“Maybe I didn?t lose after all,” quipped Comptroller William Donald Schaefer at Board of Public Works meeting Tuesday where the state elections chief detailed how she planned to remedy the problems of last week?s primary and a computer expert raised his continuing doubts about electronic voting equipment.
“It would be funny if it wasn?t so serious,” said Schaefer, who, at the meeting squarely placed the blame on Gov. Robert Ehrlich who sat beside him, and his staff.
After the meeting, Ehrlich said, “potentially, we need to convene a special session” of the Legislature to put in new voting equipment, but even his own policy chief downplayed getting the legislature involved with only 48 days to go the general election. The governor reacted mildly to Schaefer?s criticism. “I think he blames everyone” for his loss, Ehrlich said.
“Now our job is to fix it,” said Linda Lamone, the state elections administrator. “We?re well on our way to doing that.”
She listed a series of steps she would take with local elections officials that include:
» More training and retraining for elections judges on computers
» Giving local boards help in recruiting judges, since some failed to show up on election day
» Fixing Diebold e-poll book machines on which a computer glitch caused some machinesto restart (reboot), confusing judges
» Public testing of these poll books in each county
» Double-checking voting machines and procedures
» Installing phone lines or providing cell phones in polling places like churches that don?t have them.
Lamone said the touch-screen voting machines worked fine, based on random parallel testing her staff did on election day. But she said the polling book glitches, where the machines froze or didn?t communicate properly, were “intolerable,” and must be fixed by the manufacturer.
Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Avi Rubin, who served as an election judge, testified, “I don?t see a solution to the computer failure halfway through the day,” other than paper registration records used in the past. Ehrlich favors this solution.
Rubin said he continues to “have very deep concerns about the security” of the actual voting machines, and he said he would have preferred to use the paper optical-scan ballots that would have been provided by a bill that passed the House of Delegates this year, but failed to get out off a Senate committee.
