{"id":3505,"date":"2006-09-21T00:27:26","date_gmt":"2006-09-21T07:27:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bradblog.com\/?p=3505"},"modified":"2006-09-21T00:30:18","modified_gmt":"2006-09-21T07:30:18","slug":"maryland-meltdown-republican-governor-calls-for-paper-ballots-in-november","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=3505","title":{"rendered":"MARYLAND MELTDOWN: Republican Governor Calls for Paper Ballots in November!"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Page 1 of Thursday’s WaPo<\/i>:<\/a><\/p>\n

A week after the primary election was plagued by human error and technical glitches, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) called yesterday for the state to scrap its $106 million electronic voting apparatus and revert to a paper ballot system for the November election.<\/p>\n

“When in doubt, go paper, go low-tech,” he said.<\/p>\n

Ehrlich said that, if necessary, he would call a special session of the Maryland General Assembly to change the law to allow paper ballots.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Republican Governor’s call comes after hearings today to investigate Maryland’s primary election meltdown<\/a> on September 12th.<\/p>\n

Ehrlich had called for paper ballots<\/a> last February. The Democratic MD House supported the initiative in a 137 to 0 vote<\/a>. The Democratic Senate let the bill die without a vote before ending their session.<\/p>\n

As BRAD BLOG<\/a> readers know well, Maryland was one of Diebold’s original showcase states and implemented paperless Diebold touch-screens back in 2002. They’ve had more experience with them than any other state. Yet they still couldn’t manage to get them to work correctly in a sparsely attended primary for a mid-term election.<\/p>\n

Democratic Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. is against the idea of using paper ballots. He told WaPo<\/i>, “We paid millions. These are state-of-the-art machines”<\/p>\n

Miller clearly doesn’t read The BRAD BLOG<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As DIEB-THROAT, our currently-anonymous Diebold insider source, who had a great deal of personal experience helping to roll out the systems in Maryland in 2002 told us recently: “We put junk out when HAVA [the Help America Vote Act] came out…We had no plans for paper trails, nothing.”<\/p>\n

According to WaPo<\/i>, Gene Raynor, Baltimore’s election director had the decency to resign. Diebold apologist and Maryland State Board of Elections administrator, Linda Lamone ought to do the same.<\/p>\n

But Lamone, ever in denial, said Ehrlich’s call for paper ballots was “crazy” and vowed that “her staff would ‘work around the clock’ to correct the problems that plagued the primary” according to WaPo<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Like you’ve been “working around the clock” to get it right since 2002, Ms. Lamone? Got anymore lipstick for that pig?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Page 1 of Thursday’s WaPo: A week after the primary election was plagued by human error and technical glitches, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) called yesterday for the state to scrap its $106 million electronic voting apparatus and revert to a paper ballot system for the November election. “When in doubt, go […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,76,6,102],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dieboldpremier","category-election-2006","category-election-irregularities","category-maryland","bb-type-bradblog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3505"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=3505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}