The legislature failed to pass a Voter-Verified Paper Ballot Audit Trail (VVPBAT) bill again this year. Following is a recap of what happened to the proposal during the 2006 session.

The model legislation was introduced at the beginning of the session in identical bills, House Bill 244 and Senate Bill 713. The House bill moved rapidly. A subcommittee hearing lasted four hours, during which numerous advocacy groups testified in support of the bill including several representing handicapped citizens. The only opposition that appeared during the hearing was from the State Board of Elections (SBE) and several local boards of elections.

A principal opponent of the VVPBAT legislation, as she has been since she first made the decision to purchase paperless voting machines for the State, in 2001, was Linda Lamone, the State Administrator of Elections.

At one point, Ms. Lamone was asked about the so-called Hursti hack, an incident that occurred in Florida in December 2005, in which Harry Hursti, a computer security specialist demonstrated the ease with which Diebold memory card-controlled equipment could be made to miscount election results. Ms. Lamone stated that she had not received any information from Diebold regarding this incident. Yet TrueVote has a copy of a letter from Diebold to Ms. Lamone dated four days prior to the hearing stating that the company had given several updates to her and her staff.

On February 15th, Governor Ehrlich released a letter to the SBE, expressing concern about paperless voting machines. An exchange of letters between the Governor and the SBE dealt with the Hursti hack and the perceived need for retesting the Diebold machines owned by the state. These are published on the TrueVote site.

An amendment to HB244 from Delegate Liz Bobo of Howard County, provided for precinct-based optical-scan counting of the 2006 election. The amendment was offered by Chair Hixson and was adopted.

The amended bill, reported by the Ways and Means Committee, passed the House of Delegates by a vote of 137-0 on March 7, 2006, five weeks before the end of the 2006 session. It was hailed by VVPBAT supporters for its detailed language and high standards for both security and transparency.

The House-adopted bill was immediately referred to the Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs (ESE) committee, chaired by Senator Paula Hollinger. Prior to holding a hearing on HB 244, Senator Hollinger invited Diebold to demonstrate its newest paperless voting machine, the TSx. No other vendors were invited to the demonstration.

During the session, Diebold was hardly a silent voice in Annapolis. They hired a former staffer for Senate President Miller as a lobbyist, and a former Mikulski staff person to be their P.R. person. The Elections Administrator has been in Annapolis for many years and is said to have close ties to Senate President Mike Miller. This trio spread rumors around the state about the alleged inaccuracy of optical scanners.

Earlier this year the Elections Administrator hired a researcher from UMBC to do a study relating to voting machines. Interestingly, the study failed to look at a variety of voting technologies, focusing instead, as mandated by the study design, solely on voter response to touchscreen machines. Predictably, the public "liked" the machines. They also expressed a desire, by a margin of two to one, that the machines produce voter-verified paper ballots; but this finding was largely glossed over in the report on the research.

Data from the UMBC Study was characterized as finding that there was no public concern over the issue of paperless voting machines. In fact, as stated above, the study found that two out of three Maryland voters wanted a paper trail. The SBE Administrator also misrepresented an earlier report by a group of researchers at Caltech-MIT. That report had supported the use of optical scanners for vote-counting; the UMBC report failed to mention this finding, instead incorrectly stating that the MIT-Caltech report had found scanners to be inaccurate. (Interestingly, the author of the UMBC study presented a draft of his report to the Administrator in advance of its public release. Whether the Administrator made or demanded changes in the report before it was released will never be known. The researcher has assured TrueVote that she did not.)

On March 16^th, five weeks after HB244 had been unanimously adopted by the House, the Senate EHE Committee finally scheduled a hearing on SB713, the companion bill to HB 244. However, the committee did not report the bill out until April 5^th, eight full weeks after the House action and less than one week before the legislature was mandated to adjourn. The EHE Chair, Senator Hollinger, who had initially introduced SB713, now stated her opposition to the House provision for precinct-based optical scanners this year, and delayed the voting on both bills. At first the Senator excused her actions by arguing that the Governor would never fund the lease; not long after the Governor twice offered funds for the optical scanner lease. The first was $21.8 million; the second was $28 million.

