including voting machine malfunctions, long lines, registration problems and more having been coming in all across the state (particularly in and around Philly), all morning.

We’ve been doing our best to keep up, with a running wire of notable reports, which we continue to update throughout the day.

See our report yesterday detailing concerns about e-voting equipment (though not from officials, who weren’t concerned at all) and whether there would be enough machines to go around (presuming they work at all) across Pennsylvania…

For up to the minute news: ELECTION PROBLEM WIRE

If you missed it yesterday, we tried to warn you…
The Pennsylvania Primary: Democracy of the Gods
Tuesday’s Election Will be ‘Unrecountable, Unverifiable, and Unauditable’…
FULL STORY

By Adam Nossiter, New York Times

Montgomery, Alabama - Former Governor Don Siegelman of Alabama, released from prison today on bond in a bribery case, said he was as convinced as ever that politics played a leading role in his prosecution.

In a telephone interview shortly after he walked out of a federal prison in Oakdale, La., Mr. Siegelman said there had been “abuse of power” in his case, and repeatedly cited the influence of Karl Rove, the former White House political director.

“His fingerprints are smeared all over the case,” Mr. Siegelman said, a day after a federal appeals court ordered him released on bond and said there were legitimate questions about his case.

Mr. Rove has strenuously denied any involvement in the conviction of the former governor, who was sentenced to serve seven years last June after being convicted in 2006. He could not immediately be reached for comment today.

Mr. Siegelman served nine months while his lawyers appealed a federal judge’s refusal to release him on bond, pending the ex-governor’s appeal of his conviction. That refusal was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit on Thursday.

The former governor, a Democrat, said he would “press” to have Mr. Rove answer questions about his possible involvement in the case before Congress, which has already held a hearing on Mr. Siegelman. On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee signaled its intention to have Mr. Siegelman testify about the nature of his prosecution.

In June of 2006 he was convicted by a federal jury here of taking $500,000 from Richard M. Scrushy, the former chief executive of the HealthSouth corporation, in exchange for an appointment to the state hospital licensing board. The money was to retire a debt from Mr. Siegelman’s campaign for a state lottery to pay for schools, and the ex-governor’s lawyers have insisted that it was no more than a routine political contribution.

On the telephone outside the prison today, Mr. Siegelman said he had confidence that the federal appeals court, which will now consider his larger appeal, would agree with his view of the case - that he was convicted for a transaction that regularly takes place in American politics.

Otherwise, Mr. Siegelman said, “every governor and every president and every contributor might as well turn themselves in, because it’s going to be open season on them.”

His case has become a flash point for Democratic contentions that politics influenced decisions by the Justice Department, fueled by testimony from an Alabama campaign operative that suggested Mr. Rove may have had some involvement.

In Alabama, the Siegelman case has inflamed partisan passions, with Republicans insisting that Mr. Siegelman’s term from 1998 to 2002 was deeply corrupted, and Democrats furious over what they depict as a years-long political witch-hunt.

Before his release earlier in the day, the ex-governor completed his prison chores for the day - mopping a barracks area - and waited for his wife and son to pick him up for the eight-hour drive to his home in Birmingham, Ala.

“It feels great to be out,” Mr. Siegelman said. “I wish I could say it was over. But we’re a long way from the end of this.”

Think Progress:

Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D), who went to jail in June 2007 on federal corruption charges, “will be released from prison, after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals granted him an appeal bond.” Yesterday, TPMmuckraker reported that the House Judiciary Committee is seeking to hold a hearing where Siegelman will testify about the controversial prosecution that led to his incarceration.

Here’s video from yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on selective prosecutions, where ex-Gov. Don Siegelman’s (D-AL) was the marquee case:

As TPM reported yesterday, Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) made a hard run at Jill Simpson, the Republican lawyer who’s testified that Alabama Republicans often chattered about how the Justice Department and local U.S. attorneys would take Siegelman down. Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) rose to her defense, and Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney himself and lawyer for Siegelman, testified that the case took on a new life in 2005 after officials in Washington got involved.

You can see video of former attorney general Dick Thornburgh’s testimony here.

By Paul Kiel, TPM:

On February 1st of this year, National Republican Campaign Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK) abruptly released a statement about recently discovered “irregularities in our financial audit process.” That was it: no details about whether money might have been stolen, just word that they’d seen fit to bring in the federal authorities.

The details, as they’ve come, have been embarrassing for the committee, which works to get Republicans elected to the House (which was already hurting in comparison to its Democratic counterpart before all this began).

According to The New York Times this morning, it all began to unravel when Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX), a CPA, asked to meet with the audit firm that was supposedly checking the NRCC’s books, an idea that apparently no one had had for several years. Christopher Ward, then the NRCC’s treasurer, finally relented, but then chickened out 30 minutes before and fessed up that there actually hadn’t been any audits.

It was ultimately discovered that Ward had been faking the audits since 2003. The Politico, which laid out this general outline of events early last month, reported that Ward had forged everything, including the letterhead. So when it came time to actually talk to the people who’d supposedly written those fake reports, it all unraveled.

