Pr. George's Voting Glitches Highlight Training Problems

Errors in Primary Reflect Challenges of Technology

Prince George's election officials open voting machines and remove security seals and data cards at elections board headquarters in Upper Marlboro. (By James A. Parcell -- The Washington Post)

The widely publicized failure in Prince George's County to electronically transmit results from many polls after the Sept. 12 primary was compounded by a host of other errors, including failure to swiftly collect the data cards on which some votes are recorded and to properly secure voting machines.

The last of the cards were not retrieved and counted until nine days after the balloting -- several from inside electronic voting machines from a Landover precinct where Robert J. McGinley, the county elections board's attorney, said security procedures were "just blatantly not followed."

In some instances, machines containing cards were found in storage cases that lacked a required security seal. In others, tamper tape was missing from a locked door on the machine. In still others, data cards were found in machines on which doors were not locked.

Despite the roiling debate over whether electronic voting machines might be hacked into and an election stolen, the experience of Prince George's suggests a more mundane and probably widespread challenge in voting's digital age: Armies of minimally trained, modestly paid election workers are increasingly confronted with an unfamiliar, complex business.

Although the voting process was less dramatically flawed in Prince George's than in neighboring Montgomery County, the nearly two weeks since have seethed with suspicion and recrimination.

The elections board disqualified none of the cards, but the lapses undercut assurances that officials offered after the primary. Robert J. Antonetti Sr., interim Prince George's election administrator, had said 47 uncounted cards would remain safe because of the multiple security measures.

Antonetti's predecessor, Robin Downs Colbert, who resigned in June because of frustration over the rapid changes in technology, said she and her colleagues in several other counties "knew this was where it was headed."

"We warned everyone," she said Friday. "We warned the county we didn't have enough resources. We warned the legislature that it was too much too fast. . . . People have to be trained to use technology, and we need enough time to do that."

Antonetti said that working the polls was once "a second job for tobacco farmers" but that today "we need more skilled people."

But skilled people can be hard to find when the pay for the day for even chief election judges is $200.

Other counties also tallied provisional and absentee ballots in the past week, but Prince George's was alone in having to find and upload so many data cards. Montgomery, for example, had collected the last of its data cards less than six hours after the polls closed, said Marjorie Roher, spokeswoman for that county's elections board.

"If we don't have a memory card from a precinct, then we utilize the Montgomery County police, and we go out and find that card," she said. "We don't close shop for the night until every memory card is in hand."