State elections board members, clearly upset at the problems in the Sept. 12 primary, grilled representatives of the maker of the registration and voting equipment on Tuesday, and told them they needed to fix all the computer problems and provide better training and support for the general election in 40 days.
At the outset of the meeting, board Chairman Gilles Burger apologized to the voters, saying that the election board “let the Maryland citizens down.”
Even if only one voter was turnedaway ? and many more than that had problems ? “I believe our election administration failed,” Burger said. “We will work around the clock” to fix the problems.
Burger himself had problems voting when an e-poll registration book froze up, as they did thousands of times, and others on the five-person board told of problems they had heard about directly.
Michael Lindroos, vice president and counsel of Diebold Election Systems, had a different view of primary day.
“We felt in many ways we had a wonderful election,” since there were no significant problems with the electronic voting machines.
As to the problems with the electronic registration books, which create the electronic voting cards, “we jumped on it, we found it and we fixed it,” Lindroos said.
The answers didn?t satisfy to the board, which, in the last four years, approved spending $106 million on the equipment. They described confused election judges, frustrated voters and poorly trained technicians. Burger said it should be Diebold that solves computer glitches on Election Day, not the judges running the polls.
“I would like to see more technical support,” Burger said. “It?s not the equipment per se.”
He said he was also concerned about the 500 temporary technicians hired without extensive background checks.
Diebold officials insisted that the registration software had been used before in Georgia and had been tested. What was new in Maryland was the use of a pop-up message box with a voter?s information. It was this box that caused the machines to freeze up after 43 people had voted, and Diebold had never tested this feature.
Steven Hertzberg, of the Election Science Institute in San Francisco, who attended the meeting, said that Diebold has “not sufficiently field tested” its equipment, using its clients to do the testing for them.
“This has happened over and over and over again,” Hertzberg said.
