Wash Post on Diebolds massive parts replacements in MD

["Margit Johansson" <margitjo@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/25/AR2006102501907.html

The maker of Maryland's electronic voting system replaced flawed
electronic components in several thousand touch-screen voting
machines in 2005, state election officials acknowledged this week.

To eliminate unpredictable "screen freezes" that have occurred since
the machines were first used in Maryland in 2002, Diebold Election
Systems installed new system boards in about 4,700 voting machines
from four Maryland counties: Allegany, Dorchester, Montgomery and
Prince George's.

The screen freezes do not cause votes to be lost, officials said, but
they confuse voters and election judges who sometimes wonder whether
votes cast on a frozen machine will be counted.

The acknowledgment of the repairs came in response to queries from
The Washington Post and sheds further light on Maryland's troubled
transition to electronic voting. Critics said it raises concerns
about whether the state and company officials have kept the public
adequately informed about problems with a system that cost taxpayers
$106 million.

State officials said this week that they learned after the November
2004 election that a flawed system board was the source of the
screen-freeze problem. But documents show that Diebold had diagnosed
the problem early that year.

Ross Goldstein, deputy state elections administrator, defended
Diebold's handling of the problem. "They have updated all the units,
and the problem has been resolved," he said.

Mike Morrill, Diebold's Maryland spokesman, said the company had not
completed its research into screen freezes until early 2005, when it
agreed to replace all the system boards as the only way to guarantee
that the problem would not recur.

He said the flawed system boards were confined to the four counties
because other counties received machines with updated system boards.
Montgomery experienced screen freezes more often than the others, Morrill said.

The screen freezes are unrelated to the problems experienced in
September's primary, when Diebold's electronic voter-registration
machines rebooted without warning in every Maryland precinct. The
rebooting was caused by a software defect, which Diebold says has
been corrected.

Even so, the two leading candidates for governor -- Gov. Robert L.
Ehrlich Jr. (R) and Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley (D) -- have
called on voters to use absentee ballots in the election, citing
uncertainties about the reliability of Maryland's system.
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