Heading into what many believe will be the most competitive election season in modern Maryland history, each party is accusing the other of manipulating the election system to its advantage.

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Republicans say Democrats realize they could never win a fair fight and have chosen to install new rules and procedures that invite fraud and deceit. But Democrats say Republicans want to suppress turnout because they know that a true majority of Marylanders might not support Ehrlich's re-election.

Ehrlich is in full attack mode against the new procedure. His campaign workers are vigorously trying to collect the more than 52,000 signatures necessary to bring to referendum two bills establishing early voting in Maryland, which the Republican executive says could throw the 2006 election into chaos and its results into doubt.

"This is important. ... It's about the thing we value most," Ehrlich said yesterday. "I suspect this will end up in one or more courts .... in the fairly immediate future."

Democrats in the legislature passed several bills in the past year to refine the state's election system - including making absentee ballots easier to use and smoothing the way for voters whose names are not included on precinct rolls to cast provisional ballots.

But the adoption of early voting, which is in place in more than 30 states and which Democrats say will increase turnout, has caused the greatest consternation. Under the new system, selected polling places in each county and in Baltimore will be open from Tuesday through Saturday during the week before the primary and general elections. Voters would be able to cast ballots near their places of employment and during odd hours.

Advocates for fair elections say there is cause for concern about whether so large a change to Maryland voting procedure can be implemented by this fall without risking problems. But they say technology is available that could make the election - even with early voting - smoother and more accurate than ever.

Ehrlich and his supporters say they don't oppose early voting in general, just the way it is being implemented by the Democrats who control Maryland's General Assembly.

Tom Roskelly, an Annapolis Republican and longtime friend of Ehrlich who was recruited to head up the petition drive, said an early-voting system needs to be accompanied by a voter identification requirement; an audit trail for the voting machine; and thorough purging of the voter rolls for fraudulent, duplicate and out-of-date registrations. The Democrats, he said, precluded these measures.

"I'm just very concerned about what the safeguards are," he said. "I'll salute anybody who wants to expand voter rights, but the state is responsible for making sure those voter rights are also safeguarded."

Fraud alleged
In its study of problems in the 2004 presidential election, the American Center for Voting Rights, a nonpartisan voting system watchdog group, reported widespread voter fraud in states across the nation. But it mentioned only one instance of people trying to vote at an early-voting site and then again at their precinct on Election Day, one of the chief concerns of Maryland Republicans.

In that case, which occurred in Broward County, Fla., none of the double votes was counted, and the perpetrators' names were forwarded to prosecutors.

The potential exists for double-voting as election administrators struggle to develop accurate statewide voter databases and update them to reflect who has voted early, said Mark F. "Thor" Hearne II, general counsel to the American Center for Voting Rights.

States with early-voting systems like the one Maryland is adopting generally stop balloting for a few days before Election Day so officials can cross-check early voting logs with precinct voter lists, Hearne said. That typically means going through the lists by hand and crossing off names.

"In any early-voting system, the integrity of that system as an honest way to conduct an election is totally dependent, much more so than a regular election, on an accurate, real-time statewide voter roll," Hearne said. "Without that, you have eliminated all of the many major safeguards against voter fraud."

The Maryland State Board of Elections' plan to deal with that problem is a high-tech device called an "e-poll book." Instead of crossing names off a printed list, election judges would make a few taps on a mini-computer screen that has real-time, networked access to the state's voter database.

The system can check whether a voter is registered and encode the correct ballot on a smart card - including races for local offices - even if the voter is not in his home precinct.

Deputy Elections Director Ross Goldstein said the e-poll system is on track to be ready for the Sept. 12 primary. Elections Administrator Linda H. Lamone has requested an emergency procurement to buy the system at an estimated cost of $13 million.

But Ehrlich has voiced concerns about whether the technology is ready. He and Comptroller William Donald Schaefer blocked a contract at the Board of Public Works two weeks ago as a way to force Lamone to come back yesterday and discuss the procurement of the poll books, which the governor says are unproven in statewide early voting. Yesterday, after some intense questioning and some lecturing, a routine computer upgrade for the election board - not related to the e-poll books - was approved.

On this issue, Ehrlich has won the alliance of TrueVote Maryland, a group dedicated to ensuring the accuracy of Maryland elections. TrueVote Director Linda Schade said she worries about the security and reliability of the poll books, which are made by Diebold, the same company that makes Maryland's touch-screen voting machines. TrueVote has long questioned the security of the voting machines, a position Ehrlich adopted this year.

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"They're not well-tested, and so they have reliability problems," Schade said, adding that other states have found high failure rates when they have tried to employ the poll books in the field.

Technical challenges
George Beall, the former U.S. attorney tapped by Ehrlich to lead an election law task force last year, said the technical challenges of implementing early voting this year outweigh likely benefits in increased turnout. Studies have shown that early voting has little or no effect on the number of people who vote, he said.

"We didn't say it wasn't an idea whose time could come in the future, but based on the information that we received ... it was fairly compelling evidence that we weren't ready," Beall said.

As the Republican effort has accelerated in advance of a May 31 deadline to turn in part of the petition signatures, the Democratic Party has sought to reframe the issue as one of racial politics.

The Democrats held a rally in Prince George's County on Monday in which a dozen members of the House of Delegates - almost all of them members of minorities - decried the governor's petition drive, saying his real goal is to keep turnout low, particularly in Democrat-dominated African-American communities.

Ehrlich is "using the same techniques that were used to extend the franchise - petition drives and court challenges - but using them to suppress the vote," said Del. Anthony G. Brown, a Prince George's County Democrat and candidate for lieutenant governor on Mayor Martin O'Malley's ticket.

Baltimore County Republican Party Chairman Chris Cavey, who has helped with the petition drive, said the governor's argument that early voting invites fraud has struck a major chord. People intuitively see early voting as being like cheating, he said.

"They're very concerned with the innuendo or the fact that fraud can happen," Cavey said. "When you're trying to tell people who have always voted on one special day that suddenly by a magic wand it's OK to vote anytime before that special day, right there a red flag goes up. ... People have an automatic, reasonable doubt."