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Welcome to my home state: proud land of steamed crabs, sludge politics and, now, the biggest electoral snafu of the 2006 primary
season.
Maybe you've heard about the mess we have here this week. It has put Maryland in the national political news for the first
time since, well, February, when our state's venerable 84-year-old comptroller was shown round the clock on CNN commanding
a young female aide to "walk again" so he could ogle her derriere at a public Board of Estimates meeting. (He was
heartily voted out of office on Tuesday, by the way, thanks to we registered Democrats, who were way beyond sick of him.)
But now Maryland has new electoral dirt cascading across national TV news screens. The gist of it, for those of you beyond
the physical reach of our state's latest mudslide, is that the inaugural statewide use of Maryland's new electronic voting
system on Tuesday proved to be a disaster. Technical problems, staff cluelessness, volunteer shortages and flat-out incompetence
brought voting to an outright halt in places. Electoral workers couldn't get machines to function. Polling places failed to
open, then ran out of paper ballots as stand-ins for the idle machines. In one politically prominent county, electoral staff
delivered the electronic machines to polling places but not the ATM-like cards that voters need to use them, resulting in
near-insurrection as voting was delayed for hours. In Baltimore, many poll volunteers failed to show up or were stymied by
inaccurate electronic voter lists. The fallout: voters are enraged, ass-covering intra-government accusations are flying like
bullets, some races are still in doubt, and the pundit quip-of-the-moment here is that losing candidates were lining up outside
of courthouses early Wednesday waiting for the doors to open so they could file lawsuits.
There is plenty of blame to go around: the years of serial screw-ups by the head of the state's Board of Elections, who
stonewalled the wholesale purchase and installation of the electronic system against widespread public misgivings and never
addressed the system's widely-publicized glitches and vulnerabilities to hacking; the jaw-dropping incompetence of other electoral
officials; the shortage of poll volunteers willing to work long hours for a pittance; the machines themselves, manufactured
by major Bush funder Diebold, which have figured nationally in, er, questionable Republican victories.
So what does all of this mean for the nation's more than 200 million non-Marylanders? Plenty:
-- It means that, once again, electronic voting (especially without a voter-verified paper trail, which Maryland lacks)
has shown itself to be a not-ready-for-prime-time technology. Not only is it buggy and unreliable, it also continues to be
vulnerable to potentially disastrous shenanigans. (The nation's best-known study of these security vulnerabilities was done,
ironically, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; the lead Hopkins researcher, Avi Rubin [http://avirubin.com/vote], has
been a blistering critic of Maryland's electronic system.)
-- It means that we need to take the political patronage out of electoral bureaucracy in all 50 states. In Maryland, members
of electoral boards in counties across the state are political appointees put in place by the governor (who now happens to
be a Republican known for valuing political loyalty over merit). This vice is not unique to Maryland, nor is it limited to
Republicans, although Republicans have, in recent years, put it to its most monstrously Machiavellian use (see Ohio and Florida).
Administering a state's electoral system needs to be a professional, non-politicized function, carried out by publicly accountable
authorities with demonstrable (and legally required) expertise. Enough already of these dog-catcher political flunkies with
their fingers on a state's electoral results. The country can't take it.
-- And, finally, it means that we need to get the money out of politics so that politicians who make these decisions are
public servants instead of private sector ringers who take money from, say, manufacturers of electronic voting machines. I
know, I talk a lot about campaign finance reform in this space -- most recently in the first installment of the Democracy
Laundry List -- but that's because campaign finance affects just about everything in American politics.
Which brings me to this: I am, truly, as I promised, going to return to posting the remaining entries in the Laundry List.
It will be my next post.
Unless something else comes up.
© 2006 Bruce A. Jacobs (Posted 9/14/06)
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