Following the voting fiasco on primary day, Maryland state elections Administrator Linda Lamone issued a 10-pointplan to ensure a glitch-free November election. It includes training election judges, firing those who arrive late at the polls, and providing clear assignments for poll workers.
Good ideas! Where were they before the election?
One wonders if the election chiefs have the administrative ability to organize a three-car funeral.
Her belated concern about the state?s malfunctioning Diebold electronic poll books is also late. “Diebold needs to demonstrate to me that the poll books work 100 percent,” Lamone said Monday. “If I?m not 100 percent satisfied that this system works, we will not use [the system] on election day.”
The state?s new e-poll books misidentified the party affiliation of voters, froze voter registration lists, and in some cases didn?t allow voters who had checked in electronically on one machine to cast ballots on another. Diebold said Monday it had solved the design flaw that caused the problems. But even if they are fixed, they are not the only potential electronic hazard.
The voting machines are vulnerable to security breaches.
The latest academic to show this was Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten. Earlier this month he and two of his grad students replaced memory cards in Diebold touch-screen voting machines in less than a minute with similar cards programmed to steal votes ? then modify the machine?s records to hide the fraud.
These inexcusable problems validate what Linda Schade, founder of TrueVoteMD, and others have been saying for years about the danger of relying solely on computers during an election.
The state spent more than $100 million on electronic voting machines, but some Maryland candidates had to rush to court to keep the polls in Baltimore and Montgomery open until 9 p.m. to make up for the snafus.
Had every polling place been required to use paper ballots as a backup until all electronic voting machines were retrofitted with voter-verified paper receipts, the Third World disaster that erupted primary day could have been prevented.
Gov. Robert Ehrlich supported legislation earlier this year that would have done exactly that. But the state Senate rejected it, instead passing a early voting law recently declared unconstitutional by the courts.
Despite numerous studies and many real-life examples of serious problems with electronic voting machines, “the State Board of Elections refused to implement a safety net,” Schade told The Examiner. “That can only be called willful disenfranchisement.”
The general election is in Nov. 7. They now have about one month to get it right.
