Montgomery, Md. Officials Trade Barbs

Equipment Delays, Insufficient Testing Added to Poll Woes

County Council member Tom Perez accused election officials of finger-pointing yesterday. Council President George L. Leventhal, left, has also criticized officials' handling of primary voting. (By Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)

A week after Montgomery County's voting system broke down, top election officials acknowledged yesterday that they have no way of communicating quickly with many of the county's 238 polling places in an emergency.

But they blamed the state for adding to local mistakes with a flood of last-minute changes and delays before the primary elections.

"We made the error, but our directions and what the state provided us was late, later and later," said Nancy Dacek, the county Board of Elections president. "It is impossible to get entirely ready for any election if you don't have the machines until two weeks before the election or three days before the election."

State Board of Elections administrator Linda H. Lamone defended her office in an interview yesterday, saying any delays were caused by legal and bureaucratic factors beyond her control. "We were not simply sitting around here waiting or doing nothing," she said.

And County Council members, who summoned Dacek to a hearing to explain how county officials bungled last Tuesday's election, expressed anger at what they called finger-pointing.

"We continue to have a situation where the county blames the state, the state blames the county and the victims are the voters," said council member Tom Perez (D-Silver Spring), his face reddening with frustration.

He spoke after the council hearing, called to investigate how election officials forgot to include plastic cards needed to operate electronic voting machines in packets sent to each polling place. Dacek and election director Margaret Jurgensen spoke briefly before leaving to spend the first of several days counting from 10,000 to 12,000 provisional paper ballots.

At the election board's headquarters in Rockville, officials crowded together in a room to inspect stacks of ballots by hand. As officials counted, candidates and campaign workers sat on folding chairs and watched.

Donna Edwards, whose race against U.S. Rep. Albert R. Wynn (D-Md.) could hinge on ballots in Montgomery and Prince George's counties, said the counting seemed to be going smoothly and fairly. Still, she said, the scene reminded her of the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida.

"It's really frightening that here we are in 2006, and we've yet to get to the point where we have an elections process that we can have confidence in," she said.

By day's end yesterday, 937 ballots had been counted. Officials said that was not enough to determine the outcome of the undecided races.

In Prince George's County, criticism of technological glitches and human bungling mounted yesterday as election officials began counting about 4,500 provisional ballots.