Won’t This Be Fun
Oct 26th, 2006 at 12:53 pm by Susie
Trying to vote in November, I mean:
The maker of Maryland’s electronic voting system replaced a flawed electronic component 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.