Activists, growing impatient with the stalling on the part of the committee chair, started to canvass in Senator Hollinger's neighborhood to collect petitions and distribute information, in an effort to urge Senator Hollinger to pass the legislation.

At one point the Republican Senators attempted to add the language of HB244 to another Senate Voting Bill, in an attempt to support the House plan for optical scan in 2006. This effort was thwarted by Senator Hollinger, who stood on the senate floor in opposition to optical scan, saying that it could not be done in time for the primary. She offered a counter-proposal for mail-in voting and promised that this proposal would come to the floor shortly. When it came time to vote all 14 Senate Republicans supported the optical scan amendment, as did Democratic Senators Ruben and Brochin. However, the amendment fell short of the 24 votes needed for passage.

Activists had never heard of Senator Hollinger's mail-in proposal. When Senator Hollinger asked the activist community to support it, TrueVoteMD scrambled to get some information on mail-in voting. When we finally got a look at the amendment we found it unsatisfactory on a number of counts. The amendment stripped away almost all of the original legislation, severely weakening the audits and public transparency, as well as giving more discretion to the elections administrator. Some TrueVoters were willing to support the legislation and some were opposed to it. The bill came up in committee before anyone had time to make an educated comment. Senator Hollinger was unable to get any support from the other senators, and mail-in voting died in committee.

Senator Hollinger also offered an amendment for obtaining optical scanners in 2006; however it was obvious that the aim of this amendment was to kill the legislation. The amendment called for twice as much equipment as was needed, and would have carried a price tag of at least $60 million. Further, it required that the equipment be delivered to the state less than a month after enactment. It required that equipment be certified to the "2005 EAC standards," standards against which no voting equipment has been tested to date. Finally the amendment would have forced the contractor to pay triple damages if the equipment was not delivered by May 1st.

This amendment was so absurd on its face that it failed even to be seconded.

SB713 was finally voted out of committee, during a confusion of voting, late one evening in the last week of the session. When TrueVote first called around Annapolis the next day many senators told us that two bills passed, one of which was the bill we wanted from the House of Delegates. Then something truly weird happened: a committee staffer told us that the vote that night "didn't count, due to the fact that there was nothing on paper."

The bill came out of committee with unfavorable amendments, which TrueVoteMD fundamentally opposed. Vital parts of the original bill had been removed: it stripped out the procedures for recounts; the audits were reduced to a miserable 2%; the public accountability that had been mandated in the original language was removed. Finally, the bill gave discretion to the State Elections Administrator to decide what constituted the official vote during a recount, the machine tally or the results of a hand-tally. In an effort to prevent any vote on the legislation. A number of Senators then began a series of parliamentary stalling maneuvers.

The legislation was reported to the Senate floor on April 4^th. It was referred to committee under a motion by Senator Hogan. The reason given for this was that the Senator claimed there was no fiscal note on the bill, and wanted to know what the cost to the counties would be. (In fact, there was a fiscal note but that was not mentioned on the floor.)

On April 7^th, a new fiscal note was created and brought to the floor. This fiscal note stated that the cost for the counties would be $22 million. At that time Senator Schrader attempted to amend the bill to make it identical to the House-adopted HB244. This would have also removed the cost for the counties. In the middle of her request Senator Middleton interrupted and asked that the Senate delay voting for the bill until the Budget and Taxation committee reviewed it. Senate President Miller called for an immediate vote, and the Senate voted to hold off on the bill. Senator Harris objected, but the President did not allow his objection to be heard.

On the last day of session, when the bill came up Senator Currie asked that they hold off on voting for the bill until the end of session. The bill never came back onto the floor.

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