(UPDATE at 3:55) Montgomery County Board of Elections spokeswoman Marjorie Roher says Timmerman’s request has been forwarded to the county attorney, per standard procedure. Upon conclusion of the provisional and absentee ballot counts, a response will be prepared within the 30 days required by law of all Public Information Act requests.
The defeated Republican candidate for Rep. Chris Van Hollen’s congressional seat yesterday questioned the accuracy of Montgomery County polling results, filing a Public Information Act request to obtain electronic voting machine records for last week’s election.
Ken Timmerman, the Kensington man who ran against Van Hollen, got 43,729 votes and lost by more than 115,000 votes, according to the Montgomery County Board of Elections
In a letter to the Board dated Nov. 13, he questioned the security of voting machines, software and operating policies. He claimed voters in Montgomery County contacted him with “anecdotal evidence of irregularities during early voting and the Nov. 6 general election at various polling stations in Montgomery and Carroll Counties, many of which were brought to the attention of election judges on duty at the time.”
He also claimed there were voting machines in the district without a single Republican vote.
At Bethesda Elementary School, one of the most popular Bethesda voting precincts, Van Hollen got 77 percent of the vote. Timmerman got nearly 19 percent, slightly off from the split between presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and generally consistent throughout all Bethesda precincts.
Timmerman claims he asked to see voting machine print-outs detailing results from each machine, but was told they were discarded on election night. He said the state must enforce a 2007 law that established the replacement of touch-screen machines with optical scanner voting machines.
“It won’t change the outcome of this year’s elections,” Timmerman wrote. “But it could mean there will be less cheating in 2014.”
During the campaign, Timmerman had a number of testy exchanges with Van Hollen, a high-ranking member of the Democratic party. Timmerman espoused his belief in cutting government services and attacked Van Hollen’s leadership on the House Budget Committee.
Van Hollen, also a Kensington resident, said it was the worst case of “gutter politics” he had ever seen in the community.