Maryland teens who thought they were registered to vote were bewildered by a letter sent to them last month by state voting officials.
Seventeen-year-old Bethesda resident Sarah Boltuck cast a provisional ballot in February’s primary election — and legally, her vote counted. It was a triumph for the teen, after months of filing complaints, talking with state legislators and testifying in Annapolis to guarantee suffrage for 17-year-olds who will be 18 by November’s general election.
But on April 24, the Montgomery County Board of Elections sent her a letter that seemed to reverse everything:
‘‘Because you will not be 18 years old or older on or before the next election, you are not yet eligible to register and vote in Montgomery County,” it read.
The county’s Board of Elections would be in touch again when she is eligible to vote, the letter said.
Boltuck’s father, incensed over the situation, e-mailed a scanned copy of the letter to the board’s director, Margaret Jurgensen and copied local lawmakers, media and county officials on the e-mail.
The board’s attorney Kevin Karpinsky explained it was a sort of glitch in the system. Some 17-year-olds who qualified for general election voting in November were put on temporary ‘‘pending” status. This was to avoid confusing election judges during special elections for Congressional District 4 in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties and County Council District 4 in Montgomery County, and accidentally opening the door to ineligible voters. The change in voting status triggered the state Board of Elections to send registered 17-year-olds the boilerplate letter that Boltuck received.
Sound confusing? There’s more.
The letter on county Board of Elections letterhead was actually sent by the state Board of Elections, which had purview over the registration issue.
‘‘This is wickedly complex and needlessly so,” Richard Boltuck wrote in an e-mail to The Gazette.
Worse, he said, are the broader implications of the letter.
The system Maryland employs for this young subset of voters is ‘‘very messy and bound to result in errors and voter confusion,” he said, though he acknowledged Maryland is probably not the only state facing voter confusion right now.
‘‘If you had registered to vote in the primaries, then it was, ‘Wait, what? Now I’m not registered?’ I’m not adverse to it if they had explained the situation correctly,” Sarah Boltuck said.
She is somewhat forgiving of the bureaucratic snags of state and county Boards of Election. ‘‘I’m not saying that’s all right or OK or people shouldn’t try to correct it, but I wouldn’t say [that] it’s entirely unique,” she said in a phone interview Monday.
Karpinsky said the county will mail clarifications to registered 17-year-olds who may have gotten the rejection letter. The board of elections office heard from three to five confused teens since the letters were mailed, he said.
Asked whether the county or state could have caught the glitch before letters were mailed, Karpinsky said he didn’t know.
‘‘There are people who are on vacation,” Karpinsky said of Board of Elections staff. ‘‘I quite frankly have been worried about making sure that the issue is taken care of.... We want to make sure that there is no confusion.”
Whether the glitch hints at a larger problem in Maryland’s elections administration is something a voting irregularities task force assembled by Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler may touch on in recommendations later this year.
The task force, co-chaired by attorney Orlan Johnson, released a report last week, after studying for a year the voting problems in recent elections.
Confusion surrounding voting rights and the provisional ballots filed by 17-year-olds in February were among issues flagged by the task force, Johnson said.
Provisional ballots ‘‘kind of fell into that category where they didn’t receive what I would call a uniform scrutiny,” Johnson said.
‘‘There is a little bit of disconnect and miscommunication that takes place from time to time between the state Board of Elections and the county Board of Elections,” Johnson said. ‘‘There needs to be an increased level of communication between both groups.”
