Election 2013 is but a memory — good or bad — for much of the nation. But, in Virginia, election officials, attorneys and partisans will still be as busy as elves throughout much of the holiday season, and potentially even beyond, determining the final results of the statewide November 5 attorney general election this year.

On the day before Thanksgiving, Virginia’s Republican AG candidate Mark Obenshain filed for a recount [PDF] of the incredibly close race at the Richmond Circuit Court. Two days prior, his Democratic challenger Mark Herring had been certified by the state as the winner by just 165 votes out of more than 2.2 million votes cast early last month.

Should those state-certified results hold, Herring would replace Republican Ken Cuccinelli as Virginia’s AG. Cuccinelli was unsuccessful in his own run for governor in November against Democrat Terry McAuliffe. Along with the Democratic win in the lieutenant governor’s race as well, a Herring victory would result in the first time since 1969 that Democrats held all three statewide offices, and the first time in 20 years that Virginia will have a Democratic AG.

A “recount,” in Virginia, however — as we’ve documented previously (see the last section of this article) — amounts to much less than it may seem, given the technology used in the state and some of the ridiculous “recount” laws specified by the Virginia election code [PDF].

As bad as those “recount” statutes are, however, a margin of 165 votes could certainly be reversed, even in a state where most votes are currently recorded (either accurately or inaccurately, who knows?) by 100 percent unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touchscreen) voting systems, and where the rest are tallied (either accurately or inaccurately, who knows?) by paper-ballot optical-scan tabulators that will be used once again to “recount” (either accurately or inaccurately, who knows?) most of the state’s paper ballots.

Yes, that’s right. Hundreds of thousands of 100 percent unverifiable electronic votes cast in the closest statewide race in VA state history cannot be “recounted” now in any meaningful way. For those votes, state election code specifies that, during the “recount,” election officials will merely recheck the voting machine computer printouts from Election Night to make sure the certified results match. Meanwhile — and short of a court order — votes that were cast on paper ballots will simply be run through the same optical-scan computers that tallied them the first time, after they’ve been reprogrammed to set aside all ballots which the scanner sees as an over-vote, an under-vote or a write-in vote in the AG’s race. Those set aside paper ballots, at least, will then be examined by hand, in public, by actual human beings.

As ridiculous as the VA “recount” statute is, the “contest” law — another procedure that the candidate who loses the “recount” may file thereafter — is even more ridiculous. But, depending on the results of the “recount,” that may be the only option Obenshain is left with… and it could result in a GOP “victory,” even with fewer recorded popular votes, presuming there are enough heavily partisan Republicans in the VA state legislature…

‘Winning’ by ‘Recount’

Given the unreliability of optical-scan paper ballot tabulation systems — they can offer inaccurate results for any number of reasons, including malfunction, purposeful manipulation and/or their inability to read certain marks on the ballot correctly — the odds of Obenshain overcoming his slim deficit in order to prevail over Herring are anyone’s guess. A single machine with a dirty optical-scan lens on Election Night — or one that fails in some fashion during the “recount” — could produce enough differing results to flip the election.

Moreover, according to the currently certified statewide results on the VA State Board of Elections (SBE) website, there were just over 28,000 more votes recorded in the gubernatorial race on November 5 than there were in the attorney general contest. That means, in theory, that there are at least 28,000 ballots that were previously recorded with no vote at all (either accurately or inaccurately, who knows?) in the AG race.

According to Reuters, Obenshain’s attorney Stephen Piepgrass says “as many as 25,000 to 50,000 under votes have yet to be counted.” That number seems very high, particularly as many of the known under-votes were recorded via DREs, on which under-votes can’t be rechecked for accuracy (at least short of a very lengthy and difficult forensic analysis of each voting system by computer scientists, a process not called for by state statute, one that is difficult, expensive and time consuming, not to mention generally opposed by the manufacturers of voting systems which historically consider such investigations an intrusion into what they consider to be their own proprietary hardware and software.)

Still, in what is said to be the closest statewide race in history, with just 165 votes — .007 percent of those cast — currently separating “loser” and “winner,” there are likely more than enough under-votes alone to give Republicans hope of flipping the results during the “recount.”

