A small (we hope) problem with voting machines

Mark Brinker Greensboro News-Record    14 March 2006

A couple folks have sent me this story and others like it from Ohio in recent days.

The main thrust is this: A bunch of memory cards that are used as part of ES&S's optical scan voting equipment malfunctioned when tested in Ohio.

ES&S is the lone vendor of voting equipment here in North Carolina. So, one might ask, are the same problems happening here.

First off, this is an issued with the optical scan machines - those where voters mark their choice down on paper and then those papers are counted by an automated scanner. The Direct Record machines, the ones where you plug you mark your choice on a little computer screen, are not affected by this particular issue.

Different counties are using different equipment. See the SBOE's list of who is running what by clicking here.

In the News & Record's greater coverage area, only Rockingham and Randolph counties use the optical scan machines.

Randolph County's election folks were out today when I called.

In Rockingham County, Deputy Election Director Denise Armstrong told me that her office had not tested the equipment locally. However, she said that it had undergone testing at a state warehouse in Goldsboro.

The state election folks haven't gotten back to me yet, but the folks at ES&S did.

ES&S Spokeswoman Jill Friedman said that the malfunction described in Ohio had to do with some faulty PCMCIA memory cards. Laptop computer users may recognize them as the same size and shape as their modem cards.

In the case of the voting machines, they're used to store vote counting data.

ES&S doesn't make the cards themselves, but buys them from a third party. Well, that third party shipped ES&S a bad batch. The main problem has to do with a tiny battery used in the circuitry not performing up to snuff.

So are any of them here?

Maybe.

Friedman said that none of the cards shipped to Rockingham and Randolph were part of the affected batch. She said it was unclear how big the affected batch might be and declined to put a number on it.

She was able to say about 30 cards shipped to three different counties in North Carolina were affected. Those counties were: Wake, Durham and Forsyth Counties.

"In each of those instances, we're working to acquire the cards and replace them," Friedman said.

She said that none of the cards in North Carolina had tested as bad, but they're being replaced out of an abundance of caution.

I'll this post if and when I hear more.