New Md. Voting Machines Receive Mostly High Marks
Some Simply Prefer the Feel of a Paper Ballot

By Raymond McCaffrey and Cameron W. Barr
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, March 3, 2004; Page B01

Maryland election officials praised the statewide debut of a new touch-screen voting system in yesterday's primary, despite computer glitches that crashed isolated machines and left some frustrated voters demanding the return of paper ballots.

Problems with a small number of the Diebold voting machines were reported in several counties, including Charles, Montgomery and St. Mary's. But officials said the vast majority of machines worked as advertised with the help of "a small army" of computer experts who were dispatched as troubleshooters across Maryland by state elections administrator Linda H. Lamone.

Many voters said they found the new machines used during the last two years in four pilot counties easier to use than the old-style paper ballots.

"Just like the ATM," said Diane Hoskins, a Patuxent High School senior in Calvert County.

Lucky Malamut, a Democratic activist and retired teacher who lives at Leisure World in Silver Spring, called the computerized balloting "marvelous."

"Any idiot could do it, if you want to know the truth," Malamut said.

Voters who encountered malfunctioning machines, however, took issue with the positive reports. Jeffrey Liss, a lawyer, said the machine he used at Chevy Chase Elementary School had to be shut down after he complained that it did not call up the candidates for the Democratic Senate primary. Liss said that election officials refused to let him recast his vote on another machine; a provisional ballot he filled out may or may not be counted.

"We need to have a system where you can touch the ballot, you can hold it in your hand, and you can confirm what you're doing," Liss said. "We all know that computers have glitches. We suffer it every day at home and at work."

Aviel Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer science professor who was the lead author of a paper questioning the machines' security, said that "some of my concerns were laid to rest and some were made worse" after serving as an election judge yesterday in Baltimore County.

"It would be hard for someone to get away with" tampering with the "smart card" that is ed into the machine immediately before voting, he said. He remained concerned, though, that results from every voting machine in a precinct are loaded into one centralized computer at the end of the day.

"If you can successfully tamper with that one machine, you can void the election in that one precinct," Rubin said.

Howard County was the only jurisdiction to experience major difficulty and significant delays in tallying results, but not because of the Diebold machines. About an hour after polls closed, election officials there realized that their main server was not downloading the data that modems across the county were sending.

Shortly before 10 p.m., the first results finally began recording.

Maryland switched to computerized voting to comply with federal law requiring a system that could be used by sight-impaired voters and offer multilingual options. The move was controversial, particularly after a test of the system by state consultants revealed security flaws and other vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit.

Some detractors simply object to the lack of a paper ballot. Linda Schade, co-director of TrueVoteMD, a citizens group founded in September to demand printed records of each vote, helped organize a protest yesterday outside her Takoma Park polling place.

"The concern is whether the votes get counted the way they are cast," said Marc Elrich, a Takoma Park City Council member and one of nearly a dozen TrueVoteMD members who explained their reservations about electronic voting in front of a handful of television cameras. "I have no problem voting on a computer, as long as there's a paper trail to back it up," Elrich said.

Most election officials spent the weeks leading up to the primary trying to introduce as many voters as possible to the machines. They held public forums and mock elections, and they let people test them at stores, libraries and community dinners.

"I think they really have helped," said Gail L. Hatfield, the elections administrator in Calvert County. "I think in the long run, this is going to be the best system for the voters."

Voter Helen Croft agreed. "The machines are fine. It was much easier than the [former] way," she said as she left her polling place in Elkridge.

Still, the touch-screen approach confused Ray DiGiovanni of Port Tobacco, who cast his vote for an unintended candidate when he touched the wrong name by accident. "I didn't know how to erase it," he complained.

Three of the 321 machines in Charles County were switched off when election judges had trouble starting them up, said Dorothy C. Duffield, the county election director. In neighboring St. Mary's, a few of the 284 machines did not work and judges set them aside, according to county election chief Catherine Countiss. Duffield and Countiss said the machines could have been fixed, but they decided to play it safe and disqualify them.

In Anne Arundel County, one precinct experienced problems because the wrong decoder a device that contains ballot information specific to jurisdictions was delivered for the machines. Voters were allowed to fill out paper ballots until the error was corrected.

Staff writers Michael Amon, Tim Craig, Susan DeFord, Hamil R. Harris and Joshua Partlow contributed to this report.