As Alastair Farrugia, a mathematician at the Univ. of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, reminds us, "Liberty is when the people are free to speak, but democracy is when the government listens." 

A.C. Tanner served as a chief election judge in Prince George County, Maryland in the primary election on September 12, 2006. He has given permission to post the following comments. 

First, I am extremely proud of the outstanding performance of my 5 election judges, under changing conditions and unusual circumstances. To me this proves that it is possible to run an election and run it well with volunteers with a keen sense of citizenship and civic duty. And if we value our democracy, we will all continue to insist that volunteers and not professionals or contract personnel continue to conduct the elections at the polling places. 

Second, the State Board of Elections should be very careful of casting stones at county boards and their staff.  All the instructional materials provided to us, with the exception of the last minute sheet from the county, was prepared by the State BOE.  And it was a mess. The manual given to me at the county BOE training was bound, but missing several chapters. Some of these missing chapters were stapled together and handed out as a supplement. We were told that one of the chapters was out of date, and we would receive an update in the mail, which we did. All of the materials were riddled with typographical and formatting errors, and editorial notes such as "place information for chief judges here." The section on electronic poll books assumed that we would use a printer, and to my knowledge, Prince George's county had no such printers. The electronic poll book usage seems to have been a true fiasco, and the blame for that lies squarely on the State BOE and its director, Linda Lamone, who spent the money that the Governor allocated for optical scan machines on these poll books, which caused nothing but problems for judges.