Flaw found in voting machines

The only voting machine vendor approved to do business in North Carolina says it has recovered potentially faulty equipment that had been shipped to the state before the May 2 primary.

Election Systems & Software said the problem involved a bad batch of memory cards for optical scan voting machines, which count paper ballots. The problem, if not detected, could have resulted in some ballots not being counted.

The problem was first discovered in Ohio this month. The possibly defective memory cards in North Carolina have been returned to the company, and the cards are being replaced, Election Systems spokeswoman Jill Friedman-Wilson said.

All but three counties in North Carolina are using Election Systems equipment to count most of their ballots for the primary. The three outstanding counties chose to count ballots by hand rather than buy new equipment.

The State Board of Elections in December decided that most of the existing county-owned voting equipment was obsolete under new regulations approved by the General Assembly. The new rules came after an electronic voting machine error caused 4,438 votes to be lost in Carteret County during the November 2004 election.

Election Systems was the only company that ultimately met the machine restrictions set by the board and lawmakers.The potentially faulty memory cards, produced by a third-party manufacturer, may have had a problem with a small battery that is part of their circuitry, Friedman-Wilson said.

About 1,000 memory cards were shipped to North Carolina, and about 30 were sent with machines to Durham, Forsyth and Wake counties, Friedman-Wilson said. Some of the memory cards sent to North Carolina included those from a potentially faulty batch, but the company decided to replace all 1,000 cards, she said Friday.

"We're very confident that replacing these cards will eliminate the problems in the future," she said.

Each new piece of voting equipment is tested twice -- first at a state warehouse in Goldsboro and later in the county where it is sent, said Johnnie McLean, a deputy state elections director.

Election Systems has received orders for more than 8,700 optical scan, electronic recording and disabled-accessible machines from the counties, according to State Board of Elections data.