http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/20/AR2006092001356.htmlEhrlich Wants Paper Ballots For Nov. Vote
Washington PostA week after the primary election was plagued by human error and technical glitches, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) called yesterday for the state to scrap its $106 million electronic voting apparatus and revert to a paper ballot system for the November election.
When we told them the system was unreliable in 2003, the cost was just $55 million. Now they have wasted twice the money and still got burned.
I would be suing me some Diebold about now.
Linda H. Lamone, the administrator of the Maryland State Board of Elections, quickly denounced the plan to swap voting systems just seven weeks before the general election as "crazy." And Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) said it "cannot happen. It will not happen."
You know, you really have to wonder why Lamone insists on backing Diebold, you really do. The answer comes down to either insanity or corruption, you decide. (I suppose arrogance could also be a factor, but I don't believe it is physically possible for a human being to contain that much arrogance).
Ehrlich said that, if necessary, he would call a special session of the Maryland General Assembly to change the law to allow paper ballots. But Miller and House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel) dismissed the idea of a special session, saying elections officials should focus instead on fixing the current system.
"We paid millions. These are state-of-the-art machines," said Miller, who called Ehrlich's announcement a political ploy to energize his Republican supporters.
You paid millions for over-priced, under-powered computers, with buggy software, zero security and running a vintage 1988 processor. Hardly "state of the art".
In Montgomery and Prince George's counties yesterday, election officials continued to count the thousands of paper provisional ballots that could determine the outcome of the 4th Congressional District Democratic primary race between incumbent U.S. Rep. Albert R. Wynn and challenger Donna Edwards. Prince George's officials cracked opened 26 machines yesterday and retrieved votes that had not been counted.
At the rate they are going, they should be through with the primary sometime just after the November midterm election.
Ehrlich's statement came after a State Board of Public Works hearing at which Lamone said her staff would "work around the clock" to correct the problems that plagued the primary. She vowed that her office would help local election boards retrain judges, recruit new ones and force Diebold Election Systems to fix the problems that caused some of its machines to malfunction.
"Round the clock?" Gee, who is paying for all this overtime? Have we added that to the cost of Lamone's Lemons?
In the spring, Ehrlich advocated leasing optical scan machines that use paper ballots, a proposal that won unanimous support in the House of Delegates but was rejected by the Senate.
Keep this in mind kiddies, when it comes time to assign blame.
Many of the problems that marred this month's primary resulted from human error. Election judges in Baltimore failed to show up, meaning the polls opened late. In Montgomery, voting at nearly all 238 precincts was delayed because officials forgot to distribute plastic cards needed to operate voting machines.
As I have said before, this is all about a poorly designed system, with poor training and faulty equipment. Human error? Yes. The errors occurred with the idiots who bought the junk, the drooling cretins who wrote the software (I'm guessing in Crayon) and the salesmen who sold it to the state.
In Prince George's, election officials struggled to transmit data electronically from polling places to a central office on election night, delaying the counting process for hours. In the days since, they have also discovered that dozens of memory cards were not counted after the election; some remained locked in voting machines for days.
Where they are perfectly safe, unless someone has a hotel mini-bar key, in which case they have complete access.
Also yesterday, Gene Raynor, the Baltimore election director, resigned, saying Lamone and the General Assembly "have set dangerous precedents that, in my opinion, threaten the integrity of November's elections." Raynor previously sat on the State Board of Elections, where he had joined members in trying to oust Lamone two years ago.
Ooo, that can't be good.
There were also technical problems during the primary, mainly with the electronic poll books that were used in the state for the first time. They replaced the paper printouts of the voter registration rolls, allowing election judges to check in voters electronically.
Some crashed and needed to be rebooted, election judges reported. Others failed to transmit the name of a checked-in voter to the other machines in the same polling place. That meant, theoretically, that a voter could cast more than one ballot. Officials said they had no evidence of any voter fraud.
Not that they would see it even if it bit them in the ass.
Lamone said the electronic poll books, purchased from Diebold in June and July, were tested in the days before the election. But those tests did not reveal any problems.
That's because you just ran the tests Diebold told you to, rather than REAL WORLD tests which would have actually revealed these problems.
Mark Radke, a Diebold spokesman, said many of the poll books crashed because software created exclusively for Maryland caused the machines' memories to fill up after about 40 people had checked in to vote.
Please go back an re-read that paragraph. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Now imagine you bought a brand new fleet of cars and the first day you drove them, quite a few of them broke down. You call the salesman and ask what gives, and his answer is:
"The engines stopped after you drove 40 miles."
THIS IS AN EXCUSE YOU WOULD ACCEPT?
Also, if the machines failed after 40 people check in because the memory filled up, why did only SOME systems fail? Given that the data needed for a single voter probably come to 1K of RAM (1,024 bytes), and your average laptop has 256MB of RAM (260 million bytes+), this would seem to indicate shoddy programming bordering on the retarded.
But Ehrlich said he wasn't willing to risk the possibility that such glitches would remain for the November election, in which he is seeking a second term.
"I'm not sure we can afford another experiment," Ehrlich said after the Board of Public Works hearing. "I want to play it safe."
His position was supported in the hearing by Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer scientist who worked as an elections judge during the primary and has long been critical of the touch-screen voting machines.
Gilles W. Burger, chairman of the State Board of Elections, said his panel has requested that Diebold officials appear at its meeting Tuesday.
"Their feet are going to be held to the fire," Burger said.
Not likely, since it will demonstrate again how stupid you were for buying something we warned you was not going to work three years ago.
Maryland's election law leaves it to the State Elections Board to pick a voting system and certify its reliability and security. Mark Davis, the assistant attorney general who represents the board, said it has already performed required tests on the touch-screen machines.
No Markie, the "required tests" were performed last week and your system failed miserably.
"The board feels it would be catastrophic to try to do that for another system between now and the general election," he said. "It just doesn't make any sense."
Better the catastrophe you know, than the one you don't? Can we engrave that on the tombstone marking your professional career, Markie?
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