Montgomery Election Nearly Goes South

Peter Franchot, a candidate for comptroller, talks with Nancy Dacek of the Montgomery elections board about the voting glitches. (By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)

The "I Voted, Yo Vote " stickers on everybody's lapels are curling, coming unglued.

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The perfect, smooth and clean election may have always been an impossible fantasy.

Yet waking from the fantasy shakes a voter's faith to the core.

Florida during the 2000 presidential election showed how butterfly ballot bumbling, bare-knuckle partisan legal maneuvering, divided-court intervention and disputed visions of reality itself can combine to cast a permanent shadow of doubt. Ohio in 2004 became the next post-election battleground for these unleashed demons.

A parallel track of reform led many jurisdictions, including Maryland, to adopt new technology such as electronic voting. But the lack of a paper trail in that technology only sowed more doubts in some voters: You could imagine your vote being hijacked or ignored without your ever knowing.

Now as the nation pursues a foreign policy of spreading democracy, the integrity of elections at home is an unresolved subject. The current issue of Mother Jones features an article on "11 of America's Worst Places to Cast a Ballot." Montgomery County is not on the list (nor is any jurisdiction in this region).

But of course not. MoCo fancies itself a good-government oasis where civic life works. Residents of other parts of the state find this self-confidence insufferable, but in Montgomery, they will happily make the most of their parking meter credit keys, their roving recycling outreach workers, thank you very much.

Now the county's Florida moment sends tremors through the citizenry's collective faith.

"This [still] is the scrupulous Montgomery," says Nancy Dacek, the besieged president of the elections board, facing the clamoring horde across the election office counter.

"It wasn't a screw-up," she also says. "It was a mistake."

Ah.