Board told DS300 scanner failures appear to be a transient timing error; vendor to send loaners

Chair Lewis Jones told the Albemarle County Electoral Board that a DS300 scanner in one precinct failed on election morning with an error path the vendor traced to writing to the USB stick. The vendor’s account manager and a vice president met with county staff and said the failure appears to be a timing issue during file writes to the USB device; their tests show that altering the code to retry the write resolves the error.

Lewis Jones said the vendor identified the county as the only Virginia location to experience that specific failure sequence and proposed a hypothesis that the failures are concentrated in a serial‑number range for some machines. To mitigate risk while they investigate, ES&S will provide three additional loaner DS300 scanners, bringing the county’s loaner inventory to six.

Jones said the county will continue to track failures and the vendor will work on a software or ROM update; the county also discussed whether wholesale hardware replacement would be required if failures recur. "If we go into the primary and we see this happen again, then it's time to advance the theory ... that we ought to just replace" affected machines, he said.

Staff described how the DS300 writes multiple files (public count, private count, images and totals) to USB media and that a single write failure causes the scanner to present an error and stop processing; the vendor’s current fix is a retry path that prevents the error from stopping the unit. The board asked about validation and auditability and was told further guidance and releases are pending from the vendor and election technology certification bodies.

Why it matters: equipment failures on election day can disrupt voting, require contingency counting procedures and erode public confidence; the county is pursuing loaner hardware and vendor fixes to reduce operational risk.

The board asked staff to monitor errors closely and said they may consider replacing problem hardware if failures persist.