In Voter Database, Seek, and Seek, and Seek, and Ye Shall Find

[MountainLaurel]

Montgomery County elections director Margaret Jurgensen was virtually alone in the office Monday, so she began experimenting with the new statewide voter database that had been giving her staff trouble.

Workers were having a hard time using the search feature to find voters in the database. So she typed in the first four letters of her name, J-U-R-G, and the age range of 50 to 55, and hit the search button.

"My name did not come up," Jurgensen said, recounting the episode last week in a meeting with the State Board of Elections.

That was not welcome news. The primary election is two months away, and it will be Maryland's first real test of the new voter database, called MDVOTERS.

County election workers discovered problems in the database when they used it to check the validity of signatures in a petition drive to overturn early-voting laws. In Montgomery, workers were initially unable to find 121 registered voters in the database. They discovered the error when they looked up the same names on the old county voter rolls. When they searched again, using broader criteria, they found the 121 voters on MDVOTERS.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/08/AR2006070800878.html

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