The Brad Blog has a PDF of the absentee ballot sent to citizens in Rensselaer County (upstate New York, in the Capital Region -- Albany, Schenectady and Troy). On the ballot, Barack Obama has been printed as "Barack Osama." There is cause for worry as the county website says the absentee ballot "looks exactly like the ballot on the voting machine."

The Board of Elections is composed of a Democrat and a Republican. Citizens can only receive an absentee ballot with cause. The Albany (NY) Times-Union reports that about 300 citizens received the ballots.

See An Overview of Election Fraud and An Illustrated History of Voting Systems.

According to the New York Post, ACORN is under investigation in at least nine states for allegations of voter fraud. In Ohio, the Post interviewed a man who asserts that ACORN representatives gave him "cash and cigarettes ... in exchange for registering an astonishing 72 times."

ACORN is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. It is currently at the center of a Republican effort to link Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) to negative headlines. Obama was a community organizer before becoming a state legislator.

Read more...

The Senate voted 74-25-1 to endorse the Wall Street bailout. I decided to look at the 25 (15 Republicans), to see how many are up for re-election this year. Here's the tally: Read more...

According to the Christian Science Monitor, 20-year-old David Kernell,  son of Rep. Mike Kernell (D), chair of the Tennessee Government Operations Committee, has pleaded not guilty to one felony count of "accessing a computer without permission." See the indictment (pdf).

Gov. Palin's personal Yahoo! email account was hacked into in September. You can see hacked material on WikiLeaks. Kernell turned himself in after he learned that he would be charged.

Internet response is interesting. A senior editor at ZDNet seems to think the crime is no big deal. Given that a Hawaiian postal carrier was sentenced to only six months for stealing mail -- maybe he's right. But it takes a lot more initiative -- and premediation -- to break into someone's personal email account than it does to fail to deliver a piece of mail.

Here's the federal statute on mail: Read more...