By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 14, 2006; C01
It's minutes until the polls close, and people are on the verge of being disenfranchised. In the sleep-deprived fluorescence of the Montgomery County Board of Elections, lawyers and party activists are baying, frantic. They're in three-conversations-at-once mode. BlackBerrys, cellphones, naked shouting. A ringtone cacophony. The communication sounds coded, crazy.
Seven-o-six has no ballots!
Thirteen-twenty-one knows nothing; they're not going to stay open past 8!
We're hearing from precincts with judges who don't know squat about this!
Scouts are calling from polling places. Lawyers and activists relay these cryptic alarms across the front office counter to elections officials hunkered in cubicles and back rooms.
The officials appear to be moving in slow motion. Has the disaster of the day stunned them into a trance? Or could this be a defiant attempt, late Tuesday, to recover some methodical mojo, the old MoCo equipoise?
Democratic Committeeman Alan Banov slaps the counter. "Nobody is helping me at this McDonald's," he says. He is only half-joking. He gets another phone call.
"This is the worst election I've seen in 32 years in the county," he says into the phone. Hanging up, he elaborates: "It's astonishing. This is Third World. These are smart people in this county. We're not used to having glitches like this."
From his side of the counter, Kevin Karpinski, lawyer for the elections board, tries to allay fears. Dispatching is underway -- police sent to keep the polls open an hour later; more paper ballots sent to where they're needed. If they don't arrive, judges are being instructed to let voters fill out makeshift ballots on plain paper.
As men bearing ballots depart, men bearing pizza arrive. This is going to be a long night. In their wake comes Samuel Statland, the lone Democrat on the three-member elections board, the folks ultimately responsible. He has been visiting precincts, witnessing the train wreck for himself.
On the plus side, he says some of the dire reports from the field are overblown -- precincts he checked appear to be staying open the extra hour ordered by a judge. But Statland doesn't try to duck the obvious.
"To say we have egg on our face is an understatement," he says. "To say we are embarrassed is an understatement. . . . How do you spell DISASTER? With all capital letters."
The "I Voted, Yo Vote " stickers on everybody's lapels are curling, coming unglued.
* * *
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.
Here's what happened: Elections workers assembling packages for the polls somehow forgot to include the plastic ATM-like cards needed for each voter to use the electronic voting system. Workers had a checklist that was supposed to include the vital cards, so no one would forget: A low-tech redundancy against a botched election.
Instead, the cards remained at election headquarters, locked securely in a big blue cage on wheels, hiding in plain sight.
Nobody noticed until the morning of the election when election judges opened their poll packages.
Drivers rushed the cards to the precincts, but meanwhile 10,000 to 12,000 voters had to use paper provisional ballots over the course of the day. Many others reportedly left in frustration without voting, and the whole mess now is attached to that election hangover phrase, "under investigation."
Dacek, 72, was a 12-year County Council member representing the northern, more rural part of Montgomery who lost her seat in 2002. Gov. Robert Ehrlich appointed her to the elections board in 2003.
"There are apparently 110 things that have to be put in the bags to be taken to each polling place," Dacek says, her "I Voted" sticker clinging desperately to her white jacket. "It was a simple staff mistake."
Andrea LaRue, a lawyer volunteering on behalf of U.S. Senate candidate Ben Cardin, steps up to the counter with a question for Dacek.
"Do you have a chain-of-custody plan for the provisional ballots?" LaRue asks.
"A who?" Dacek replies.
* * *
Mary Shine couldn't believe what she was hearing.
A quintessential Montgomery resident, she has high expectations for her county, and she actively fulfills her part of the social contract. She's president of the Franklin Knolls Civic Association, and most election years she volunteers at the polls for one candidate or another. This year she was wearing a Ben Cardin T-shirt over her pink sweater.
She was told she'd have to fill out a paper ballot using a pencil. "It's outrageous," she says. "I feel like I'm in Florida. . . . People left this morning because they said they couldn't wait to vote. Especially in this day and age, we want people to believe in the political process again. After Florida and the Supreme Court? Please. It's so absurd. It's pathetic ."
Seated nearby at a table of Democratic literature, Democratic precinct chair Frankie Winchester added, "How could they be so stupid? This is what the board prepares for for two years. They don't get it right? I was sure it was something purposeful, but I guess not. . . . I guess it was just pure stupidity. One of those attacks of sheer stupidity that happens to people sometimes."
Coping with the stupidity as election judges inside Albert Einstein High School were two equally quintessential Montgomery County women -- Theolyn Wilson and Pat Cutlip, a matching pair of peppiness in red shirts, short silver hair and glasses. It was about 6:15 a.m. that morning when they opened their canvas judges' bag and made the awful discovery. "We were frantically going through the contents: 'Where is that box of voter access cards?!' " says Wilson.
Veteran judges, they knew what to do with paper; they kept the line of voters moving with provisional ballots. But, allows Cutlip, "It's a most unusual situation."
Dacek and her fellow elections board members had been bracing for a different kind of trouble.
This primary marked the debut of a new component of electronic voting: Electronic voter check-in at the polls. The hardware arrived late, and the staff worked heroically to get it tested and implemented in time, Statland says.
There were reports of glitches with the equipment around the state. Avi Rubin, a computer sciences professor at Johns Hopkins and a skeptic of some forms of electronic voting, posted a detailed blog of his experiences as a precinct judge in Baltimore County. "The smallest thing can lead to disaster," he wrote.
Other jurisdictions had their troubles. Baltimore City had to keep polls open an hour later, too, to make up for morning foul-ups. More than a dozen polls in Prince George's County opened late for various reasons, State Sen. Ulysses Currie said Tuesday afternoon.
Even Cardin experienced his home precinct in Baltimore County opening 10 minutes late, after a line had formed and people had given up in frustration to go to work. "We're the most sophisticated democracy in the world and we can't get our voting places open on time? It's inexcusable," he says.
But nothing matched Montgomery's debacle of the low-tech fumble with a piece of high-tech equipment. Human error indeed. Sometimes humans are too clever by half. They'll build a Mars orbiter, then calibrate it in English rather than metric units. They'll spacewalk from the shuttle, and drop a bolt. They'll invent an electronic voting system, and forget to pack . . . whoops, we don't have the card to check you in right now, Mr. Voter.
"The thing that gets lost in many current discussions of election reform is the degree to which elections are an intensely human affair," says Doug Chapin, director of Electiononline.org in Washington, a nonpartisan clearing house for election reform information. "In an election you've got millions of voters encountering thousands of poll workers at hundreds of polling locations, which creates an almost exponential opportunity for error."
He's reminded of "the old poem, for want of a nail a kingdom was lost. One could argue that for want of a card an election was lost yesterday. . . . People will always wonder if the outcome would have been different."
The paper ballots will be counted Monday. By hand. No electronics required. The fate of some races hangs, oh, that Florida word, in the balance.
