Voting Machines

Elections officials in Baltimore and Baltimore County spent yesterday trying to determine what went wrong in tabulating primary election returns, despite the use of multimillion dollar, state-of-the art computerized voting systems.Lack of enough technicians was blamed for a delay in tallying primary votes Tuesday night in Baltimore County as elections judges in some precincts struggled with jammed voting machines.In Baltimore, returns arrived 2 1/2 hours later than expected, despite the purchase of a new $6.5 million system.

ClarificationIn a Sept. 4 editorial, we wrote that if city voters fail to push a "cast the vote" button on Baltimore's computerized machines, judges would have to step into the booth to do so for them. The judges are under instructions not to do that. Rather, they have been told to push the orange (not yellow) button by reaching inside the booth, without entering it. The editorial also should have noted Baltimore County computerized its voting machines in 1996, not in 1966.Pub Date: 9/10/98

ISSUE: Elections officials across Maryland faced a bevy of problems on Primary Day. In Anne Arundel, at least 100 vacancies for election judges were unfilled, and many judges who participated lacked the proper training to operate the electronic voting machines. Those two factors contributed to the temporary mishandling of memory cards holding 6,000 votes and sparked allegations of unrecorded votes. County and state elections officials have since expressed confidence in the electronic voting system and said many of the difficulties will be resolved for the general election Nov. 7. YOUR VIEW: Do you have confidence in these voting machines and the ability of Anne Arundel elections officials to correctly operate them Nov. 7?

In Baltimore City Needle exchange program has enrolled 14,000 clients A Baltimore needle exchange program designed to reduce the spread of HIV among intravenous drug users has enrolled more than 14,000 clients and exchanged more than 6.6 million dirty needles for clean ones since its inception in 1994, city health officials said yesterday. The program, designed to link people addicted to drugs with treatment, also has placed more than 2,300 people into treatment, Health Commissioner Dr. Peter L. Beilenson said.

In late 1989, former Annapolis Mayor Dennis M. Callahan abandoned a write-in campaign for mayor after the city board of elections ruled that stickers bearing candidates' names couldn't be used because they would jam voting machines.Now the Maryland Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is contending that the stickers wouldn't havebeen a problem.In a letter to City Clerk Patty Bembe dated Dec. 17, ACLU special projects attorney Carl Gabel said the city's voting machines would have accepted the stickers if they were smaller than 1 inches long and inch high -- the size of the opening on the machines for write-invotes.

Elections can't be run this sloppily. For all the Sturm und Drang about voting machines and early voting that preceded Maryland's primary election, it was old-fashioned human error that caused the worst snafus. Oh, there were technology issues, too, but it wasn't a computer that caused Montgomery County election officials to forget to deliver the requisite cards activating the touch-screen voting machines. Nor was there anything high tech about Baltimore and other jurisdictions not having enough judges to staff the polls on time.

MARYLAND should heed computer scientists' warnings and cancel its $55.6 million purchase of touch-screen voting machines. E-voting is so susceptible to errors and manipulation irregularities could negate the whole idea of free and fair elections. This is not a criticism directed solely at Diebold Elections Systems, which is selling 11,000 touch-screen machines for use throughout Maryland. Its competitors' products, too, have the same fatal flaw: There is no paper trail. Consequently, there is no real way to verify disputed results.

CARACAS, Venezuela - After demanding an audit of voting results upon failing to oust President Hugo Chavez in a recall referendum, representatives of Venezuela's opposition movement said yesterday that they would refuse to participate in or recognize the review, asserting that the audit would fail to detect the deception that they insist took place. The opposition has not offered solid evidence of wrongdoing to the Organization of American States or to the Carter Center - monitors of the 18-hour recall election Sunday, in which Venezuelans voted by a large margin to keep Chavez as their leader.

Baltimore County elections officials, who did not complete their Election Night count because of data transmission problems, spent several hours yesterday tallying votes from more than a dozen affected precincts, the board secretary said. Elections workers brought voting machines from those polling sites to the board's headquarters in Catonsville to retrieve and verify voting information, said Robert Seidel, secretary of the Baltimore County Board of Elections. Seidel said late yesterday afternoon that officials had completed their first count of all ballots cast using the machines, and were working on a routine second count.