The FBI is currently investigating, and it’s not clear yet why Ward was so keen to hide the real numbers. But as the Times reports this morning, the signs are not good. NRCC internal audits since Ward’s discovery show that “hundreds of thousands of dollars are missing and presumed stolen.” And it gets worse: there are apparently indications that “the financial irregularities might extend beyond the national committee to the campaign funds of individual Republican lawmakers who also worked with Mr. Ward, a longtime party operative.”

Ward had been with the NRCC since 1993 and worked for dozens of Republican campaign committees, political action committees, and other organizations. It’ll be interesting to see what the FBI turns up.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

Video at Crooks and Liars:

I’ve been following the Don Siegelman case for a couple of months, but as much as I know about this case, it didn’t prevent my blood pressure from leaping up dangerously high. Imprisoning political rivals? Someone tell me again how tyrannical Castro was, because I sure don’t recognize this country as my own when things like this happen.

(Grant) Woods is one of the 52 former state attorneys-general, of both parties, who’ve asked Congress to investigate the Siegelman case.

“I personally believe that what happened here is that they targeted Don Siegelman because they could not beat him fair and square. This was a Republican state and he was the one Democrat they could never get rid of,” Woods says.

Now a Republican lawyer from Alabama, Jill Simpson, has come forward to claim that the Siegelman prosecution was part of a five-year secret campaign to ruin the governor. Simpson told 60 Minutes she did what’s called “opposition research” for the Republican party. She says during a meeting in 2001, Karl Rove, President Bush’s senior political advisor, asked her to try to catch Siegelman cheating on his wife. [..]

She says she spied on Siegelman for months but saw nothing. Even though she was working as a Republican campaign operative, Simpson says she wanted to talk to 60 Minutes because Siegelman’s prison sentence bothers her conscience.

Simpson says she wasn’t surprised that Rove made this request. Asked why not, she tells Pelley, “I had had other requests for intelligence before.”

“From Karl Rove?” Pelley asks.

“Yes,” Simpson says.

Simply horrifying how low Karl Rove and company will go. Someone definitely needs to be spending some serious time in prison…but I’m pretty sure it isn’t Don Siegelman. Scott Horton of Harper’s (who is scheduled to speak with Sam Seder on AirAmerica at 4:00 pm est) has been covering this story from the beginning, and truth squads some of Rove’s statements. Guess who isn’t telling the truth?

The full segment and transcripts available here. If you live in Alabama, that’s the ONLY way you’ll get to see the whole segment.

Contracts with Unaccountable Private Vendors Like ES&S in NM and Elsewhere, Continue Taking Costly Toll on American Democracy…

On Wednesday, we covered some of the massive problems emerging from New Mexico’s Democratic Party Caucus on Super Tuesday. The razor-thin margin between Obama and Clinton remains in question at this hour after ballot boxes were discovered to have been kept overnight, uncounted, at the home of a party official; voters faced long lines at the polls; and some 17,000 voters (11% versus 4% in the last caucus) were forced to vote on provisional ballots.

NPR had reported on Thursday that the state’s Democratic party, which ran the election, as opposed to the state themselves, had decided to do a full recount of all ballots. Tonight though, John Gideon informs us the report was incorrect, and only “all qualified provisional ballots” are set to be counted by officials.

We had updated our previous story several times while covering the mess, before finally noting:

The most notable take-away from this story may end up not being the poorly run caucus process of the Democratic Party (as opposed to the state, who would run the general election in November), or even the “sleepover” ballot boxes. The most notable issue here may be the questions about what the hell happened to the registration rolls in New Mexico, as now maintained by the thugs and failures at voting machine company ES&S, since the last election.Remember, NM is where former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was fired because he refused to prosecute the bogus “voter fraud” charges made by the Republican Party there.

Continue Reading »

More Video’s coming at the Video The Vote YouTube Channel

Also Check out: Brad Blog the Best Source for Election Protection News

Brad Blog

Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) continues misleading America about his two different election reforms bills. On Saturday night’s CBS Evening News (video here), he says, in regard to the upcoming Super Tuesday Election: “There will be states around the country where the election results will be in question, and there will be no way to resolve the question.”

What he fails to mention is that, should either of his own two federal Election Reform bills be passed into law as currently written, there will still be states around the country where the election results will be in question, and there will still be no way to resolve the question, because he still refuses to include a ban on touch-screen voting machines in either of his two bills.

Incredibly, even his newly introduced “Emergency” bill (which we wrote about back here) would give money for paper ballots only to jurisdictions that don’t already use unverifiable touch-screen (DRE) voting systems with so-called “paper trails”…

As with his previous failed effort, HR811 (which we helped his office write before it was introduced, and which we’ve covered in great detail here), the touch-screen DREs would be allowed to stay in place in the new bill as well, as long as they have that worthless, and unverifiable “paper trail”.

Such DRE “paper trails”, in contrast to true, hand-marked paper ballots have been shown in study after study to be easily hackable, and ultimately offer no more confidence that an election was recorded accurately, than a DRE without such a “paper trail”.

Rush Holt knows that, of course, (we’ve told him as much directly ourselves and he is, literally, a rocket scientist) but he apparently doesn’t care.

It’s not the first time Holt has mislead about this issue. In fact, he’s previously out and out lied about it.

We take no joy in saying it, but Rush Holt, the “leader” among the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives on the issue of Election Reform, is absolutely shameless.