He agreed, at first.
Then, Boyd said yesterday, the CBS News program "60 Minutes" called, telling him it wanted to send an expert to test the machine. Boyd decided to keep the machine until Thursday, the day he said he had agreed to return it originally.
Boyd said the board was persistent in its effort to recover the machine. He said the election officials called repeatedly and, when he was not home, tried to persuade his 15-year-old daughter to help them search for the 55-pound machine.
Joe Torre, Maryland's director of procurement and voting systems, shows how to use a touch-screen voting machine during a new conference.
(2003 Photo Don Wright -- AP)
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"I think when you get contacted nine times in one day, there's a lot of concern," he said.
The attorney for the election board, Kevin Karpinski, said in court that Boyd gave varying accounts of his whereabouts during the day. At one point, Karpinski said, Boyd told them he was headed to Dulles International Airport because his son was ill, and later told them he was at Baltimore Washington International Airport.
Circuit Court Judge D. Warren Donohue ordered at 3:20 p.m. that Boyd hand over the machine, which was then at the home of the lead plaintiff in the failed appellate challenge.
Boyd said the CBS expert had by then examined the machine as thoroughly as Boyd would allow. "This was all they could do without somehow endangering the machine" -- without taking it apart or rendering it inoperable, he said, adding, "They could not do more."
A spokesman for "60 Minutes" did not return a phone call seeking a comment. It was unclear what the program's examination found.
