By Christian Davenport and Miranda S. Spivack
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
The most basic of human errors threw Maryland's primary election into chaos yesterday: Someone forgot the wallet-sized plastic cards needed to operate the voting machines in Montgomery County, frustrating early morning voters who lined up outside polling places and often were turned away without voting.
Courts ordered polls to remain open an extra hour in the county and in Baltimore, where at least two dozen polling places opened late, but it seemed doubtful that the extensions would resolve the confusion.
Some Montgomery County polling places didn't receive word of the order to remain open until minutes before 8 p.m., when they had been scheduled to close. Others ran short on the paper ballots that the court instructed be used during the extended hour of voting, with voters scribbling their choices on scraps of paper in Takoma Park.
"You had to laugh. It got more and more ludicrous," said Dennis Desmond, who cast his "vote" on a discarded flier handed him by election officials after ballots ran out in Takoma Park.
He said election workers rushed to a nearby pharmacy to buy envelopes in which the makeshift ballots could be sealed.
The number of paper ballots cast won't be known until today. They will not be counted until Monday.
When all of the county's 238 polling places opened in Montgomery, the state's most populous jurisdiction, the electronic voting machines were inoperable. Many precincts handed out provisional paper ballots as soon as the precinct doors opened at 7 a.m., but at some polls those ballots ran out, and at others election officials didn't know that paper ballots were an option. They just told people to come back later.
Although the cards necessary to activate most of the voting machines arrived by 8:30, in some cases, and election officials said some of the machines weren't working until 10 a.m. -- three hours after polls opened. Voters said some were even later.
Partisan bickering broke out, with the governor blaming the Democratic legislature, and the Democrats pointing the finger at the governor.
Nancy H. Dacek, who was appointed as president of the county's Board of Elections by Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) , apologized for the error.
"We regret what happened this morning. It was just a fluke," Dacek said. "There was a glitch. It's now been taken care of."
The cards that went astray are called voter access cards and look like white ATM cards with a golden computer chip embedded in them. They are issued to voters once election judges verify they are registered to vote. When the cards are placed into the voting machines, the touch screen ballot appears on the screen.
County elections officials said they simply forgot to include the cards in the supply bags provided to the chief election judge of each polling place.
The trouble began Friday when eight county elections employees and a supervisor met in a locked room on the first floor of the elections headquarters building at 751 Twinbrook Pkwy. in Rockville.
They packed the large canvas bags which were to contain the items needed to operate the computerized voting system. But the stacks of the critical voter access cards were forgotten, locked a few feet away behind a caged door. Once the bags were packed, they were padlocked for security, and polling place judges were prohibited from opening them until yesterday morning.
About 6 a.m., the judges realized the cards were missing, said Margaret Jurgensen, the county's elections director. She said the county has checklists to keep employees from forgetting to pack any of the items, but she did not know if they were used.
Jurgensen said the error "was a team effort."
Linda H. Lamone, chairman of the State Board of Elections, said she was appalled by the day's events and said it was the work of poorly trained election judges.
"We push the information out to them," said Lamone, who was appointed by Ehrlich's Democratic predecessor, Parris N. Glendening. "If they choose not to follow it, there's nothing we can do."
Ehrlich's initial reaction on learning of the problems was: "That's negligence. That's inexcusable."
Later in the day, the governor added: "The training is Linda Lamone's responsibility, period. The apology should come from her. . . . She's going to have to answer a lot of questions tomorrow."
But Douglas F. Gansler (D), the Montgomery County state's attorney, who is running for attorney general, joined several other candidates who lambasted the county election board yesterday.
"The level of incompetence that led to this is almost surreal -- especially in Montgomery County," he said.
When David Belkin showed up to vote at a polling place in Bethesda at 8:30 a.m. he was told he could vote by provisional ballot, but the line was too long and he was late for a meeting.
"The degree of incompetence is beyond belief," he said. "It's just incredible. It's not like this was a surprise. They knew the election was coming. And whoever is responsible should be fired today."
Gareth Rosenau, a lawyer with the Federal Railroad Commission, said the voting cards arrived shortly after he did at the polling place in Takoma Park. But when the registered Democrat put his card into the voting machine, a Republican ballot appeared on the screen, he said.
Other voters were having the same problem, he said, and complained to election officials, who didn't know how to fix the machines so they would produce the proper ballots.
"I felt like I was in a Third World country," he said.
Baltimore was also plagued by election day problems, prompting a judge there to extend voting by an hour as well.
The Maryland Democratic Party alleged in a court filing that at least 75 precincts in Baltimore opened late because election officials failed to show up on time and struggled with the electronic voting machines the city was using for the first time.
Baltimore Elections Administrator Gene Raynor said there were problems with some judges showing up on time. But he said the number of affected precincts was closer to "two dozen."
"When you have 1,500 [election judges], you're going to have problems with some of them," he said.
States across the country scrambled to revamp their election systems after the debacle in Florida during the 2000 presidential election. In an attempt to avoid hanging chads that plagued that election, many states, including Maryland, moved to an electronic voting system. Montgomery has been using the electronic voting machines since 2002 without significant problems.
Critics have described the electronic systems as vulnerable, and a report in June by Common Cause concluded that they "are highly vulnerable to machine malfunction and human manipulation." It also found that Maryland was one of 17 states with voting systems that are at "high risk" because their machines don't have a paper ballot backup system.
In Prince George's County, about 15 to 20 of the county's 206 precincts were delayed on average of about 25 minutes yesterday morning, according to Alisha Alexander, deputy elections administrator for the Prince George's County Board of Elections. Most of the precincts were in the northern part of the county, including Beltsville and University Park.
Alexander said about 20 technicians, who were scheduled to deliver and set up electronic poll books by 6 a.m., quit yesterday morning, resulting in long lines and frustrated voters at numerous polling places.
"We had to find other staff and send them out," said Robert J. Antonetti, the interim Prince George's elections administrator.
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