Cardin Airs Doubts About Voting System

Diebold has already moved the state's 5,500 electronic poll books to its warehouse in Glen Burnie, where the company will install software upgrades designed to address the rebooting error and the failure of some machines to communicate with each other, Goldstein said.

Each county, he said, would have at least 50 of the upgraded polling books by Monday and the remainder by the end of the week.

In Prince George's County, members of the Board of Elections gathered yesterday to recertify results of the Sept. 12 voting, after workers spotted 165 provisional paper ballots that had not been counted before the vote was first certified Sept. 25.

Interim Elections Administrator Robert J. Antonetti Sr. said the ballots had been approved and were waiting to be counted but were then mistakenly mixed with ballots that had been rejected.

"You have all these ballots and, like with anything, some were dropped in the wrong receptacle," he said.

The new votes did not change the outcome of any race.

In another development, a civil rights organization in the District and an Arkansas-based voter participation group asserted that Maryland is illegally disenfranchising voters by requiring that their personal identification numbers match those on Motor Vehicle Administration or Social Security Administration databases.

The District-based Advancement Project and Project Vote said in a letter to Lamone that state regulations violate federal laws and that in Baltimore, election officials had wrongly placed 8,500 registrations on "pending" status. Nikki Trella, the state board's reform director, said she had not read the letter.

Staff writer Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.