On the downside for the GOP, however, many of the jurisdictions that use paper ballots, versus unverifiable DREs, lean heavily Democratic. For example, the single largest jurisdiction in the state, Fairfax County, uses paper ballots, but the Democrat Herring reportedly defeated the Republican Obenshain there by a whopping 61 to 39 percent. With some 306,000 votes tallied in the gubernatorial race in Fairfax County, there are believed to be just over 3,000 ballots with no vote currently recorded in the AG race. Presuming they are correctly identified by the optical scanners, those under-vote ballots will be examined by hand during the “recount” process. They could, in that county alone, offer more than enough previously unrecorded votes for Obenshain to reverse the statewide results. They would, however, have to weigh heavily in Obenshain’s favor, which would seem unlikely given the currently recorded results. On the other hand, op-scan systems can fail for unpredictable — and sometimes, unknown — reasons, so who knows?

The last statewide “recount” was in 2005, also in the AG race that year. In that one, then-state delegate (currently governor) Bob McDonnell (R) was certified the winner over state Sen. Creigh Deeds (D) by 323 votes before the “recount” began. McDonnell ended up picking up 37 more votes than Deeds in the “recount,” resulting in a final margin of just 360 votes. “Obenshain needs 5 times that swing, & in right direction!,” tweeted Daniel Nichanian, formerly of Campaign Diaries, recently.

This year, however, tweets D.C. election attorney Chris Ashby in response, “approx[imately] 100 times the number of paper ballots would be rescanned & hand counted vs. ’05 AG recount.”

Indeed, following the 2005 “recount,” the VA legislature passed a law disallowing the purchase of DRE voting machines. That means that the state has been slowly moving to paper ballot optical scanners over the past eight years as voting systems get replaced with newer ones by local jurisdictions. There will be much more to actually “recount” this year than in 2005, both by hand and by optical scan.

In Alexandria, according to the Washington Post, all paper ballots cast — there were 41,214 recorded votes in the gubernatorial race — will most likely need to be counted by hand. That, at least, is a victory for the voters in the city of Alexandria, who, unlike most jurisdictions across the state, will be able to have some assurance that their votes were ultimately counted as per their intent (presuming the chain of custody for paper ballots there has been secure from Election Day up through a public hand-count in mid-December).

There, the city uses optical-scan systems made by Austin-based Hart InterCivic which, according to their registrar Tom Parkins, cannot be reprogrammed for the “recount” as per state law, which requires that the machines be set to count only the race being “recounted,” and to set aside ballots otherwise not read as votes by the machine.

“Because of the technology we use, I don’t believe we can isolate the attorney general race,” Parkins is quoted by WaPo’s Patricia Sullivan. “If that’s the case, we’ll have to recount manually.” He said, however, he didn’t mind. “I think we actually prefer a manual recount because it’s speedier,” he said, explaining that the Hart scanner used in Alexandria is a precinct-based scanner that accepts just one ballot at a time, pausing as it tabulates each one separately.

The idea of allowing these systems to be reprogrammed at all at this point in such a close election is likely one that sends shudders up the spine of many e-voting system experts who understand the sensitivity of these systems and how easily they can be incorrectly — or nefariously — programmed.

“In 3 of 4 recounts w/ [a] certified margin [of less than] 300 [votes],” Ashby tweeted last week, citing this FairVote article, “the certified loser prevailed in the recount.” That could certainly be good news for Obenshain. “On the flip side,” Ashby continued, “in 6 of 7 recounts w/certified margin [greater than] 300 [votes], the certified winner prevailed in the recount.” Those data are based on statewide recounts across the country over the past century.

The statewide “recount” in Virginia is likely to begin in mid-December, after a date is set by a three-judge panel in Richmond that will oversee the process and make any determinations that local jurisdictions are unable to resolve on their own. Given the automated nature of VA “recounts,” officials in a number of jurisdictions have guessed that the process will take just a day or two in each location, barring any surprises.

The results of that “recount” are, ultimately, anyone’s guess. What happens beyond it could get even more bizarre…

‘Winning’ by ‘Contest’

Even if Obenshain is still declared the loser after a “recount,” he has still another option. So does Herring, for that matter, but it’s unlikely to be successful for him if he were the one to come out of the “recount” on the short end of the stick.

It’s being referred to by some as the Republicans’ “Nuclear Option”: an election contest. In most jurisdictions around the country, such post-recount contests — where a candidate would argue the election or the recount was carried out improperly, or the results of either were tainted by fraud — would happen in a court of law. In Virginia, however, election contests are decided by a majority vote of the 140-member state legislature. Rather than 165 votes out of more than 2.2 million cast, the AG election could be determined by a minimum vote of 71 members of the state legislature.

