Top court dismisses challenge to AccuVote (24561)

admin//August 19, 2004//

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A legal challenge to the Diebold AccuVote-TS machines ended yesterday in the Court of Appeals, which dismissed the suit filed by eight plaintiffs in April 2004 against Linda H. Lamone, supervisor of the board of elections.

Linda Schade, Andrew Harris, Judith Burns, Mark Elrich, Kwame Abayomi, Terrence Fitzgerald, Sharon Beard and Paul Suh were demanding paper ballots in the election process, contending that the electronic voting machines needed to provide a paper trail.

“It is the position of our lawsuit and a growing consensus across the country that we need to have a voter-verified paper trail,” Shade, co-founder of the Campaign for Verifiable Voting, said earlier in the month.

The lawsuit was sent to mediation but the two parties could not reach a compromise. The plaintiffs filed a motion for the top court to hear the case because the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court scheduled the hearing too late.

The Court of Appeals granted certiorari and ordered a dismissal yesterday, without comment.

The decision means that Maryland will use the 16,000 voting machines in the election.

Advocacy groups pushing for a paper trail still plan to monitor the election closely, however.

“We’re alerting voters as they go into the polls what to look out for,” Shade said last week.