Senate Hopeful Sees November Turnout at Risk Because of Primary Hitches
By Ann E. Marimow and Cameron W. Barr
Washington Post staff writers
Friday, October 6, 2006
U.S. Senate candidate Benjamin L. Cardin yesterday voiced a lack of confidence in Maryland's voting system and worried that the problems that plagued the primary election could discourage voters from turning out in November.
"I am not convinced that they know how to run this election so that voters will not be inconvenienced to a point where they don't participate," Cardin (D) said during an interview with Washington Post reporters and editors.
Cardin's comments came on the day that state elections Administrator Linda H. Lamone announced that Maryland would continue using an electronic voter check-in system that repeatedly froze and rebooted without warning on primary day, confusing election judges and delaying voters across the state.
"After rigorous review and testing of the proposed solutions offered by Diebold Election Systems" -- the equipment's manufacturer -- "we are satisfied the issues experienced with the electronic poll books in our primary election have been resolved satisfactorily," Lamone said in a statement.
Cardin blamed the primary day foul-ups less on technology than on human error. Maryland election officials went to the polls without properly testing the machinery, he said.
"When we go to war, we don't try the equipment out for the first time in battle, so why are we surprised when we try voting equipment out for the first time that you have problems?" he asked. "The failure was not doing a full test ahead of time."
He expressed particular concern about how the glitches would affect voter participation next month as he seeks to drive up turnout in his bid to replace retiring Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D). The Baltimore congressman called turnout his "biggest challenge," in particular in heavily Democratic Prince George's and Montgomery counties.
Cardin is trying to overcome disappointment among some black voters who supported former NAACP president Kweisi Mfume overwhelmingly in the Democratic primary. And he is trying to fend off Republican candidate Michael S. Steele, the first African American elected to statewide office, who is seeking to sway black Democrats to cross party lines.
Cardin is counting on help from Prince George's political leaders to build enthusiasm for his candidacy. "By and large, the black leadership are very much energized by this campaign," he said.
Cardin joins a growing number of critics of the state's electronic voting system, including independent Senate candidate Kevin Zeese, who has long advocated a system that produces paper records to verify votes.
Cardin said he would prefer a system with greater verification of votes, but he rejected the call by Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) to trade the state's electronic machines for a paper-based system before the general election. Cardin, who has helped monitor elections overseas, blamed Maryland's problems on "bad administration."
Ross Goldstein, State Board of Elections deputy administrator, responded with a pledge: "We're not going to have a repeat of the primary election."
Diebold has already moved the state's 5,500 electronic poll books to its warehouse in Glen Burnie, where the company will install software upgrades designed to address the rebooting error and the failure of some machines to communicate with each other, Goldstein said.
Each county, he said, would have at least 50 of the upgraded polling books by Monday and the remainder by the end of the week.
In Prince George's County, members of the Board of Elections gathered yesterday to recertify results of the Sept. 12 voting, after workers spotted 165 provisional paper ballots that had not been counted before the vote was first certified Sept. 25.
Interim Elections Administrator Robert J. Antonetti Sr. said the ballots had been approved and were waiting to be counted but were then mistakenly mixed with ballots that had been rejected.
"You have all these ballots and, like with anything, some were dropped in the wrong receptacle," he said.
The new votes did not change the outcome of any race.
In another development, a civil rights organization in the District and an Arkansas-based voter participation group asserted that Maryland is illegally disenfranchising voters by requiring that their personal identification numbers match those on Motor Vehicle Administration or Social Security Administration databases.
The District-based Advancement Project and Project Vote said in a letter to Lamone that state regulations violate federal laws and that in Baltimore, election officials had wrongly placed 8,500 registrations on "pending" status. Nikki Trella, the state board's reform director, said she had not read the letter.
Staff writer Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.
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