“They shouldn’t be too difficult for Obenshain to round up,” Jeff Schapiro of theRichmond Times-Dispatch explained last week. “There are 87 Republican legislators. Many of them don’t like one bit that their party could be completely shut out of statewide office.”

That’s right. Depending on the mood of the Republican-majority legislature, the results of the popular vote wouldn’t actually matter. It would be up to those partisans, in a joint session of the state’s Assembly and Senate, to vote on who should be the state’s next AG.

Such a move could be risky for Obenshain, Schapiro notes, but also potentially worth the risk. “Democrats would almost certainly accuse Obenshain of stealing the election, having overridden the popular vote in an increasingly blue state,” he wrote. “A contest also could be high reward. Obenshain would cement his status as his party’s titular leader and its likely gubernatorial nominee in 2017. But the big issue that year would probably be Obenshain’s scheming four years earlier.”

Short of something new revealing itself during the “recount,” which is certainly a possibility, or the margin narrowing even further during same, there seems little basis currently for Republicans to legitimately argue the election was not carried out properly. (Note: There are a number of points that Democrats could raise if they ultimately filed such a contest — such as the 40,000-voter purge carried out with the approval of Republican AG Cuccinelli just weeks before the election — but this article is long enough already, so we’ll hold those possible points for another day, as needed.)

Every electoral board across the state — in each county and major city — is currently run by two Republicans and one Democrat. (State law specifies one member from each of the two major parties on the three-person boards, plus one more member from the governor’s party. The current governor, until he’s replaced by the Democrat McAuliffe, is Republican McDonnell.) Those boards, as well as the Republican-majority State Board of Elections, oversaw, approved and certified the post-election canvass and the adjudication of provisional ballots.

While there were a small handful of counties (such as Dem-leaning Fairfax County detailed here and GOP-leaning Bedford County detailed here) that added a significant number of votes to the totals after Election Day during their normal canvassing procedure to double-check against human and, in some cases, computer error, for now, most of those changes have been publicly explained to little controversy.

The only jurisdiction to offer a hint of controversy in the post-election provisional ballot adjudication period was Fairfax. There, the county’s Republican-majority electoral board decided to allow several more days for provisional voters to come in and argue their case for their ballots to be included in the final tally. The board did so after a legal opinion was issued by the Republican-majority SBE declaring that attorneys could not argue on behalf of the inclusion of provisional ballots for voters who were not present to make the case, even if those voters had previously given their approval. The state’s edict was contrary to procedures Fairfax had previously used and which they had informed voters about again this year. Therefore, the county’s board decided to allow several more days — right up to the deadline for county certification — for voters to make their case in person.

In post-certification comments, Obenshain’s campaign has mentioned concerns about “uniformity” in vote counting across the state. “We owe it to the people of Virginia to make sure we get it right, and that every legitimate vote is counted and subject to uniform rules,” they said in a statement after counties and cities certified their canvassed results one week after the election.

That reference has clearly been meant to lay the potential groundwork for an Equal Protection argument during a contest, as UC Irvine election law professor Rick Hasen details here. If the final margin after the “recount” is less than the total number of votes gained by Herring via provisional ballots in Fairfax County, Republicans could make the argument that those votes should be removed entirely from the final tally.

Remember, of course, that court decisions, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore, which found that “uniformity” is required in vote counting (as ridiculous as that argument actually is, given the different ways that votes are tallied already, even within the same county where some are tabulated by DRE on Election Day, others on optical-scan for absentees and provisionals, etc.). Virginia’s election contest statute requires only that the partisan legislators be convinced during a contest. Actual legal precedent and case law sort of go out the window at that point. Partisan preferences may take over instead.

While some Democrats are already suggesting that such a “win” by “contest” for Obenshain would amount to “stealing the election,” some partisan Republicans are suggesting he contest Fairfax County’s provisional votes which, they argue, should be disqualified since the Republican-majority electoral board changed procedures to allow the possibility of more votes — by supporters of either party — actually being included in the official final tally.

That said, according to the provisional ballot results carefully tracked by the Cook Political Report‘s Dave Wasserman, while 263 provisional votes were ultimately included in the Fairfax County AG totals, Herring increased his margin over Obenshain by just 57 with those votes. Thus, even if all of the Fairfax provisional ballots were to be tossed out of the final tally, Herring would still be the winner of Virginia’s 2013 attorney general race by 108 votes — unless, of course, the “recount” reduced the margin to fewer than 108 votes. Then, we may be left to watch the nukes fly in the VA state legislature.

