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TrueVoteMD writes letter to Baltimore City |
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July 14, 2005 Mr. Neal Jones, Acting Director
Baltimore City Board of Elections
Charles L. Benton Bldg., Room 129
417 E. Fayette Street
Baltimore MD 21202-3432
Dear Mr. Jones,
Baltimore City is scheduled soon to join the rest of the State of Maryland in using Diebold’s Direct-Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines for your elections. Yet major questions about the performance of these machines in the November 2004 General Election remain unanswered. Are you aware of the following serious problems and can you assure the citizens of Baltimore that they will not affect the integrity of future election results?
1. Montgomery County’s information technology report for the November 2004 General Election shows that 7% of their machines failed on election day, and an additional 5% were “suspect.”
- Have root causes for these failures been identified?
- Are they attributable to a common hardware defect that is likely to occur in other machines not yet affected?
- These machines, which are some of the oldest in the state, until now have been covered by the manufacturer’s warranty, but that warranty will expire soon. What will be the cost of repairing and replacing the defective machines when the warranty expires?
2. Baltimore County experienced problems so severe that they were unable to report precinct results on election night. The results for Baltimore County certified by the state in December, 2004, report 20,000 more votes in the presidential race than Baltimore County’s official results certified in February, 2005
· Why did it take Baltimore County several days longer than any other county in the state to report their election night results? Exactly what problems were they experiencing during that time?
· Why do the official results for Baltimore County reported on the State Board of Elections website not match the official results reported by Baltimore County on its own website?
· Why does Baltimore County report 20,000 fewer votes* for president than the SBE’s official certified vote count** for that election?
· Why does the official turnout reported by Baltimore County show 27,000 fewer voters than reported on the SBE website?***
· Why did Baltimore County certify its results on February 14, 2005—3 months later than all other counties in the state?
· Were there memory card failures in Baltimore County? If so, how many?
· Were the cards that failed able to be recovered by retrieving the vote data from the "redundant" internal audit logs in the DREs, or were those also corrupted?
· If internal audit logs were corrupted, on how many machines did this occur and how many votes were lost?
I urge you to halt the deployment of the Diebold DREs in Baltimore City until these questions have been answered to your satisfaction or insist on the newest Diebold machines that are equipped with a voter-verified paper audit trail. You may wish to request the following documents to aid in your investigation:
· Reports from county election boards, especially in Baltimore and Montgomery Counties
· Election Day reports and other internal documents from Diebold, the equipment manufacturer which is responsible for the diagnosis and repair of the problems
· Equipment performance reports from the State Board of Elections
· Maryland Association of Election Officials (MAEO) Election Day Report
Additionally, you may wish to refer to the cost/benefit analysis performed by Miami-Dade County, Florida, which caused them to decide to replace their new $25 million DRE system with precinct-based optical scanners, which will save them $13 million in total costs over ten years. That report may be found at:
http://reformcoalition.org/Ressources/Initial%20Report%20from%20Supervisor%20of%20Elections.pdf
Sincerely,
Robert Ferraro
TrueVoteMD.org
301-270-6150
Sources:
http://www.elections.state.md.us/SBE_Election/turnout/turnout1.html
http://www.elections.state.md.us/SBE_Election/pages/president.html
http://resources.co.ba.md.us/Documents/Elections/2004_general_election_results.pdf
http://truevotemd.org/Resources/Lessons_Learned.pdf (Mont. Co. IT Report)
cc:
Baltimore City Board of Elections
Armstead B. C. Jones, Gene Johnson , Stephen Medura , Eleanor Wan , Lionel Murphy
Mayor, Baltimore City
Martin O'Malley
Baltimore City Council
Baltimore City Delegation, Maryland General Assembly |
