AT 11:30 P.M. election night a week ago, hours after the last vote had been cast and many races had been decided, I watched the last returns from a Baltimore City precinct arrive at the city board of elections at 417 E. Fayette St.
I leaned on my cab to observe the end of what had been a grueling day that began at 5:30 a.m. I was one of about 40 cab drivers hired to drive voting machine technicians and election board officials around on Election Day.
As part of my duties, I kept logs of the destinations of my passengers and used my dispatch radio to keep technicians in contact with their supervisors. I drove Gene Raynor, head of the state elections board, to check on vote totals throughout the day, and chauffeured technicians to trouble spots. I went to a total of 26 precincts scattered throughout the city, from palatial North Baltimore churches to elementary schools in West Baltimore to seedy dives in far East Baltimore.
As a Republican who has a healthy dose of suspicion about government, I saw nothing and heard nothing that remotely appeared to be attempts to fix the election. Any "irregularities" that I saw were due to such things as machine malfunctions.
I write about this in the wake of Republican gubernatorial candidate Ellen Sauerbrey's claims of election irregularities in Baltimore City last Tuesday -- including an apparent report to her headquarters that late returns -- such as the ones that I mentioned earlier -- might have been delayed due to some manipulation of vote totals. Such charges have raised doubts among many about the validity of the outcome of the governor's race, which it now appears that Democrat Parris Glendening will win. This is a serious charge since it could lead to more people losing faith in the democratic process. Too few people vote already.
The problems that I saw were bipartisan in nature: at least as many were caused by Republicans as Democrats. A typical problem was one a technician and I raced to at a Northeast Baltimore precinct shortly after the polls closed. There an election judge had used a wrong key to open a voting machine and it had broken off in the lock. As a result, that machine could not be opened and its votes counted until a technician came to repair the machine. Witnesses from both political parties were present. No one tried to alter the vote count.
When the technician completed his task, we returned to my cab and I called his supervisors on my radio to report that I had a technician ready to go to the next trouble spot. We were dispatched to three polling places. We finished the last of the trio about 10 p.m. So the last precinct serviced by the technician I was driving didn't get its tally turned in until after 11 p.m.
Jeff, one technician I chauffeured who doesn't want his last named used, visited 18 polling places on repair calls. When asked the key reason for problems, he said: "Election judges who don't know what they're doing."
Speaking of human errors, I think Republicans should concern themselves with increasing their representation at polling places on Election Day in the city. Under state law, at least one election judge from each party is supposed to be at each polling place the entire day. This past Tuesday, Republican judges, as is usually the case, were in short supply in the city. As a result, some precincts couldn't open until a Republican voter turned up who was willing to be drafted to serve as a judge at least until a trained Republican judge could be found.
In addition to judges, Mrs. Sauerbrey and her cohorts should be ashamed of the lack of overall Republican visibility at city polling places on Tuesday. Little if any Republican campaign material or workers were evident. But every precinct that I visited was ringed by "Vote for the Democrats" signs. It's simply not smart politically for the Republicans to write off Baltimore City.
The main "irregularity" on Election Day and during the campaign was a complete lack of respect for city voters by Republican candidates, Mrs. Sauerbrey in particular.
Throughout the campaign, Mrs. Sauerbrey made it clear that the welfare of Baltimore City was not high on her agenda. Now that it's evident that several dozen more votes per precinct from the city would have made her the next governor, she's screaming election fraud.
Such claims are really hypocrisy of the worst sort. If this is the way she would have behaved in office, I'm glad Ellen Sauerbrey didn't win.
Robin Miller writes from Baltimore.