During the last statewide “recount” in Virginia, the 2005 AG race, the final results were not determined until December 21 and that was without an election contest following the “recount.” So, yes, this one could potentially go until Christmas and even beyond. Yes, Santa Claus, there is a Virginia — where they may still be fighting over the November 5 AG race, even on Christmas Day.

Originally posted at The Brad Blog

Despite completely misreporting on administration emails related to the pretend Benghazi “scandal,” after they were misquoted (and/or fabricated) to him by a reportedly Republican source, ABC News and their White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl still refuse to properly correct and apologize for having lied about“obtaining” those emails.

Had Karl’s error — compounded by his “cover-up” even more than his original “crime” — contained news that falsely appeared good for Democrats instead of for Republicans, he would have been hammered and forever discredited by the right until finally fired by ABC News. But, alas, his completely false report on Benghazi benefited Republicans rather than Democrats, so no biggie, it seems. He gets to keep his career!

ABC’s Karl, however, wasn’t the only top-tier network newsman who blew it big time, further tarnishing the profession over the past week. Not by a long shot.

Here’s how NBC’s Brian Williams opened — opened! — NBC Nightly News last Tuesday, the same day that the Treasury Department’s Inspector General report was released, offering zero evidence of White House involvement in the so-called IRS “scandal”…

BRIAN WILLIAMS: “As a lot of American adults not so fondly remember, the last time the government was found looking into the phone calls of reporters and using the IRS for political purposes, it was the Nixon era, and while times have changed and circumstances are different, that subject came up at the Obama White House today as the administration now scrambles on several fronts.” (NBC Nightly News, May 14, 2013)

Odd. The “last time” we “not so fondly remember…the government…found looking into the phone calls of reporters and using the IRS for political purposes”, was during the George W. Bush era, not the Nixon era. Did Williams sleep through that decade? Seemingly so. Or, it’s safer to allude to the discredited Nixon than the off-scot-free Dubya. Or, Williams simply felt like lying to his audience. Either way, why has Williams also failed to correct or apologize for his grotesquely absurd, remarkably misleading and demonstrably inaccurate opening? And why has he seemingly faced little or no pressure to do so (unlike Karl) from others in the media?

Finally, the network Sunday news shows this week — what we were able to catch of them, anyway — proved to be the usual misinformative lockstep knee-jerkery that keeps us from even bothering to check in on them much anymore. From ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos (which, astonishingly failed to even mention Karl’s extraordinary journalistic lapse, but managed to end its broadcast nonetheless with the straight-faced voice-over: “ABC News: Accurate. Credible. Unmatched.”) to NBC’s Meet the Press to Fox “News” Sunday, they all pretended that last week’s week of “scandals” was on par with Watergate, Iran-Contra, Teapot Dome and other actual presidential scandals. That must be what they train for.

But the award for irresponsible knee-jerkery under the guise of seasoned journalistic commentary must certainly go to CBS’ Bob Schieffer, who, as seen on his Twitter account, appears quite proud of his breathless “dumb and dumber” finger-wagging on this week’s Face The Nation, despite its lack of tether to reality or verifiable facts…

So, ya didn’t even bother to read the IG’s report before describing the IRS scandal as “dumb and dumber”, did ya, Bob? We’ve sent that question to CBS and will update if we receive a response. But based on his commentary, it seems he clearly has not. Else, he could not have described the IRS as trying to “get away with” having “gone after the Tea Party” — not based on the currently existing evidence, anyway. Nor could he have made his completely irresponsible comparison to Watergate in the bargain.

So that’s a major fail, by the very highest echelons of each and every broadcast news outlet in a single week. And yet some dare to criticize us — a mere “blog” after all — for getting the story right, time and time again?! Seriously?!

5/15/13: “Republicans Suddenly Decide to Care About Big Government Overreach”
5/16/13: “‘Misconduct’?: What’s NOT in the Inspector General’s Report on IRS Identifying ‘Tea Party’ Groups for Additional Tax-Exempt Scrutiny”
5/17/13: “IRS ‘Scandal’ Appears Nearly as Phony as Shirley Sherrod, Van Jones, ACORN ‘Scandals'”

Originally posted at The Brad Blog

One month ago, The Miami Herald’sPatricia Mazzei unleashed an excellent investigative report on an attempted series of online cyberhacks of absentee ballot requests prior to last August’s primary election in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

Mazzei’s article describes the mysterious attempt by someone to request more than 2,500 absentee ballots for elections in three different Miami-Dade districts using anonymous proxy Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from foreign countries to hide the real identity of the requester. A grand jury looked into the matter [PDF] of the “phantom” requests, but was hamstrung by the fact that they were not told — the article says it was due to administrative confusion — that the initial IP addresses used to make the absentee ballot requests were actually not from overseas, but local to Miami-Dade. Had prosecutors had that information, they might have been able to zero in on the culprits, rather than close the investigation late last year without identifying a suspect.

