Elections auditor swaps reviewers

Original team leader replaced with someone with no ties to county elections officials

Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2006

The group hired to review the county’s elections board’s conduct of the primary election has changed its team of reviewers after critics said the original team was too closely aligned with some county elections employees.

R. Doug Lewis, executive director of The Election Center, a Houston-based trade organization, said the group made the change to avoid any appearance of a conflict in interest.

Elections experts last week criticized the involvement of the lead reviewer on the project, Connie Schmidt, who has worked with Montgomery election officials on other projects.

Schmidt, a former elections administrator in Johnson County, Kansas, was replaced by Ingrid Gonzales, a former registrar of voters in San Bernardino, Calif.

‘‘We’re not going to jeopardize our name or reputation for any election official anywhere,” Lewis said. ‘‘We get called in on problems and how to fix those problems, and that’s what we do. In this instance where there were potential questions, we wanted to avoid the appearance of anything improper, and Connie concurred with that.”

Gonzales and assistant reviewer Dwight Beattie, both of whom are retired, began their work on Monday. Because of the change, the deadline for a preliminary report has been pushed back to Oct. 16, with a final report due 26 days after the team’s arrival at the Montgomery County offices, Lewis said.

Last week the center and the project were also criticized because Montgomery elections director Margaret A. Jurgensen is a member of the center, as is Diebold Election Systems, manufacturers of the state’s electronic voting machines.

‘‘If you look at reviews we have done in places we have been, those [election officials] have also been members,” Lewis said Monday. ‘‘In jurisdictions of significant size, most of the elections officers are members.”

Although the center and Montgomery elections officials maintained the organization’s independence, election judges and voting experts said The Election Center’s audit posed a problem.

‘‘I think the review can be independent because Jurgensen is not involved in conducting the review, but the question of conflict of interest is there. That’s why this needs to be done by a separate committee,” said Ronald W. Walters, political science professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. To remove the appearance of impropriety, Walters suggested establishing a statewide bipartisan committee, without elected officials, to examine and fix voting problems.

In addition to the membership conflict, critics of the state’s electronic voting system have been concerned that the organization has a vested interest in the investigation’s outcome.

‘‘[The Election Center] has members who are all for a completely electronic election with no paper backups, and we think that makes them very biased,” said Shelley Fudge, co-founder of SAVE Our Votes in Columbia, which has called for the suspension of the e-poll books, which contain voter information and failed frequently during the Sept. 12 primary. ‘‘We would not expect a clear analysis from them.”

Failures of the e-poll books added to the frustration experienced by Montgomery voters, many of whom could not vote in the morning because access cards needed for the voting machines were not shipped to precincts.

But the audit has nothing to do with voting equipment, Jurgensen said last week. ‘‘This is the board of elections that is requesting to bring on The Elections Center for this review of management systems, not [a review of] Diebold [voting machines],” she said. ‘‘This [review] has to do with the provisioning of supplies and equipment at the polling places. At no time are we asking them to look at voting systems. Also, this is the only organization, to our knowledge, that is focused exclusively on voting administration and management.”

Conflict or not, other issues must be solved before November.

‘‘Right now [state and local boards of election] are wasting time going back and forth on these issues,” Walters said. ‘‘We’ve got a bigger problem than just a broken voting system. Voter turnout in the primary was extremely low.”

In Montgomery County, for example, turnout for the primary was only about 24 percent. Traditionally in gubernatorial election years it has been around 30 percent, elections officials have said.

How to restore voter confidence is the focus of plans and investigations across the state.

Sima R. Osdoby, an international elections consultant from Rockville, said she understands the concerns over electronic voting systems.

‘‘We have undergone significant changes in a very short period of time in this country in the past six years, all with the objective of increasing access for everybody and ensuring that people’s vote is going to count,” she said.

She suggests that the state elections board provide each county with a paper backup of the e-poll books. Locally, precincts should be stocked with more provisional ballots, shorten shifts for election judges and also use tech-savvy students and establish administrative systems with built in redundancy, such as multiple checklists.

‘‘These are simple things you can do without changing the law,” Osdoby said. ‘‘Later we can tackle the large things that require a law change.”