Voters who need an absentee ballot today because they are leaving town might be out of luck, a member of the Maryland Board of Elections said Monday.
More than 1.1 million absentee ballots have been printed, but that may not be enough.
Gov. Robert Ehrlich is recommending that voters request absentee ballots because of his concerns about the reliability and security of electronic voting equipment. This has produced a flood of applications to local elections board.
More than 161,000 ballots had been requested as of Monday morning, almost three times the number who actually voted absentee four years ago.
Elections staff reported that local elections officials are doing their best to meet emergency requests.
In one case, Jessica Jordan, who manages the State Elections Voard Web site, reported that a county official planned to meet a departing voter at the airport with a ballot.
Voters may also go in person to their local board and vote, just as Ehrlich running mate Kristen Cox did Monday morning in Baltimore County.
“The reality is that … some voters won?t get their ballot,” said Joan Beck, on the five-member state board. “It?s going to come back and bite us.”
Diebold Election Systems makes the voting machines and prints the absentee and provisional ballots which are counted by optical scanners. Diebold executives told the board that boards have ordered three times what they originally projected, and there is one less week between the primary and general election than there was in 2002.
This has forced the company to phase delivery to different counties, and use three printing shops in addition to their own. In Prince George?s and Montgomery counties, the ballots are two pages.
Board Chairman Gilles Burger wondered “Why have the local boards of election been panicky?”
There has been a shortage in some counties of some of the several hundred different ballot styles, but the sheer volume has made it difficult for most boards to cope.
If they run out of a ballot, they can also copy one.
Fresh concerns were also raised about the security of the Diebold machines by Stephen Spoonamore, chief executive officer of Cybrinth in Washington, which investigates security intrusions on information technology. But Burger said he didn?t want to take any testimony from him in an open meeting because of his own security concerns.