The case has now reportedly been reopened, but the length of time since the initial event may have allowed the trail run cold. Hopefully we will find out soon.

Last week, the story suddenly received a lot of fresh attention after it was picked up by NBC News’ Gil Aegerter, who describes what happened as the “first known case” of such a cyberattack on a U.S. election.

Setting aside, for now, the point as to whether this is the first such attack — I’ve reported quite a bit of evidence of several others over the years (the NBC report links to a number of stories I’ve broken on these matters, including one of my stories at ComputerWorld in 2007 describing a malicious virus that struck Sarasota’s contested 2006 special election for the U.S. House where some 18,000 votes ultimately disappeared from the touchscreen voting machines) — there are a few key points and lessons from this story that I’d like to underscore, despite the fact that the mainstream corporate coverage has been pretty decent here for a change.

Additionally, one of several key remaining mysteries in the story — one that I’ve been trying to make sense of over the past several weeks, since learning of the story — may now have an answer, or at least a new and troubling clue.

Potential Clue to One of the Story’s Central Mysteries

Aside from the identity of the failed “bad guy(s)” here, and why the prosecutors weren’t originally notified about the Miami-Dade IP addresses in the first place, there has been another major “unknown” in the story originally headlined by The Miami Herald as “The case of the phantom ballots: an electoral whodunit.”

That “unknown” has been how the scheme was supposed to have affected the elections in question, had it not been discovered and stopped. Since the absentee ballot requests were made on behalf of “infrequent voters” (who would otherwise be unlikely to show up to vote in person), and scheduled to be sent to their normal address, where they are registered, how would anybody then be able to use those ballots to game the elections with fraudulent votes?

“It doesn’t make any sense to me why someone would do that, because you’d still need the person to [vote for you],” said one of the NJ-based consultants for two of the candidates (brothers) involved in two of the races.

“Had the requests been filled,” the Miami Herald’s Mazzei goes on to suggest, “short of stealing the ballots from mailboxes, the campaigns would have been able to flood the targeted voters with phone calls, fliers and home visits to try to sway their vote.”

“Persuade enough of them,” she suggests, “and you might flip the race.”

But that seems a fairly sloggy way to try and have an effect on election results. On Friday, BlackBoxVoting.org’s Bev Harris offers up a more reasonable (and disturbing) scheme that could have been planned here, had the operation not been interrupted before it fully played out.

She points out that the printing and mailing of absentee ballots is generally jobbed out to third-party contractors by election officials. The third parties are given the database of voters who have requested absentee ballots and then they take care of the job from there. Often, the company hired for this job is publicly known and vetted, but that contractor sometimes then hires yet another outfit to do the actual work of printing ballot envelopes and mailing them out to voters.

“If you have a few thousand strategically targeted extra ballots that you know are bogus, and you reroute the database to an off-the-public-record consultant during the print-and-mail phase, you can deliver those ballots anywhere you want,” Harris writes. “They can all be sent to the same address; no one would know.”

“I’m not sure what vendor Miami-Dade County is using to print and mail ballots; some Florida counties use Runbeck, out of Arizona by way of Tampa. But regardless of who they use, it isn’t the Miami-Dade elections people who actually do the mailing. Whoever does the print-and-mail phase has both the absentee request database and total control over where absentee ballots go.”

The scheme, as Harris envisions it, then would require a “bad guy” to make the absentee ballot requests and an accomplice either at the final print-and-mail outfit — or somewhere else along the chain of custody of the absentee ballot database — to change the addresses where those illegitimately requested ballots were to be sent. As prosecutors are said to be looking into this case again, they may want to ask some questions of whoever might have received access to that absentee ballot request database.

See the BBV article for a bit more background on some of the shady players who can be found in the absentee ballot print-and-mailing business, as well as a few more details on potential suspects in the FL case revealed by common threads between the three elections in question.

