A House Ways and Means subcommittee hearing Wednesday in Annapolis turned out to be an opportunity for state election officials to explain how the 2010 election will proceed.

Ross Goldstein, deputy administrator, said Administrator Linda Lamone reiterated during the hearing, which lasted nearly two hours, that any new system would be costly and could create longer lines than currently exist across the state’s 1,824 precincts. Officially, the state board took no position on the issue. Instead, Goldstein said, state elections workers rely on the guidance set forth by lawmakers.

“Legislators set the policy,” Goldstein said.

In 2007, a new law mandated the state board of elections move forward with procuring a new optical scan voting system — one that advocates claim provides a more secure safeguard in the event of a recount.

“Right now, the governor took funding for that out of the budget,” Goldstein said of the proposed fiscal 2011 budget Gov. Martin O’Malley recently released. “We’re not going to be moving forward with procuring a new system. We had pretty much finalized the procurement. The plan was to submit a plan to the Board of Public Works for approval by Feb. 10. In the meantime, funding got cut.”

Goldstein said the state agency had “spent the last several months” working toward fulfilling the 2007 directive and had agreed to negotiate with Elections Systems and Software. In September, ESS acquired Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold Election Systems. Premier Election Solutions holds the license to the voting system currently in use across the state.

SAVE our Votes, a Columbia-based nonprofit organization advocating for the new system, argued Wednesday that, in fact, it’s not the new system that would increase the financial burden to taxpayers. It’s the current system that will do so, said co-director Rebecca Wilson.

The procurement package put forth by the state board of elections to the Ways and Means Committee is flawed, Wilson said, as it’s structured “in such a way that extensive reliance on vendors and project managers would continue unabated into the future.”

In addition, “we are concerned that some of the costs have been front-loaded into the first year as start-up costs rather than spread out across the five-year capital lease,” Wilson said in a prepared statement, “especially the roughly $8 million for voting booths and equipment transportation carts.”

Goldstein addressed the estimates for voting booths. He said the state had intended to purchase long-lasting booths made of plastic and metal instead of ones made of corrugated cardboard advocated for by SAVE our Votes. The cost is about $100 each — or nearly five times the cost of a cardboard unit — but would likely last longer than the life of any new voting system, Goldstein said.

Wilson pointed out the estimated cost per voter for procuring a new voting system was significantly higher in Maryland than in jurisdictions that have successfully completed the transition. A chart offered by SAVE our Votes shows the cost per voter in Maryland would be $23 — 64 percent higher than Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which has 1,436 precincts. The county had a total procurement cost of $16 million. Maryland’s estimate is $77 million.