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The Cost of Electronic Voting
Wired's Threat Level blog is reporting on an analysis of the cost of electronic voting compared to traditional methods of vote tallying. A group named SaveOurVotes examined Maryland's budget allocations for elections during their switch from optical scanners to touch screens, and found that contrary to official claims, the cost was higher for e-voting (PDF) — much higher.
"Prior to purchasing the touch-screen machines, about 19 of Maryland's 24 voting districts used optical-scan machines. SaveOurVotes examined those counties and compared the cost of the optical-scan equipment they previously used to the touch-screen machines they were forced to buy. The cost for most counties in this category increased 179 percent per voter on average. In at least one county, the cost increased 866 percent per voter — from a total cost of about $22,000 in 2001 to $266,000 in 2007."
Hey! Freedom Ain't Free!!!
I don't understand why then U.S. is so keen on using electronic counting. I mean even optical scanners are quite a system. What speaks against a letting volunteers count the vote like in lots of other countries? It sure is at least as safe as electronic voting, much cheaper and not that much slower.
The USA is rich. Rich enough to spend trillions in choosing the governments of other countries.
;) ). Otherwise you get too many people not accepting the results. In which case it becomes a big waste of time (and often lives).
So it should be able to afford a good voting system. Nothing like the diebold crap.
Manual vote counting and counter-checking can be easily parallelizable. The more voters you have, the more vote counters and observers you should be able to recruit.
It is MUCH harder to tamper with paper ballots. You might be able to do a few areas, but to do it all while the other parties have people watching is hard.
With most electronic voting systems, 3rd parties can't watch the "counting" easily. If you have an e-voting system where 3rd parties can watch easily and it's verifiable, it'll probably cost more in the end.
So what if you have to wait a few hours before you get the results?
Lastly, Elections don't just have to be fair, they have to be _SEEN_ to be fair (enough
The real shame of this is that electronic voting should be cheaper and more secure but Dibold's flawed equipment and business model has given a bad name to the whole concept. While it's true that electronic voting requires more equipment, this equipment should be cheaper. Ten $200 terminals should cost less to purchase and maintain than one specialty machine. Yes, $200 is a reasonable price if free software was used and a free software for voting can easily be written if it's not already available. Instead, Dibold passed on the "commodity" software model, complete with the upgrade treadmill, insecurity and lack of transparency.
No need to worry about educating people on how to use the machine (either for voting or setup), and the paper trail is built in.
Of course, you can still mess with things if the layout of the ballot is inherently flawed (butterfly ballots in 2000, anyone, although with a pen chads aren't a problem), but at least the mechanism itself shouldn't be in question.
I don't know about you, but it'll be a cold day in hell before I want my individual vote traveling over an unsecured network.
Today's lucky number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
it is all of them. The fact that ALL of the mainstreams are trying hard to hide their code and their hardware says a lot about them. Yet, none of it is proprietary. There just is nothing that they do that subject to a patent. What is needed is for states to INSIST on buying ONLY open systems (i.e. all code is open to be seen) AND closed hardware (i.e. no accessable usb ports, etc). All of this is easily doable and all should be cheap. But we both agree.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Insert your favorite quote about statistics here...
I glanced at the article and didn't see any useful data, so I paged through the pdf. There's some stuff in there that I don't understand and could cause some major problems with their statistics.
1) They appear to be comparing projected costs of optical scanners with actual costs of touchscreen machines. The PDF shows a 7 year lifespan of the original optical machine purchase, amortized over the first five years with zero additional purchases for that 7 year period, only warranty repairs. I sincerely doubt that there were zero additional purchases.
2) Can't they hire the same project managers for the touchscreen rollout as for the optical? People management is people management, no real difference.
3) Warehousing costs - aren't they storing the equipment at a state run facility? No reason why there should be a huge capital payment associated with that.
4) Transportaion costs fluctuate wildly on the touchscreen actual costs page, but are unwaveringly cheap on the optical page. The same equipment would always have to be moved to the same place, so I don't see that assumption as valid.
5) Voter outreach is 2x more for touchscreen as it is for the optical assumptions. I don't see how that cost would be different.
