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Howard
County Times
Discarded Paper Ballots Draws Ire of Voter
By Pete Pichaske
April 22, 2004
Helen Kolbe of Columbia
said she has been a faithful voter for more than five decades.
So the news that Howard County elections officials had tossed
out her vote in last month's primary election angered her.
"I don't like the idea of being disenfranchised,"
Kolbe, 76, said. "Voting is our last bastion of
democracy, and if we can't know with confidence that our votes
will count, where is our democracy?"
Kolbe was one of 22 people in Howard County who filled out
a paper ballot in the March 2 primary election rather than use
the new touch-screen voting machines, and whose votes were
thrown out.
Under the touch-screen system, those 22 paper votes didn't
count, county elections officials said.
Kolbe, who voted at Bryant Woods Elementary School in
Columbia, said she requested a paper ballot on election day
because she did not trust the electronic system.
Although an elections official handed her a paper ballot,
told her how to fill it out, and even placed her finished
ballot in an official-looking "lockbox," nobody told
her that the ballot didn't count, Kolbe said.
"I did not vote with the intention of not
voting," she added.
Kolbe has appealed the decision to discount her vote to the
state board of elections.
Elections officials said they allowed people to use the
paper ballots because they wanted to ensure that everyone who
wanted to cast a ballot did so. However, state regulations
barred them from counting those votes, the officials said.
"We wanted to make sure that nobody leaves a voting
precinct without voting," Howard County Board of
Elections chairman Guy Harriman said. "But we could not
count them. We really had no choice."
In some cases, officials counted paper or
"provisional" ballots, Harriman said. Those cases
included, for example, the vote of a person who showed up at
the wrong precinct and therefore had no access to the voting
machine. But if a person had access to a touch-screen machine,
he or she had to use it.
Election officials counted 97 legal paper ballots, not
including absentee ballots, which also were paper.
However the board sent 22 voters who had access to
touch-screen machines but decided to use paper ballots,
letters explaining that their votes did not count, Harriman
said, adding that the letters went out a week or two after the
election.
He and other election officials said the voters requesting
paper ballots should have been told when they voted that their
vote didn't count.
"That may not have been made clear to people by the
election judges," said Evelyn Purcell, acting supervisor
of elections board. "And maybe the people didn't
understand what they were told."
No paper trail
The touch-screen voting machines were used throughout most
of Maryland for the first time in the March 2 primary and will
be used again in the November general election.
Although the machines proved popular with most voters, who
found them easy to use, critics have pointed out that the
machines provide no back-up "paper trail" of the
vote, leaving them vulnerable to tampering. The Maryland
General Assembly this year rejected legislation requiring that
the machines provide a paper tally.
Critics of the system urged voters to protest the new
system by demanding paper ballots during the primary election,
a suggestion hundreds of voters throughout the state followed.
While it is unclear whether other counties followed
Howard's policy of accepting paper ballots at polling places,
election officials throughout Maryland refused to count the
protest ballots.
"There are reasons people were allowed to vote with a
provisional ballot, but fear of touch-screen voting machines
is not one of them," said Mary Wagner of the state board
of elections.
The officials' refusal to accept paper ballots has outraged
critics of electronic voting.
"This happened to people throughout the state,"
said Linda Schade of True Vote Maryland, an organization
founded last year to lobby for changes to the touch-screen
system used in Maryland. "They didn't have to do that.
They didn't have to disenfranchise people."
Ann Balcerzak, an alternate to the county elections board,
said she sympathized with some of the paper-ballot users and
lobbied the board unsuccessfully to have at least some of the
ballots counted.
"In Helen's case, in particular, I thought there was
an expectation that the ballot would've been counted,"
Balcerzak said of Kolbe's experience.
The board would have to resolve such snafus before the
general election, she added.
"This was a real shakedown cruise for us,"
Balcerzak said of the primary election. "This is the type
of thing the board will be looking at very closely. When you
realize how close elections can be, you can't have this
happening."
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