Voting Machines Had Defective Part

Morrill said Diebold executives have always made clear that "we've upgraded technology constantly on our machines, both in Maryland and in other states."

A Record of Trouble

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Under a 2001 contract with the state, Diebold sent nearly 4,700 electronic voting machines to the four counties in the first phase of Maryland's transition to a uniform electronic voting system.

In Sept. 10, 2002, primary elections, the machines had their first outing in Maryland. Montgomery's Board of Elections received 59 calls from precincts to report machines out of service. In the 2002 general election, the board received 53 such calls. Many of the machines were shut down after their screens froze, county officials said.

On February 1, 2004, Diebold's Maryland office issued a document, "Weekly Update of Montgomery County Root Cause Failure Analysis," that said the screen-freeze error "has been identified as a 'hardware' failure." The memo said no definitive single cause had been isolated but added that "replacement of the system board did resolve the problem."

The memo was obtained from the State Board of Elections through a lawsuit filed by Linda Schade, an activist with a group called TrueVoteMD. The group has tried to push Maryland to adopt a system that provides a verifiable paper trail of each vote cast.

A second Diebold memo provided by the board to Schade, dated March 28, 2004, blamed a "specific batch of RAM chips used in the manufacture of a quantity of system boards." It added that "batch-level tracking" was not used in the manufacturing process, so "it is impossible to identify or predict the occurrence of [system board] failures."

The second memo said 156 system boards had been replaced to address a variety of problems. Relative to the 16,000 Diebold voting machines in Maryland at the time, the memo said the 156 replacements represent a failure rate of 0.97 percent. "This is not a case of defective production units being released for shipment," the memo said. (A 2005 Diebold letter revised the number of system boards replaced to 129.)

Maintenance records obtained by The Post show that Diebold technicians in Ohio replaced an additional 133 system boards from June to November 2004, including those in machines that had experienced screen freezes.

By the 2004 general election, the screen-freeze problem had not been solved. Montgomery reported 106 screen freezes on Election Day, meaning that 4 percent of the 2,500 machines deployed in the county were affected.

The problems prompted another "root cause failure analysis" by Diebold. In February 2005, the screen-freeze problem was again identified as a "hardware issue," according to a memo. A March memo promised that the company would "implement permanent corrective or preventive action."

Staff writer Eric Rich and staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.