The several other points that I wanted to flag here are as follows:

Vote-by-Mail is a Terrible Idea

—We have long decried the many perils of absentee balloting and Vote-by-Mail (VBM) elections. This latest FL hack points out just another reason why VBM is always troubling and, far and away, the most frequent place where ballot fraud is known to occur. Republicans love to suggest that (Democratic) voters are committing fraud by misrepresenting themselves at the polling place — thus, draconian, disenfranchising polling place photo ID restrictions are needed, they pretend. But they know they are lying. That type of fraud is incredibly rare. They know that most of this type of chicanery, where it exists, is done via absentee balloting, which polling place photo ID restrictions that Republicans are pushing in state after state, does absolutely nothing to deter.

Adding in the points raised by Harris about how absentee ballot databases are often processed outside of public oversight, and you’ve got another reason to be concerned. Such ballots, she notes, “need never be mailed at all,” if a bad operator decides to game an election in this way.

You Call That a “Safeguard”?!

—The Miami Herald story offered one disturbing revelation that I haven’t seen commented upon elsewhere. Moreover, it’s reported as a “feature,” as opposed to a “bug” in the Miami-Dade online absentee ballot request system.

“There are other safeguards, too,” Mazzei notes in describing how the attack was stymied when the software flagged the suspicious activity as coming from several single IP addresses. “When a voter submits an absentee request online, Miami-Dade doesn’t automatically send a ballot. The request is reviewed by an elections department staffer, who must manually sign off on sending it.”

That is considered a “safeguard”?! I’d consider that very troubling, frankly. It means that one election official can determine whether or not any number of voters actually receive the absentee ballot they’ve requested. It sounds like a great way for a “bad guy” election insider to suppress the votes of just about anybody they may choose.

The Most Disturbing Aspect: The Menace of Internet Voting

—The real message in this story is not about the perils of online registration and absentee ballot requests systems, even though that has, understandably, been at the center of most of the coverage. The real message here is about the dangers of using the internet for voting! The push for online voting has, insanely, been increasing over the past year or so. We’ve taken to describing it as the Internet Voting Virus as it spreads to places like California, where even Democrats are ignoring virtually every world-class computer science and security expert in order to push for this horrible idea.

In the NBC report, a number of the experts we’ve turned to over the years in our own stories and interviews here are quoted trying to offer those same warnings again, in the wake of what happened in the case of the failed online absentee ballot requests.

J. Alex Halderman, the University of MI computer science professor behind the successful remote hack of a mock Internet Voting system, which had been set to be used in a real election in Washington D.C. the following month in 2010, and the hack of a touchscreen voting machine that turned it, literally, into a game of Pac Man, tries to warn that the failed cyberattack in Florida was just the tip of the iceberg.

He explained to NBC’s Aegerter that “an attack somewhat more sophisticated than the one in Florida, completely within the norm for computer fraud these days, would likely be able to circumvent the checks.”

David Jefferson of Livermore National Laboratory, and a member of the Board of Directors at Verified Voting, once again warns, as he has many times here in the past, that the security of electronic voting and registration systems currently in use, as well as the insane schemes currently being used and planned for internet voting, are serious threats to national security. “The legitimacy of government depends on it being impossible for single parties to change the results of elections,” he told Aegerter.

“Whoever did this is clearly capable of engaging in online registration fraud (in states such as Maryland and Washington with weak authentication),” Jefferson told me via email some weeks ago, “or online vote fraud.”

Jeremy Epstein, a senior computer scientist at SRI International, warns about the perils of internet voting in the NBC story as well. “The overwhelming consensus of the computer science community is don’t do it, it’s a bad idea.”

And, finally, Cleveland State University’s election integrity expert and law professor Candice Hoke cut right to the chase, warning that while politicians may see internet voting as a way to increase turnout for their voters and election officials may see such schemes as a way to save money on polling sites, ballot printing costs and manual labor, the real costs to democracy ultimately outweigh everything else.

“It’s cheap,” she said, “if you don’t care whether elections are stolen.”

Originally posted at The Brad Blog

Pretend journalist and Republican activist Hannah Giles agreed to pay $50,000 to former San Diego ACORN worker Juan Carlos Vera as a part of a legal settlement struck last summer in response to an invasion of privacy lawsuit filed against her and her former partner James O’Keefe, Vera’s attorney Eugene Iredale has confirmed to The BRAD BLOG.

