Misplaced electronic cards, untrained poll judges and malfunctioning new computers helped make a mess of Tuesday’s primaries in two of the state’s largest jurisdictions. Officials spent much of Wednesday trying to sort out what happened, how to correct it and whom to blame.
In Montgomery County, where some polls opened more than three hours late because new voting machines would not work without electronic cards that were not delivered, County Executive Doug Duncan demanded that Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich fire the county’s two top election officials.
In Baltimore, where many polling places opened several hours late because election judges failed to arrive, a spokesman for Mayor Martin O’Malley, Ehrlich’s opponent in the November election, said the mess was due to the governor’s “lack of oversight” and “incompetence.” He called the election “a national embarrassment for Maryland.”
For his part, Ehrlich blamed the Democrat-controlled state Senate for forcing the state to adopt complicated new machines without proper training.
“The overarching problem was that local election boards were required to implement a new, highly complex voting technology without sufficient time or training,” said Henry Fawell, Ehrlich’s spokesman.
Officials of both the local board of election and the state attorney general’s office said they would investigate the problems in hopes of correcting them by November. But that gave little solace to candidates who as late as Wednesday morning still did not know whether they had won or not because of the slow returns from Montgomery County and Baltimore, which between them have about a quarter of the state’s voters.
“It was nothing more than rank ineptitude,” said Montgomery County State’s Attorney Douglas F. Gansler, who Tuesday won the Democratic nomination for attorney general. “The Montgomery County Board of Elections has one mission … and they blew it.”
Polls in both Baltimore City and Montgomery County stayed open an extra hour Tuesday to make up for the delays. In some cases, paper provisional ballots were handed out, and after they ran out voters had to endure long lines or leave.
Duncan late Wednesday called on Ehrlich to fire Nancy Dacek, the chair of the board of elections, and demanded that the board fire Margaret Jurgensen, the director of the elections office.
Electronic errors in Montgomery County’s new voting machines happened in part because the machines there had never been field tested, said Dacek. The board received the machines only last week, and printers that had to be connected to the machine arrived only three days before primaries.
“Training 5,000 people on electronic poll books in less than a week is not possible,” Dacek said.
She said hundreds of plastic cards needed to access the new voting machines were not sealed in plastic bags sent to Montgomery County precincts along with rubber bands and pencils.
In addition, some machines, which are supposed to quickly search for voters’ names electronically so judges don’t have to sift through paper cards, would overheat after five or six uses and need restarting, Dacek said.
Dacek blamed the Democrat-dominated General Assembly for the electronic machines arriving late. Because the courts struck down an early voting bill weeks before primaries, all money and work the Board of Elections had put toward implementing the measure was wasted, she said.
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