Md. Counties Seek Hundreds of Election Judges

Prince George's County must hire nearly 1,000 new election judges to serve as poll workers before the Nov. 7 election, and Montgomery County needs at least 200 more to ensure that voting runs smoothly, elections officials said yesterday.

At a Prince George's County Council hearing, Interim Elections Administrator Robert J. Antonetti Sr. placed much of the blame for voting problems in the Sept. 12 primary on state officials.

But he acknowledged that the county's roster of technicians and election judges needed to be enlarged and retrained before the general election. Among other things, workers need a refresher course on basic procedures such as handling provisional paper balloting, he said.

Classes for election workers began yesterday, despite a new order from the state that training should not begin until after Oct. 8. Antonetti said he thought the county needed to get started.

Antonetti said he and other local officials were eagerly awaiting word from state officials about whether Maryland will use electronic voter registration machines, known as e-poll books, or return to paper rolls.

Montgomery Board of Elections spokeswoman Marjorie Roher said the county needs to add about 200 judges to handle the heavier turnout expected in the general election. If e-poll books are not used, she said, Montgomery would need to bring in 800 new judges to handle the increased workload of verifying voters names against paper records.

In Linthicum yesterday, representatives of Diebold Election Systems, which makes the e-poll books, held a mock election to show that the machines are no longer marred by faulty software and an assembly defect.

On Sept. 12, the voter-registration machines experienced three types of problems. They rebooted without warning in every Maryland precinct because of a software flaw that caused each machine to freeze up after an election judge had checked in 43 voters. Also, some machines failed to communicate properly with other units or could not encode the access cards that voters must use to operate a voting machine.

State Board of Elections Administrator Linda H. Lamone said she would decide today whether the machines will be used.

In Prince George's, Antonetti told council members that his office is understaffed and needs county funding to hire more full-time workers. But under questioning, he acknowledged that his office faced Election Day with 10 full-time employees even though the county budget authorized 16 for the year.

Some polls opened late for primary voting in Prince George's because technicians did not show up for work. Many election workers also had trouble electronically transmitting results to the central voting office at the end of the day. And the county spent more than a week after the election collecting data cards from 47 voting machines that should have been delivered to headquarters by poll workers on election night.

Antonetti said he plans aggressive recruitment to sign up 980 new judges. He said the task is challenging because election judges are paid $125 for what can be a 16- to 18-hour day. Maryland law also requires a Republican chief judge at every precinct, a difficult task in the predominantly Democratic county.