Batteries trouble voting system
Memory cards fail during Summit testing ahead of May elections
By Lisa A. Abraham
Beacon Journal staff writer

Dead batteries that's what Election Systems & Software officials are saying is to blame for the failure of dozens of computer memory cards in Summit County's new optical scan voting system.

``What we're dealing with is a portion of one batch of cards sent out in recent weeks have an issue with low batteries,'' ES&S spokeswoman Ellen Bogard said Friday.

ES&S made the new voting equipment, but the memory cards were made by Vikant Corp., a Long Grove, Ill., company. Company officials from Vikant did not return a call seeking comment.

Testing of the county's new voting system began Monday, when the memory cards failed to work as often as 30 percent of the time.

Bogard said there is a large battery and a smaller backup battery in each card. She said Vikant has agreed to replace the cards free of charge for ES&S and its customers.

However, Bogard said ES&S was still trying to determine how many of the cards may have been distributed to customers of the Nebraska voting machine maker.

``We're working with customers who may have received them. We're still contacting our customers,''she said. Bogard said the problem would affect customers who received memory cards from ES&S in recent weeks.

``We're still working to determine the exact parameters,'' she said.

Bogard said no other county in Ohio or throughout the country has complained of failing cards.

Marijean Donofrio, deputy director of the Summit County Board of Elections, said noadditional problems were noted in testing Friday. She said 140 of 525 optical scan machines purchased by the county still had not been tested.

County residents are expected to begin voting in the May 2 primary with a new optical scan system, which will replace punch-card voting.

With optical scan, voters fill in circles on paper ballots with a pencil to mark their voting choices. The ballots are then fed into the optical scan machine which reads the marks and stores the vote on the memory cards inside the scanners.