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Electronic Pollbooks Not Necessary for Early Voting |
$13 Million No-Bid “Sweetheart Deal” with Diebold
Draws Fire from Election Integrity Activists
Takoma Park, MD: The implementation of early voting and of the
federally mandated statewide voter registration database has been such
a headache that the administrators of elections in several Maryland
counties have recently resigned, including those in Prince Georges,
Anne Arundel and Wicomico Counties.
Wednesday the State Board of Elections quietly tried to sneak a $13
million sweetheart deal with Diebold Election Systems, Inc., through
the Board of Public Works to buy electronic pollbooks in time for this
fall’s early voting. Since there are other vendors that sell
e-pollbooks, the state would normally issue a carefully written RFP and
thoroughly investigate each product available, as they do with other
purchases of this magnitude. Instead they are trying to rush into a
no-bid contract with a company that has been uncooperative lately in
answering their questions about possible security vulnerabilities in
Maryland’s voting equipment.
The haste with which the SBE is seeking to consummate this deal is in
stark contrast to their protestations a few short weeks ago that there
was no time to make major changes to our voting system before this
fall’s elections. That was when the question was about replacing our
paperless touchscreen voting machines with precinct-based optical
scanners—a change favored by 57% of Maryland voters, according to a
recent survey by Gonzales Research. One of the complaints the SBE
voiced about the Voter-Verified Paper Ballot bill was that it might
force the state into working with a specific vendor. But it seems that
their tune changes when the vendor is Diebold.
“TrueVoteMD has no objection to the concept of early voting, but we
have serious concerns about how it will be implemented in Maryland with
our unverifiable electronic voting machines,” said Alex Zeese, State
Coordinator of TrueVoteMD. “Specifically, our objection is to the rash
purchase, untested use and of electronic pollbooks and the troubled
implementation of the voter registration database.”
The federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 requires all states to
have a statewide voter registration database in place by 2006. Like
most other states, Maryland has struggled to meet this deadline, and
the problems encountered in converting county databases into the new
format have not yet been fully resolved. A recent study by the Brennan
Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law found that
nearly one-fifth of new voter registrations may be disqualified in the
transition and dropped from the voter rolls. Operating the 2006
elections with this significant change alone presents major challenges.
But on top of that, the State Board of Elections now wants to insert an
additional new product into the mix: electronic pollbooks.
Paper pollbooks and Voter Authority Cards—the index cards each voter
signs when checking in at a polling place—are some of the few remaining
safeguards against voter fraud in Maryland’s otherwise paperless voting
system. They provide an independent means to verify exactly who voted
in an election and to determine how many votes should have been tallied
by the voting machines. Replacing them with electronic pollbooks—which
the SBE insists is necessary to implement early voting in Maryland—adds
yet another layer of untested technology between the voter and the
voting process.
Since these e-pollbooks would interface directly with the state’s voter
registration database via the Internet, altering the database in the
process, the potential to disenfranchise large numbers of voters
through computer malfunctions, system crashes, bad programming, or even
hacking or fraud, is enormous.
“Electronic pollbooks are not needed if early voting is done the same
way it is in states such as Texas, where it is essentially treated as
walk-in absentee voting,” said Linda Schade, Executive Director of
TrueVoteMD. “Voters mark their choices on absentee ballots that are
canvassed with all other absentee ballots after election day. If a
voter has voted at the polls on Election Day, their early ballot is
disqualified and not counted. That would be the safest, simplest method
of providing early voting this year—and it would prevent the state from
pouring millions more dollars into pork that enmeshes us more deeply
with Diebold.”|
Define "database"
Written by sherpa on 2006-05-07 22:32:11
Oh yeah, let's go with the company that has demonstrably defective voting mechines to do our e-pollbooks. That makes sense!
While The federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 requires all states to have a statewide voter registration database in place by 2006. does this specifically require that the database be electronic (the book is a "database" with the broad meaning of the term)? If the database must be electronic, is this electronic version of the database required to be the one used to verify registration in the polling place?
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