Computer scientists have warned for many years that paperless touch-screen voting systems like Maryland's are dangerous, insecure, and put our elections at risk. Countless studies and election-day disasters in other states have proved them right.
Maryland passed a law in 2007 requiring optically scanned paper ballots by the 2010 elections.
State Elections Administrator Linda Lamone claims that it would be too expensive to switch. However, an independent review of voting system costs and life-span commissioned last year by the General Assembly has shown that Maryland would save money by switching, and warns against continuing to use the current equipment, which is aging beyond its projected life-span.
In 2010, some of the oldest machines in Maryland began experiencing significant failures, including "dead zones" in 18% of the touch-screen machines in Allegany County. The machines in Montgomery and Prince George's Counties will also be beyond their life expectancy by the 2012 elections.
Help NEEDED: Ensure that the FY2013 budget includes funding to begin the transition to a safer, less expensive voting system to have it in place by the 2014 elections.
Stop the reckless rush to internet voting
As insecure as touch-screen voting is, internet voting is far more dangerous.
In 2010 Maryland's State Board of Elections (SBE) began delivering blank ballots over the internet to any absentee voter who requested one. Voters printed the ballot, marked it, signed it, and mailed it in.
The SBE now intends to allow absentee voters to mark their ballots on the internet, print them out, and mail them in. A bar code on the ballot would encode the votes and be used to print out a ballot that can be read by a computer. This ballot, which the voter never sees, would be the ballot counted.
This new internet voting system is not federally certified, and no federal standards have been set yet. Further, it does not meet the certification requirements of Maryland law.
Signatures are never checked to ensure that a ballot was submitted by the voter who requested it, and it is unclear whether the ballots printed by the computer will be compared to the original ballots mailed in by voters to ensure they match. There are countless ways to "hack" this type of election.
With a "no-excuse" absentee voting, the percentage of absentee voters is growing quickly.
Help NEEDED: Maryland should follow the lead of other states and restrict the option of internet ballot delivery to military and overseas voters, groups that do not always have the safer options available to domestic absentee voters. Enforce state requirements for federal certification of all voting software and hardware, voter-verifiability of the official ballot, and protection of ballot privacy, which may be at risk with this system.
Prevent proposed restrictions on polling place transparency
The SBE has proposed new regulations that would severely restrict election monitoring by candidates or parties.
These would greatly limit polling place transparency, reduce flexibility and last-minute assignments of poll-watchers, and be a bureaucratic nuisance for candidates, parties and local election officials precisely at the busiest time of the pre-election period.
Help NEEDED: Make office-holders, candidates, and parties aware of the proposed regulations. Submit comments during the public comment period in November.
New Study Shows Maryland Could Save Millions
by Switching to Optical Scan Voting
December 14 - A report just released by the Department of Legislative Services shows Maryland could save at least $9.5 million over 8 years by replacing its aging touch-screen voting equipment with optically scanned paper ballots. The study estimates that the state already would have saved $1.6 to $5.2 million by now if we had switched in 2006.
The independent cost analysis was mandated last spring by the General Assembly to examine the true costs of operating the existing machines versus switching to the more verifiable voting system required by a law passed in 2007. Controversy over the costs erupted during last year's legislative session when State Elections Administrator Linda Lamone presented a cost comparison to Board of Public Works members that vastly overstated the cost of moving to optical scan while underestimating the costs of operating the existing machines.
Read SOV's News Release and the DLS final report with findings and recommendations.
(Please note that some information has been redacted per vendors' requests.)
April 12, 2010 - Maryland should have voted on a new, reliable paper-ballot voting system in this year's elections, according to a law passed in 2007 mandating a change away from the highly vulnerable touch-screen voting equipment. But the transition was delayed based on cost estimates supplied by the State Board of Elections (SBE) which asserted that it would be far less expensive to continue using the current equipment. Skepticism about the accuracy of those cost projections has prompted the General Assembly to order an independent study... Read more
March 4, 2010 - Three years ago Maryland passed a law requiring the state to adopt a proven, verifiable, and cost-effective paper ballot/optical-scan voting system by 2010. But Governor O'Malley recently cut the funding to purchase the new voting system because of Maryland's severe fiscal crisis...
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