This article was first published in the American Observer.
The touchscreen voting machines Maryland uses to record votes malfunctioned in some polling areas Tuesday, according to a representative from an organization that was monitoring the election.
Robert Ferraro, who works for SAVE our Votes, a nonpartisan watchdog group that advocates for secure and verifiable elections in Maryland, said that in some areas voting machines broke down and touchscreens had calibration errors.
“It’s significant that there’s always some machines breaking down every single election practically in every precinct,” said Ferraro. “It’s a lousy system. If other things broke down that frequently people would be howling.”
He said that at one voting precinct, seven of 15 machines weren’t working. He said that technicians were able to get all but one of those machines running again in about an hour and a half.
He also said a SAVE our Votes member, who was chief election judge at a voting place at Mount Rainier Junior High School, said she had to take one machine out of service there due to a calibration error in which the right side of the screen was working correctly, but the left side of the screen was malfunctioning.
“She said it was really weird, something she’d never seen before,” said Ferraro.
Ferraro said that he didn’t personally see any people challenging votes in Maryland. However, the Baltimore Sun reported that in a few isolated cases some people complained that their votes were recorded incorrectly, a problem that seems to have been corrected in those cases. The Sun said that “it was not clear if other voters may have made similar errors and not noticed it.”
Ferraro said that the machines were not malfunctioning more than what was normal and that he often sees at least one machine broken down in the majority of voting precincts.
The use of touchscreen voting machines in Maryland is a controversial issue for some — one that was in particular focus on Tuesday. Maryland was originally mandated by a 2007 law to switch from the machines to paper ballots this election, but that mandate was delayed due to budget issues.
Many cite the machine’s lack of a paper trail as a reason to switch to paper ballots that can be optically scanned.
Maryland voter Nancy Wallace said that she voted absentee this election to avoid voting on the touchscreen machines, which she worries don’t always record votes accurately or can be hacked.
“I was so glad that the state legislature has removed all restrictions on absentee voting so we can now all vote on a paper trail on a paper ballot,” she said.
She also said that absentee ballots are more reliable if a close election demands a vote recount.
“If there are questions later on in a couple days or in a few weeks, [the absentee ballots] can be recounted with the original intention of the voters,” she said. “There is no ability to actually recount the votes on the machine. You can reprint the result, but … there’s no capture of the original intent.”
However, Maryland State Board of Elections Deputy Administrator Ross Goldstein said that, despite the concerns, generally voting with the touchscreen voting machines goes smoothly. “People find [the machines] intuitive and easy to use,” he said.
He also said that Maryland has one of the lowest voter error rates in the country.
He said that with all voting systems it’s important to look at the system in its entirety, as opposed to just one aspect, in order to determine how secure it is. “All the voting systems require people to manage it, to provide … security procedures around the system to ensure that it can’t be tampered with and that the voting process is secure and accurate,” he said.
“I feel that we’ve done that with this system and that we do have a lot of security procedures in place,” he said. “People can have a lot of confidence on Election Day that the votes that they record are the votes that are counted.”
Several cost estimates have found that it would be too expensive to change the system from touchscreen machines to paper ballots that are optically scanned.
However, Ferraro disputed those estimates. He said that SAVE the Vote’s analysis found that switching to paper ballots would save more money in the long run due to the saved costs from not having to maintain aging touchscreen machines.
Ferraro said he hopes funds would be available to make the switch away from the touchscreen machines for the next election. “It’s still up in the air whether we’ll have it for the 2012 election,” he said.
Gov. Martin O’Malley did not include funds to switch to a new voting system in the proposed budget for 2011, according to the Maryland Association of Counties website.