Maryland election officials have disqualified a petition signed by thousands of registered voters opposed to the General Assembly?s early voting law that changes Election Day into Election Week.
Overriding a gubernatorial veto, lawmakers in Annapolis opted to let voters cast ballots from Tuesday through Saturday the week before primary and general elections, a move that prompted The Wall Street Journal to blast the General Assembly as “the worst state legislature in America.”
Marylanders for Fair Elections submitted more than 21,000 signatures; this past Wednesday, the group learned that after an initial count it fell 138 names short of the 17,062 needed to get the issue on the November ballot. Too bad, because early voting is a very bad idea ? especially in Maryland.
Absentee ballots already accommodate people who cannot make it to the polls on Election Day.
Early voting goes far beyond that reasonable concession. Despite last year?s recommendation by a national bipartisan committee, Maryland is one of just two states with early voting that does not require voters to present any form of identification, making it extremely difficult to detect voter fraud. This serious problem is compounded when an election lasts a week instead of a day. The solution to long lines is more polling stations, not longer elections.
Voters who go to the wrong polling places or are not listed on the voting rolls in their home precincts will receive provisional ballots and be allowed to cast them anywhere in the state, bypassing the verification process that precinct-based voter registration provides. That means people could vote in multiple counties without being detected until after the votes are certified.
Maryland is also the only state to allow early voting without a verifiable paper trail. Avi Rubin, a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins University, recently acknowledged that the state?s Diebold touchscreen machines were so vulnerable to hacking that he was deliberately withholding details for fear of inciting cyber attacks. Yet the State Board of Elections recently signed a no-bid contract with the same company for 200 electronic pollbooks needed to implement early voting ? eliminating the last remaining safeguards against voter fraud.
Knowing they won?t be caught exponentially increases the chances that unscrupulous individuals will try to tamper with election results.
Allowing early voting only in handpicked Democratic strongholds is also patently unfair. Not surprisingly, the conference committee that devised this nefarious scheme had six Democrats ? and no Republicans. This is even more egregious given Maryland Democrats? 2-to-1 voter registration advantage. To paraphrase early voting proponent Rep. Chris Van Hollen, R-Md.: What are Democrats afraid of?
Last, but certainly not least, Maryland taxpayers will be forced to pay millions of dollars to compromise the integrity of their own electoral process. This is nothing if not banana republic-style democracy.
