Maryland state elections administrator Linda Lamone has came up with a 10-point plan supposedly to ensure a glitch-free election in November, including training election judges, firing tardy poll judges and providing clear assignments for poll workers — things that should already be done as a matter of course.
Lamone warned in a letter to Montgomery, Prince George’s, Anne Arundel and Baltimore officials that “your immediate and full attention to this plan of corrective action is imperative to restore public confidence in the election process.” But she has systematically undermined public confidence by stubbornly insisting the state’s Diebold electronic voting system works just fine.
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The latestacademic to prove otherwise was Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten, who earlier this month revealed that in less than a minute, he and two grad students replaced memory cards in Diebold touch-screen voting machines with similar cards programmed to steal votes and then modify the machine’s records to cover up the fraud.
To date, we still don’t know why Montgomery County’s 238 precincts didn’t all have the 13,000 access cards needed to operate their Diebold machines by 7 a.m. on primary day — or exactly who had custody of them in the meantime. But even if this inexcusable glitch was solely due to human error, it validates what Linda Schade, founder of TrueVoteMD, and others have long said about the dangers posed by computerized elections.
The state’s new e-poll books misidentified the party affiliation of voters, froze voter registration lists, and in some cases didn’t allow voters who had checked in electronically on one machine to cast ballots on another. Making matters even worse, the paper provisional ballots on hand soon ran out in some precincts, leaving frustrated voters in Montgomery — one of the country’s wealthiest counties — reduced to casting their votes on little pieces of scrap paper or unnumbered, photocopied ballots. The state spent more than $100 million on electronic voting machines, but some Maryland candidates had to rush to court to keep the polls in Montgomery and Baltimore open until 9 p.m. to make up for the snafus.
Had every polling place been required to use paper ballots as a back-up until all electronic voting machines were retrofitted with voter-verified paper receipts, this Third World-like disaster could easily have been avoided. Gov. Robert Ehrlich supported legislation earlier this year to do exactly that, but it was shot down by the state Senate — which instead passed an early voting law just recently declared unconstitutional.
Despite numerous studies and many real-life examplesof serious problems with electronic voting machines, “the State Board of Elections refused to implement a safety net,” Schade told The Examiner. “That can only be called willful disenfranchisement.”
The general election is in November. They now have just two months to get it right.
