Duncan Seeks Resignation of Election Chiefs

Because of the voting problems, Montgomery officials distributed up to 12,000 provisional paper ballots to voters. Officials also gave out 11,200 absentee ballots, 6,000 of which have been returned. The absentee ballots will begin to be counted today, the provisionals Monday.

The uncounted ballots could affect the outcomes of two House of Delegates races in the county, according to Samuel L. Statland, one of three voting members on the Board of Elections. Fewer than 400 votes separated Jeff Waldstreicher and Daniel Farrington, who were vying for District 18's third seat. In District 19, Benjamin Kramer led Paul Griffin by 238 votes.

Voters and elections judges yesterday recounted a litany of Election Day mishaps. In addition to the late arrival of the voting machine access cards, several elections judges said the electronic polling books at their precincts malfunctioned several times during the day.

In some instances, the polling books, which were used for the first time this year to verify voter registration, crashed when the voter access cards were inserted into them. Alan Fox, the chief judge at a Kensington polling place, said it happened a few times before the elections judges figured out how to reprogram the equipment, which took a little technical ingenuity.

Janet Millenson, a chief elections judge at a Potomac precinct, said the same thing happened at her polling place on a few occasions. The new machines were "not ready for prime time," she said. "Let's hope they get the resources they need to fix it by November."

At Sligo Middle School, the voter registration check-in machine crashed at least 12 times, said elections judge June Jeffries, a federal prosecutor. Poll workers also began to worry as some electronic cards stopped working, she said.

"The number of usable cards kept going down," Jeffries said. "We would wipe them off or rub them on our pants legs to try to get them to work again. I am livid. We are not failures as elections judges. . . . I want to know what happened and why we were in that position and why the voters were in that position."

When a Circuit Court judge ordered that polls stay open an extra hour in Montgomery, until 9 p.m., election officials were faced with even more problems.

Under state law, votes cast during an extended voting period must be on paper provisional ballots. But many polling places had used up those ballots during the morning delays. When Fox obtained a spare set of ballots, he realized they were marked for the wrong precinct. His was Precinct 18, but the ballots were marked for Precinct 16.

He said there was nothing he could do, so he told the voters to fill them out and hope for the best.

Meanwhile, in response to the myriad problems in Baltimore, Linda H. Lamone, administrator of the Maryland State Board of Elections, sent a letter to the state attorney general asking for the authority to take over election judge training and recruiting for the city.

In her letter, she noted that state officials received reports that judges were not trained on the electronic polling books. She added that one support technician in Baltimore "had encountered judges who were apparently intoxicated."

Lamone is also asking for permission to force the Montgomery County Board of Elections to detail what went wrong, and she said she was considering launching a full-scale investigation.

"The problem is we only have seven weeks" before the general election, she said. "That's not a long time we've got to get moving on this."

Henry Fawell, an Ehrlich spokesman, said the governor would also like a "comprehensive review of what happened [Tuesday]. And the governor's course of action will be based on the findings of that review."