Last week, in a scoop on Wonkette, it was disclosed that O’Keefe, a federal criminal and professional liar, agreed to pay $100,000 in his own legal settlement with the same former ACORN employee, after heading up the scheme to secretly videotape him in violation of California’s Invasion of Privacy Act (Cal. Penal Code § 632).

O’Keefe and Giles’ illicit taping of Vera was carried out as part of the deceptively edited series of hit videos released by the pair in 2009. The tapes were published, and paid for, by the late conman Andrew Breitbart. Vera had been portrayed in the misleading video as having been willing to help the pair smuggle underage prostitutes into the United States across the Mexican border. In fact, Vera had played along with the duo’s ridiculous proposed scheme only long enough to collect information from O’Keefe and Giles (and take their photographs), before contacting law enforcement immediately after the secretly videotaped meeting.

Giles played the role of a prostitute in the ACORN “pimp” hoax videos. O’Keefe played her boyfriend. O’Keefe did not play the part of a “pimp,” as he had knowingly misrepresented in both the videos and to the public, and as repeatedly misreported by the bulk of the mainstream media at the time, and even still today.

During the course of Vera’s lawsuit, it was revealed that Breitbart, who died in March of 2012, had paid the pair some $125,000 for their hoax tapes, with O’Keefe collecting $65,000 to Giles’ $60,000, most of which she has now been forced to turn over to Vera.

Despite the real facts of the Vera case being known since at least April of 2010 — when a criminal investigation by the California attorney general found “no criminality” by Vera or any of the other ACORN employees seen in the videos — the original stories on the hoax videos remain published on the Breitbart website without correction, as we noted in our detailed report on O’Keefe’s settlement with Vera last week.

As we reported once again at the time, every official law enforcement investigation on the matter — including those by the former MA Attorney General [PDF], by the Kings County, NY District Attorney, and by the CA attorney general — determined that there were no violations of law committed by any ACORN worker as seen in any of the surreptitiously taped videos. Each official investigation found that the tapes were “highly” and “deceptively” edited to present a false case against ACORN.

O’Keefe had attempted to fight for dismissal of Vera’s July 2010 lawsuit but lost in court on every attempt to do so. While it took O’Keefe until this past week to see the writing on the wall and finally agree to settle with Vera, Giles was smart enough to settle her own part of the lawsuit with Vera last summer. Giles’ settlement agreement had been reported by Dave Maass of the San Diego City Beat at the time, but the conditions of that settlement and Giles’ agreement to pay out $50,000 to the former ACORN worker had not been known.

Asked during his sworn deposition why he didn’t attempt to confirm the false story given to him by Vera before publishing his videotapes, O’Keefe, who still pretends to be a “journalist,” explained: “I did want to follow up. I just didn’t end up following up.”

After those revelations, it appeared likely that Breitbart might have been pulled into Vera’s lawsuit and named as a defendant as well. Moreover, he might have even faced criminal liability in the matter.

For their part, O’Keefe and Giles received criminal immunity from the CA attorney general in exchange for providing the office with the previously unreleased, unedited versions of the videotapes. The AG’s probe found no violations of the law by ACORN workers, but the report did note that the secret recordings appeared to be in violation of CA’s Privacy Act. While the immunity deal spared the duo from criminal prosecution for violation of that law in the state, it did not protect them against civil enforcement of the act, such as that brought by Vera. Nor did it protect Breitbart, who, it was discovered through depositions from O’Keefe and Giles in the lawsuit, had prior knowledge of the illicit videotaping at several ACORN offices in California. He could have been charged with a criminal violation of CA law, as well as being named as a defendant in Vera’s suit.

Vera says that the videotapes, widely promoted by right-wing outlets such as Fox “News” (and many non-right-wing outlets as well) without any fact-checking whatsoever, resulted in tarnishing his reputation. He says he has had difficulty finding work ever since.

“My reputation was in the garbage,” he told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz last week in broken English, adding that while the settlement could be seen as a victory, he felt “sad” because ACORN, who had “very good programs,” was put out of business after the O’Keefe/Giles/Breitbart campaign.

ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, had been a four-decades-old nationwide nonprofit group dedicated to fighting against predatory lending practices and assisting millions of low- and middle-income American families in obtaining housing loans, as well as participate in their democracy by legally registering to vote. Vera was just one of tens of thousands of employees who lost their jobs as a result of the right-wing political hit job on the organization, which was forced to shut its doors in the wake of the manufactured scandal.

Since news of O’Keefe’s settlement with Vera broke last week, the right-wing grifter has taken to his website and Twitter in an attempt to claim his innocence, despite the settlement.

