Ehrlich, leftists ally in fight against Diebold machines

Friday, March 10, 2006

by Thomas Dennison
Staff Writer

ANNAPOLIS — Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has joined forces with Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard B. Dean, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Sierra Club, Progressive Maryland and a group of Takoma Park activists.

The Republican governor has not become a member of the Democratic Party’s left wing that he often demonizes, but he has jumped on their bandwagon by blasting the state’s election system — particularly electronic voting machines.

‘‘It’s an interesting coalition of Montgomery County good government types and Republicans raising not just serious issues but irrefutable questions about the integrity of the process,” Ehrlich said in an interview.

Those same special interests that Ehrlich likes to lock horns with are on his side when it comes to the state’s $90 million electronic Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machines that have been in place since 2002.

Takoma Park-based TrueVoteMD has been on a crusade since July 2003 against Diebold, questioning its voting machine technology and security of the system that critics say is susceptible to hacking.

At the heart of TrueVoteMD’s argument is that the state should require Diebold to install the technology to produce a ‘‘paper trail” for voters to take with them after their ballots are cast to ensure the integrity of the election process.

Ehrlich turned up the volume in questioning the state’s voting system this week with a letter to the state Board of Elections supporting a bill that was passed 137-0 by the House on Thursday to lease optical scan voting machines to replace the touch-screen Diebold machines for $12 million to $16 million.

The bill would give the state two years to study alternatives, but the electronic voting machines would not be used for the coming September primaries or November’s general election. The bill is facing some rough sledding in the Senate because of opposition from Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Dist. 27) of Chesapeake Beach.

The State Board of Elections and Diebold officials contend that Maryland’s system is the safest, most accurate way to vote in America. They say leasing a new system would be too costly and cause a burden on local elections officials to implement. There are also questions about the reliability of optical scan machines.

State elections officials organized a conference call with reporters on Thursday with Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor, Michael I. Shamos, to reinforce the reliability of Maryland’s voting system.

Governor’s help welcome

Linda Schade, executive director and one of the five co-founders of TrueVoteMD, applauded Ehrlich’s intervention on the voting machine issue.

TrueVoteMD’s coalition consists of many organizations, such as the ACLU, that are almost never among Ehrlich’s allies.

‘‘We’ve said from the beginning that this is not a partisan issue ... whether you’re on the left or on the right, you want your candidate to have a fair shot,” said Schade, who ran as a Green Party candidate for the House of Delegates in Montgomery County in 2002.

Ehrlich’s lack of confidence in the state’s electronic voting system is proof ‘‘that the legitimacy of the Diebold system is in tatters,” Schade said.

Also, many of Howard Dean’s ‘‘Deaniacs” have taken on the paper trail issue as their call to arms.

‘‘It’s quite safe to say that there are a lot of people across the political spectrum who are passionate about having a voter verified paper trail for this year,” Schade said.

Opinions are mixed, however, on whether Ehrlich can gain any ground by taking on the state’s election system.

Remember 1994

The governor’s aides said this week that ‘‘blowing up” the entire voting system — including the calls to get rid of the Diebold machines — is part of the lingering fallout from several elections-related bills that the legislature overrode into law earlier this session.

Those bills require polling places to be open earlier and offer more access to provisional ballots. Ehrlich and his Republican allies describe the laws as blatant attempts by Democrats to sway the election to their favor.

‘‘When you change the rules of the elections in the middle of the process like the legislature has done, you shuffle the deck on the integrity of the process,” said Kevin Igoe, a Republican strategist. ‘‘A lot of Republicans still believe that the Democrats stole the election in 1994, and they see these veto overrides as proof that they’re trying to steal it again.”

Igoe was political director for Ellen R. Sauerbrey in 1994 when she narrowly lost a bitterly contested election with Parris N. Glendening, a Democrat.

In at least three opportunities that Ehrlich had to talk with reporters or on the radio this week, he brought up the 1994 election.

‘‘People don’t want 1994 to happen all over again,” he said.

The integrity of the state’s election process is not even on the radar screen of most voters, said G. Keith Haller, a Bethesda pollster who has surveyed the issue over the years. He said that right after the 1994 election there were concerns, but voters are overwhelmingly confident in the current system.

‘‘This is really a battle of the political intelligentsia,” Haller said. ‘‘If there ever was an inside baseball political story, the voting machine debate is a prime example. It’s really about campaign aficionados in both parties who paint these wild scenarios that there is hysteria in the streets on this issue.”

Haller also knocked down any talk that Ehrlich could win many liberal votes by embracing the voting machine controversy.

‘‘There is no way on God’s green earth that people in Takoma Park will ever join Ehrlich in his re-election campaign,” he said.

Schade disagreed, noting that dozens of e-mails from her supporters have sent to Maryland Democratic Party Chairman Terry Lierman expressing concern that Ehrlich may be capitalizing on the issue.

‘‘Democrats make up the majority of the membership, and they are writing to [Lierman] to tell him ‘hey guys we need to get on the job,’” Schade said.