Maryland governor plans to drop electronic voting, buy optical scanners

Making good on a campaign promise to overhaul Maryland's suspect electronic voting system, the governor there proposed an initial outlay in the state budget toward the purchase of scanners to replace its $65 million touch-screen voting systems.

As the Baltimore Sun first reported on Saturday, in his state's budget officially submitted to the Maryland legislature this morning, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) has proposed an outlay of $6.8 million toward the purchase of optical-scan voting machines which utilize hard-copy paper ballots.

The new machines would end up costing the state $20 million, the Sun reported, though meanwhile it would continue to pay off the remaining bill for the $65 million worth of touch-screen voting machines the state would evidently retire. That bill is being paid off on an installment plan that expires in 2014.

The touch-screens became a campaign issue in Maryland back in 2006, especially after it was learned that supplier Diebold Election Systems had replaced suspect hardware in voting machines it had already shipped to Maryland, without notifying the state's election officials that it was doing so. And that same month, the source code for Diebold systems already in use was mysteriously shipped on disc to a state legislator, in an indication of the accessibility of the procedures that held up the entire state's election system.

The crisis that ensued threatened to affect the tabulated results of the election, as Diebold also happened to be the supplier of absentee ballots for the state.

Some experts are saying that, while optical scan systems haven't been proven themselves optimally reliable either, they may be more reliable than touch-screen systems that misread voters' touches, record some touches twice, or freeze in the middle of the voting day.

But a July 2005 report by an advocacy group called Black Box Voting (PDF available here) called into question the integrity of optical scan systems, including particularly -- and in this case, ironically -- those manufactured by Diebold.

As author Harri Hursti wrote at the time, "In the author's opinion the greatest problem in the system under review is the very design and architecture itself. Incorporated into the foundation of the Diebold Precinct-Based Optical Scan 1.94w system is the mother of security holes, and no apparent cure will produce infertility, or system safety. This design would not appropriately be characterized as a house with the door open. The design of the Diebold...1.94w system is, in the author's own view, more akin to a house with an unlockable revolving door."

If any recommendations have been made with regard to the supplier of the new optical scan machines for Maryland, they have not yet been made public. Last August, Diebold Election Systems renamed itself Premier Election Systems, as part of an effort to repair its public images after controversies erupted in Maryland, California, and elsewhere.

In related news, the Washington Times reported last week that Gov. O'Malley has made it a goal of his state to adopt the US Dept. of Homeland Security's Real ID system by January 1, 2010, thus meeting the department's deadline set in March of last year.