He described media coverage of the settlement agreement as “lies and lies and more lies from journafascists” and attempted to taunt the media to “have the guts” to allow him to tell his side of the story. We took him up on that offer and invited him to appear on our KPFK/Pacifica Radio show this Wednesday. O’Keefe has yet to “have the guts” to even respond to our invitation.

Originally posted at The Brad Blog

Former San Diego ACORN worker Juan Carlos Vera will receive $100,000 in a settlement from federal criminal and professional liar James O’Keefe, after being secretly videotaped in violation of California law by the right-wing propagandist. The tape was just one in a series of similar videos, all deceptively edited as part of his 2009 ACORN “pimp” hoax series.

The story of the settlement was originally broken by Wonkette, which published the three-page settlement document [PDF], yesterday.

Several official investigations, including those by the former MA attorney general [PDF], the Kings County, NY district attorney, and the CA attorney general all determined that there were no violations of law by any ACORN worker seen in the surreptitiously taped videos. The officials found the tapes were “highly” and “deceptively” edited.

The videos were published originally by the late Republican con-man Andrew Breitbart, who, before he died of heart failure just over a year ago, was likely to have been pulled into the civil case as well, after disclosures that he had paid O’Keefe for the videos and had advance knowledge of the scheme to secretly videotape workers in violation of CA’s Invasion of Privacy Act.

After Breitbart’s publication, the edited tapes were widely covered, without fact-checking, in both the right-wing media such as Fox “News” and non-right-wing media such as the New York Times. The Times was eventually forced to issue partial corrections for their inaccurate reporting after a six-month effort by The BRAD BLOG to point out how they’d been duped by O’Keefe, who had lied about appearing as a 70s-era “Blaxploitation”-style pimp in the offices of ACORN.

A 2010 investigation by the CA attorney general determined there was “no criminality” by ACORN workers seen in any of the raw videotapes. O’Keefe and his partner Hannah Giles agreed to turn over the unedited tapes in exchange for immunity from criminal prosecution in the state. “The evidence illustrates that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality,” California’s then AG Jerry Brown said in a statement accompanying the release of his office’s investigation, which “involved attorneys from all three legal divisions – criminal law, public rights, and civil law – as well as special agents from the department’s Bureau of Investigation and Intelligence.”

“Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor,” he added.

While the deal left the AG’s office unable to prosecute the duo, the criminal investigation found that O’Keefe and Giles likely violated the civil provisions of CA’s Privacy Act and could be sued under those provisions “for recording a confidential conversation without consent.” Vera, who, after his odd meeting with O’Keefe and Giles had the wherewithal to contact the police, sued both of them in July of 2010 for violations of the act.

Giles had the common sense to settle with Vera last summer after a string of losses in court. O’Keefe, on the other hand, attempted to argue a First Amendment privilege as a “journalist” to secretly videotape Vera. Judge M. James Lorenz soundly rejected the argument in May of 2011, but O’Keefe persisted in his unsuccessful defense.

O’Keefe now finally faces at least some accountability in the settlement, which, in addition to agreeing to pay $100,000 to the former ACORN employee, notes that he “regrets any pain suffered by Mr. Vera or his family.”

Thousands of ACORN workers were left unemployed by the O’Keefe/Giles/Breitbart stunt after the U.S. Congress also fell for it. In 2010 they passed legislation, signed by President Obama, that federally defunded the four-decades-old community organization that advocated to end predatory lending practices and helped millions of low- and middle-income Americans obtain housing loans and legally register to vote. The group was forced to shut its doors in the wake of the manufactured scandal.

While O’Keefe, Giles and Breitbart helped perpetrate the long-held GOP lie that ACORN was involved in voter fraud, there is not one piece of known evidence to demonstrate that even one illegal vote was ever cast thanks to an improper registration by any of the organization’s tens of thousands of voter-registration workers.

The only question now: Will any of those other ACORN workers who were improperly fired due to O’Keefe’s illegal, secret videotapes file suit against him as well?

UPDATE: Conor Friedersdorf’s coverage of the Vera/O’Keefe settlement over at The Atlantic points out that, to this day, Breitbart’s “news” site, where the fake ACORN stories were originally published, still has the original inaccurate story sliming Vera — published as is, with no correction, even though it was long ago debunked as nonsense, and even since O’Keefe has agreed to apologize and pay him $100,000 in the settlement as described above. Read more here.