Don’t blame the locals

Friday, Sept. 22, 2006

I hate to interrupt a perfectly good flogging but before you horsewhip all those beleaguered local elections officials you might want to consider the following:

First, these are the same part-time local boards and full-time local administrators who pulled off both the 2004 primary and 2004 general elections without anyone calling for their scalps. And 2004 was a presidential election year with far greater turnout than 2006.

Second, last week’s elections snafus were widespread throughout Maryland, including Montgomery, Baltimore city, Baltimore County, Anne Arundel, Prince George’s, Carroll and many others, not an isolated phenomenon.

So, what changed between 2004 and 2006 resulting in such mayhem? Not the elections officials — the same people conducted both elections. The big difference was the overload caused by new federal and state elections laws rendering an already fragile elections system almost impossible to administer.

Did you ever throw a party for 50 people? How about 500 people? How about 750,000 people? Elections are one-day events mostly run by part-time workers processing up to a million strangers in gyms, churches and halls throughout the state.

Smooth elections depend on experienced help using familiar technology and familiar procedures. That didn’t happen on Sept. 12. Instead, the people who planned the event, the feds and the state, kept changing their minds, kept missing deadlines and kept springing surprises on the locals.

For instance, the new federal Help America Vote Act required states to have statewide voter registration lists and uniform voting machines in place by 2006. So Maryland elected (no pun intended) to go with hi-tech Diebold AccuVote — TS touch screen machines previously used at some polling places in 2004.

But the statewide voter registration technology was brand new in 2006, untested anywhere in the nation. These electronic e-poll books list every registered voter and keep a real time record of who’s voted. They replaced those boxes of paper registration cards used to check-in voters in the past. But the e-poll books require special assemblage (wires must be connected in specific order, etc.) and special training, which never happened. In many counties, the e-poll books weren’t delivered until five days before Election Day. In other cases, training was haphazard or beyond older workers’ comprehension.

So, when the polls opened many machines didn’t start or they kept crashing. Perhaps the locals could have done a better job dealing with the new technology except they were constantly distracted by the state.

Yes, in the same year federal law mandated radical new voting technology, the Maryland legislature mandated radical new elections changes resulting in mass confusion, delay and uncertainty right up until Election Day.

First, it was the Senate bill moving primary election day from September to June. It died but the legislature passed an early elections law opening the polls for five days before Election Day and a statewide provisional ballot law allowing voting anywhere outside one’s home precinct.

The logistical challenges, alone, were overwhelming. Schools become polling places on Election Day but where are people going to vote for five days before Election Day? You can’t close schools for a week! And where do we find the extra help? And how do we keep uncounted ballots secure for a week? And how do we stop fraud and abuse of the new rules? And who pays for all the new costs?

Then came the uncertainty. In May 2005, Governor Ehrlich vetoed the new elections laws echoing the locals’ fear that the system wasn’t ready for such wholesale changes. But in January 2006, the legislature overrode the veto. Then Republicans mounted a petition drive to delay the laws and put them on referendum. When that failed a lawsuit was filed resulting in the Court of Appeals striking down the laws as unconstitutional less than three weeks before primary election day!

In other words, the local elections officials never had a chance. How were they supposed to prepare for a Sept. 12 election when they didn’t even know the rules until Aug. 25?

For almost two years the local elections officials warned of the pending system overload but when the Maryland State Board of Elections officials and the Maryland Association of Elections Officials testified in Annapolis that there wasn’t enough time to handle the new changes, state lawmakers passed them anyway. When more than a half dozen local elections administrators resigned in protest no one noticed. When the new technology backfired in other state’s primaries Maryland didn’t heed the warning. And when Common Cause dubbed Maryland one of the nation’s 17 ‘‘high risk” states due to questionable elections technology, Annapolis yawned.

Then, last week, when the elections system collapsed, who took the blame? Who dealt with the enraged voters, the paranoid candidates and the cynical media? And in the midst of all this who finally got the system up and working?

Now, as a final insult, the Washington Post and some misguided politicians want the locals fired. Brilliant. Less than two months before the general election let’s fire the only people who know what’s going on. That’s just the kind of thinking that got us into this mess.

Blair Lee is CEO of the Lee Development Group in Silver Spring and a regular commentator for WBAL radio. His column appears Fridays in The Gazette.