The state’s 19,000 electronic voting machines are running smoothly and will be able to handle any influx of ballots come Election Day, Maryland Elections Administrator Linda Lamone said Wednesday.
That number of machines represents an 18 percent increase over the past presidential election compared to a 9 percent increase in voter registration this year, Lamone said. The state has voting machines on reserve to replace any that malfunction, and each has been tested by outside contractors who have had criminal background checks.
In addition, the state will perform a random audit of random machines from each county on Nov. 4.
“This system has a very heavy winter blanket of security over it,” Lamone said.
Next month’s election marks the eighth when electronic voting machines have been used in Maryland and could be the last. State lawmakers have mandated the use of machine-readable paper ballots to produce a verifiable record in the 2010 election.
Voting machines have been tested by marking paper ballots at the same time voters are entered in electronically. Lamone said that in recent past tests, “the only discrepancy found was in the hand tally” of the paper ballot.
Lamone emphasized that the touch-screen machines are not networked and are not connected to the Internet. The voting information is contained on a card within the machine, which is held in by tamper-proof tape. If there is any evidence the tape has been disturbed, the machine is not supposed to be used.
Election workers have been verifying more than 360,000 new registered voters, slightly fewer than in the 2004 presidential election.
“We have not seen any of the problems we’ve seen in other states,” Lamone said. “We have not seen any evidence of voter fraud.”
New registrants must supply either their driver’s license or Social Security number, and that information is verified with the Motor Vehicle Administration and cross-checked with vital statistics for deaths and with the judicial system database for convictions of disqualifying crimes.
The most common reasons voter registration applications are rejected are: failure to sign the form, failure to provide the driver’s license number or failure to provide the last four digits of the Social Security number, Lamone said.
