Big Dan's Big News Dec 19, 2007

(click on chart to see 2004 exit poll discrepancies; voting news in red below)

· Longtime readers of this site know that the history of TPM is rather intertwined with the history of the 2002 New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal. In case you don't remember, that's the case where the state Republican party (almost certainly with the knowledge and probably with the cooperation of the national party) hired a phone bank to jam the phones of the Dems' and the local firefighters' GOTV phone banks. The guy close to the center of the whole scam was the media operative/consultant hired to run the operation, Allen Raymond. And he's written a new tell-all book, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative.(h/t z)

· More on the "New England Phone Jammer": A former GOP political operative who ran an illegal election-day scheme to jam the phone lines of New Hampshire Democrats during the state's tight 2002 U.S. Senate election said in a new book and an interview that he believes the scandal reaches higher into the Republican Party. Raymond's book, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative" (Christ! Does anyone think this is a huge story? A REPUBLICAN WRITES A BOOK ABOUT HOW REPUBLICANS STEAL ELECTIONS!)

· Ohio Will Likely Face Big Vote-Counting Problems in 2008; Election officials in the presidential battleground state will have no one but themselves to blame because they ignored real solutions for months.

· BREAKING: Colorado's Republican Sec. of State Decertifies E-Voting Machines After Failed Testing; All Voting Systems by ES&S Completely Decertified; DRE Touch-Screens from Sequoia Banned; Optical-Scan Paper Systems by Hart InterCivic Banned; All Systems by Diebold/Premier Conditionally ALLOWED for Use!; SoS Admits Federal Certification Process, Now Overseen by Former CO SoS on Behalf of EAC, 'Has Been Very Weak to Date'...(bd: WE have ES&S e-vote machines here in Luzerne County, and I keep seeing them being decertified all across the country!)

· BREAKING: Judge Orders Release of Pima County, AZ Voting Database; Diebold's GEMS Tabulator Files, Containing Data from '06 Election, Ordered Released to Democratic Party Experts for Scrutiny, Possible Release to Full Public; Decision Seen as Important Victory for Election Integrity Advocates...

· Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (contains a history of e-vote machines that will scare you!)

· Landslide Denied: Exit Polls vs. Vote Count 2006

· Bush: Iraq doesn’t have nukes…obviously. (Laughter) Yesterday at a speech in Virginia, President Bush was forced to correct his own misinformation campaign when a questioner mistakenly said that Iraq currently has nuclear weapons: Q But I’m concerned about the nations like Iraq, who now have nuclear weapons – THE PRESIDENT: Iran. Q Iran and Iraq both. THE PRESIDENT: Not Iraq. (Laughter.)

· Gonzales, Cheney's Lawyer Plotted Over CIA Torture Tapes

· Remember "the terrorists" who were going to supposedly blow up the Sears Tower? One Aquitted, Mistrial For The Other Six

· Buyers at Risk: Christmas Season of Toxic Recalls; Who is out there protecting Americans from these hidden hazards? Practically no one.