Marie Garber and Mary Rodgers

The conduct of elections and election officials have come in for a lot of scrutiny and much criticism since the 2000 election. So it is nice to see the Washington Post recognize two people, Marie Garber and Mary Rodgers, who improved our election system:

MARIE M. GARBER of Montgomery County and Mary S. Rodgers of the District were two conscientious elections administrators who knew how to get results when it mattered most in their jurisdictions. They held their posts over the same period and -- as fate would have it -- died within a fortnight of each other. At one critical point in the District's chaotic introduction to voting for local self-government, Mrs. Garber and Mrs. Rodgers even teamed up to reorganize the city office and end a string of nightmarish electoral calamities: computer cards that jammed in counting machines, malfunctioning machines that once delayed tallies for 12 days and ballot boxes that fell off the back of a truck on the way to being counted.

In Montgomery, Mrs. Garber -- one of the most knowledgeable elections experts in the country -- led an effort to modernize the county's electoral system, introducing computerized registration and vote-counting methods and making the election office a national model of efficiency. In 1987, when incoming Gov. William Donald Schaefer foolishly replaced her with a political crony, Mrs. Garber went on to become an elections consultant, helping to set up voting systems around the world. "She was years ahead of her time," said former Montgomery County executive Douglas M. Duncan, who worked in Mrs. Garber's office in the 1970s. "She ran one of the best election shops in the country."

Mrs. Rodgers had to endure the mismanagement of several predecessors before she finally was promoted from longtime staffer to acting administrator and eventually to administrator. Her patience, steady hand, sense of humor and in-office popularity proved just the tonic. She knew where the glitches were and wasted no time righting the system along with an energetic new executive director, Emmett Fremaux Jr., who purged the voter rolls of thousands of dead or transplanted voters, commingled with bum addresses. Soon gone were the voting horrors that had been so singularly embarrassing to residents who had fought so long for a measure of self-government. Their hard-won franchise remains precarious, but the Election Day guffaws and growls in Congress have subsided over the years.

Mrs. Garber, who died at 83, and Mrs. Rodgers, who was 82, were exceptional public servants who shared a most treasured belief. Each valued deeply the importance of the vote and of the need to ensure its integrity. And each contributed mightily to the strength of the region.

Hat tip to Del. Bill Bronrott (D-16).