http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/20/AR2006092001356.html
washingtonpost.com
State Election Chief Says Staff Toiling to Fix Electronic
Glitches
By Christian Davenport and Ann E. Marimow
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 21, 2006; A01
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.
"When in doubt, go paper, go low-tech," he said.
Linda H. Lamone, the administrator of the Maryland State
Board of Elections, quickly denounced the plan to swap voting systems just
seven weeks before the general election as "crazy." And Senate
President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) said it "cannot happen. It
will not happen."
Ehrlich said that, if necessary, he would call a special
session of the Maryland General Assembly to change the law to allow paper
ballots. But Miller and House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel)
dismissed the idea of a special session, saying elections officials should
focus instead on fixing the current system.
"We paid millions. These are state-of-the-art
machines," said Miller, who called Ehrlich's announcement a political ploy
to energize his Republican supporters.
In Montgomery and Prince George's counties yesterday,
election officials continued to count the thousands of paper provisional
ballots that could determine the outcome of the 4th Congressional District
Democratic primary race between incumbent U.S. Rep. Albert R. Wynn and
challenger Donna Edwards. Prince George's officials cracked opened 26 machines
yesterday and retrieved votes that had not been counted.
The problems playing out in Maryland have created unease
elsewhere in the nation, where more than 80 percent of voters will use
electronic voting machines in the Nov. 7 election and a third of all precincts
are using them for the first time.
Ehrlich's statement came after a State Board of Public Works
hearing at which Lamone said her staff would "work around the clock"
to correct the problems that plagued the primary. She vowed that her office
would help local election boards retrain judges, recruit new ones and force
Diebold Election Systems to fix the problems that caused some of its machines
to malfunction.
The idea of switching systems now worried local election
officials who said testing new equipment and educating election judges and
voters about a new system would be a daunting -- if not impossible -- task.
"There isn't a lot of time," said Marjorie Roher,
a spokeswoman for the Montgomery Board of Elections.
Henry Fawell, a spokesman for Ehrlich, said the governor's
top priority is to replace the electronic poll books, used to check in voters.
But he said Ehrlich "is also interested in moving voters to a paper ballot
for this year's general election."
"He realizes it's a tall order," Fawell said. But
moving to paper ballots would "eliminate the chronic problems that
electronic voting machines demonstrated [Sept. 12] with respect to crashing and
susceptibility to tampering."
In the spring, Ehrlich advocated leasing optical scan
machines that use paper ballots, a proposal that won unanimous support in the
House of Delegates but was rejected by the Senate.
Many of the problems that marred this month's primary
resulted from human error. Election judges in Baltimore failed to show up,
meaning the polls opened late. In Montgomery, voting at nearly all 238
precincts was delayed because officials forgot to distribute plastic cards
needed to operate voting machines.
In Prince George's, election officials struggled to transmit
data electronically from polling places to a central office on election night,
delaying the counting process for hours. In the days since, they have also
discovered that dozens of memory cards were not counted after the election;
some remained locked in voting machines for days.
Yesterday, county election officials began opening selected
machines to locate the missing cards and capture the voting information
contained on them.
Also yesterday, Gene Raynor, the Baltimore election
director, resigned, saying Lamone and the General Assembly "have set
dangerous precedents that, in my opinion, threaten the integrity of November's
elections." Raynor previously sat on the State Board of Elections, where
he had joined members in trying to oust Lamone two years ago.
There were also technical problems during the primary,
mainly with the electronic poll books that were used in the state for the first
time. They replaced the paper printouts of the voter registration rolls,
allowing election judges to check in voters electronically.
Some crashed and needed to be rebooted, election judges
reported. Others failed to transmit the name of a checked-in voter to the other
machines in the same polling place. That meant, theoretically, that a voter
could cast more than one ballot. Officials said they had no evidence of any
voter fraud.
Lamone said the electronic poll books, purchased from
Diebold in June and July, were tested in the days before the election. But
those tests did not reveal any problems.
Mark Radke, a Diebold spokesman, said many of the poll books
crashed because software created exclusively for Maryland caused the machines'
memories to fill up after about 40 people had checked in to vote.
He said the company was investigating the synchronization
problems.
But Ehrlich said he wasn't willing to risk the possibility
that such glitches would remain for the November election, in which he is
seeking a second term.
"I'm not sure we can afford another experiment,"
Ehrlich said after the Board of Public Works hearing. "I want to play it
safe."
His position was supported in the hearing by Avi Rubin, a
Johns Hopkins University computer scientist who worked as an elections judge
during the primary and has long been critical of the touch-screen voting
machines.
Gilles W. Burger, chairman of the State Board of Elections,
said his panel has requested that Diebold officials appear at its meeting
Tuesday.
"Their feet are going to be held to the fire,"
Burger said.
Maryland's election law leaves it to the State Elections
Board to pick a voting system and certify its reliability and security. Mark
Davis, the assistant attorney general who represents the board, said it has
already performed required tests on the touch-screen machines.
"The board feels it would be catastrophic to try to do
that for another system between now and the general election," he said.
"It just doesn't make any sense."
Staff writer Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this
report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company