Press release from True Vote MD
Electronic Pollbooks Not Necessary for Early Voting
$13 Million No-Bid “Sweetheart Deal” with Diebold
Draws Fire from Election Integrity Activists
Takoma Park, MD: The implementation of early voting and of the federally mandated statewide voter registration database has been such a headache that the administrators of elections in several Maryland counties have recently resigned, including those in Prince Georges, Anne Arundel and Wicomico Counties.
Wednesday the State Board of Elections quietly tried to sneak a $13 million sweetheart deal with Diebold Election Systems, Inc., through the Board of Public Works to buy electronic pollbooks in time for this fall’s early voting. Since there are other vendors that sell e-pollbooks, the state would normally issue a carefully written RFP and thoroughly investigate each product available, as they do with other purchases of this magnitude. Instead they are trying to rush into a no-bid contract with a company that has been uncooperative lately in answering their questions about possible security vulnerabilities in Maryland’s voting equipment.
The haste with which the SBE is seeking to consummate this deal is in stark contrast to their protestations a few short weeks ago that there was no time to make major changes to our voting system before this fall’s elections. That was when the question was about replacing our paperless touchscreen voting machines with precinct-based optical scanners—a change favored by 57% of Maryland voters, according to a recent survey by Gonzales Research. One of the complaints the SBE voiced about the Voter-Verified Paper Ballot bill was that it might force the state into working with a specific vendor. But it seems that their tune changes when the vendor is Diebold.
“TrueVoteMD has no objection to the concept of early voting, but we have serious concerns about how it will be implemented in Maryland with our unverifiable electronic voting machines,” said Alex Zeese, State Coordinator of TrueVoteMD. “Specifically, our objection is to the rash purchase, untested use and of electronic pollbooks and the troubled implementation of the voter registration database.”
The federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 requires all states to have a statewide voter registration database in place by 2006. Like most other states, Maryland has struggled to meet this deadline, and the problems encountered in converting county databases into the new format have not yet been fully resolved. A recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law found that nearly one-fifth of new voter registrations may be disqualified in the transition and dropped from the voter rolls. Operating the 2006 elections with this significant change alone presents major challenges. But on top of that, the State Board of Elections now wants to insert an additional new product into the mix: electronic pollbooks.
Paper pollbooks and Voter Authority Cards—the index cards each voter signs when checking in at a polling place—are some of the few remaining safeguards against voter fraud in Maryland’s otherwise paperless voting system. They provide an independent means to verify exactly who voted in an election and to determine how many votes should have been tallied by the voting machines. Replacing them with electronic pollbooks—which the SBE insists is necessary to implement early voting in Maryland—adds yet another layer of untested technology between the voter and the voting process.
Since these e-pollbooks would interface directly with the state’s voter registration database via the Internet, altering the database in the process, the potential to disenfranchise large numbers of voters through computer malfunctions, system crashes, bad programming, or even hacking or fraud, is enormous.
“Electronic pollbooks are not needed if early voting is done the same way it is in states such as Texas, where it is essentially treated as walk-in absentee voting,” said Linda Schade, Executive Director of TrueVoteMD. “Voters mark their choices on absentee ballots that are canvassed with all other absentee ballots after election day. If a voter has voted at the polls on Election Day, their early ballot is disqualified and not counted. That would be the safest, simplest method of providing early voting this year—and it would prevent the state from pouring millions more dollars into pork that enmeshes us more deeply with Diebold.”
http://truevotemd.org/content/view/467/82/
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