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Brooke Stanley, Maryland Gazette Oct. 8, 2003 Gaithersburg has decided to use the state's new electronic voting machines in the Nov. 4 city council election despite a recent state analysis that acknowledged certain flaws that could lead to fraud and errors. The city Board of Supervisors of Elections voted Thursday to go ahead with plans to use the Diebold voting system, which has been attacked since a Johns Hopkins University study in July found a number of holes in its software. After that report surfaced, the state hired Science Applications International Corp. to conduct a review of the system, and that review turned up dozens of flaws and set a schedule for fixing them. But state officials have said municipalities need not be concerned about the machines because they were already used without problem for last year's elections in four counties, including Montgomery. Gaithersburg, under the direction of the State Board of Elections, will put several precautions into place to avoid any problems, said Assistant City Manager Fred Felton. "The board was in agreement that the machines are safe and that we could use them," said Joan More, a member of the city's Board of Supervisors of Elections. The city will not use the Internet to transmit election results to the county Board of Elections, Felton said. Such electronic transmission was identified in the SAIC report as a potential security problem, so election officials will drive the results to the county Board of Elections instead, Felton said. Although all the fixes to the Diebold system will not be completed by the Nov. 4 elections, the first phase, which addresses critical technical problems, will be completed by Oct. 13, Felton said. The city will require election judges for the first time to attend a four-hour training session, and a major component of that training will be about security, Felton said. The city also will add an extra election judge at each polling site, bringing the number of judges at each site to 10, he said. "I guess it was the decision by the governor's office to go ahead and use it" that was the determining factor in the city's decision to go ahead with the touch-screen machines, said Stuart Gorin, a member of the city Board of Supervisors of Elections. "It would be kind of difficult at this late stage to come up with something totally different," he said. The City of Rockville has also decided to use the system in its upcoming mayor and city council races.
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