When it comes to Maryland elections, a lot has gone missing lately — poll workers, voter cards, voting machines, data disks.
But this week, a former delegate found three Maryland State Board of Elections computer disks holding voting machine source codes left outside the door of her Olney office. Cheryl Kagan, a critic of Board of Elections head Linda Lamone, said Wednesday morning’s discovery of the disks has raised unsettling questions.
“How many copies of this software are there? If they sent it to me, is it possible that there are a dozen other copies out there?” Kagan asked Friday. “My understanding is that, with this software, a person of ill intent could disable a machine or skew an election.”
The anonymous arrival of the software comes less than three weeks before the Nov. 7 general election and as Montgomery and Prince George’s counties work to prevent a repeat of mistakes made during the Sept. 12 primary election.
A spokeswoman for the Montgomery County Board of Elections said the discovery does not affect the county’s preparations for the Nov. 7 general election.
“Montgomery County remains confident of our security practices and the operation of the touch-screen voting machines,” Marjorie Roher said. “They are kept secured at all times.”
But leaders at TrueVoteMd, a Takoma Park-based advocacy group, saidthe voting process still is flawed.
“These voting systems have so many security holes,” said co-founder Linda Schade, “it’s like trying to plug all the holes in a colander. You just can’t come up with enough Band-Aids.”
Schade called the Diebold voting machines and accompanying electronic voter registration books “incredibly problematic.”
“I am confident that the voting system will not perform well in November,” Schade said. “What I can’t say is how visible it would be. These things could be tampered with without detection.”
Roher said Montgomery County has instituted a system of checks and balances to make sure voter cards arrive at precincts in time for polls to open on schedule.
The county still needed about 100 election workers and 150 substitutes out of about 2,700 total poll workers as of Friday afternoon. Roher said she wasn’t worried that the board would have to turn to contingency plans.
“Normally in Montgomery County, we’re pretty well-staffed,” Roher said. “We may not have the additional folks we want, but we always meet the requirement.”
As for the disks, the matter of who delivered them to Kagan has been brought to the attention of the Baltimore offices of the FBI.
“We have been contacted and it is under review by our office,” said spokeswoman Michelle Crnkovich.
Kagan said she’s hardly reassured that the election will go off without controversy.
“I’m worried about it,” Kagan said. “I personally have requested an absentee ballot. I know that an increasingly large number of Marylanders have done the same thing.”