6) I don't see a line item for absentee ballot printing on the optical page at all.
7) I call BS on the statement that 10 touchscreens are needed for the job of a single optical scanner. Why would a county be willing to have a single optical scanner during an election? What if it failed? Those people wouldn't be able to vote that day? I think 2-3 is a more legitimate answer to account for quick processing and/or machine failures.
8) What exactly are the optional services that Diebold provides that account for almost $28M. That's a third of the overall total cost. There's no breakdown of what the services are, so there's no way to compare them with line items on the optical scanner costs.
They're comparing apples to oranges here with the projected costs of optical. It's simply not a fair comparison. And then not listing what those services are that almost singlehandedly account for the entire difference in cost between optical and touchscreen is ludicrous. If you take that line item out since there is no equivalent line item on the optical sheet, you have $67.5M for touchscreen and $52.4M for optical. Even using the listed number of $95M for touchscreen, that's still a little less than 2x the cost of optical. How exactly did they arrive at a 10 fold increase statistic?
I'm sure that the touchscreens are more expensive than opticals at first. Same thing when companies were first rolling out desktop computers to their workforce a couple decades ago. They understand that it cost a lot of money and a lot of lost productivity, but they also knew that they would reap huge rewards in additional productivity in the long run.
Now that said - let's find some other electronic voting firm to spend our next $100M with instead of Diebold.
What drivers? They aren't running an NVidia 8800 GTX or SB Audigy on these machines. It's simple keyboard, mouse, touchscreen (pretty standard from what I know), x86 processors. There's no real drivers needed.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
They had to buy new stuff. And even the article admits some of the money went to training. This isn't necessarily an indication that the higher costs are inherent, just that switching to something new has an initial cost. It would make more sense to see how the costs changed over, e.g., 10 year periods than just after the new technology was introduced.
Personally I think the higher cost would be justified if it led to an increase in democracy. As another poster mentioned, the US is a rich country. If there are demonstrable benefits to the new technology, I would bias in favour of it, even at increased cost.
The big problem, of course, is that the machines are not only expensive, but terrible. They seem to be a step backwards in democracy, not forwards. I live in Canada where we use pencil-and-paper ballots and they work beautifully for our purposes. I can't imagine switching to anything electronic at this point, as it would surely be a step backwards.
No REAL technophile would EVER insist on electronic voting. They would understand the inherent stupidity of damn near every aspect of the entire concept. Anyone so-called "technophile" hyping the greatness of e-voting is either a clueless poseur or bought and paid for by the Stand Alone Complex of politicians, corporations, and religious leaders that I will simply refer to as The Man.
Oppressing an entire population is never cheap.
--Jeckler (/. Beta IS GARBAGE!)
For all of that, I've read that Dibold never made much money of these things and wants out of the business.
I think Diebold probably made a LOT of money on it - initially. My guess is that they probably lost because they were forced to re-examine, re-implement, and re-certify the crap that they tried to pass off as secure voting machines. Now that the cat's out of the bag, it's understandable that Diebold would want to distance itself as much as possible.
Open source solution already exists, it's call pen & paper ;)
Everything else is just insecure: Even if electronic voting machines use open source software, how do you know the code you check earlier is the same that the computer use during the election ?
Jeez... We use this SIMPLE and EASY paper voting system for years, why the hell do we have to search for a more COMPLEXE alternative ?
The cost doesn't matter if the value added is less than zero.
The e-voting machines have resulted in a second term for the world's most visible terrorist, and they've wasted countless man-millenia as everyone discussed, debated or idly witnessed the chaos surrounding voting fraud. Hell I don't even LIVE in the U.S. and I watched a "documentary" about how easy it is to screw with the Diebold counting machines. That's 90 minutes of my life I won't get back, all because of one messed up government and its conveniently incompetent equipment contractor.
If you really want to tally the cost of something, you have to look at _everything_. The up-front dollar amount is nothing compared to the thousands of people that had to deal with these broken machines and learn how to use them, along with the millions who had to waste yet more brain cells on this dead-end gadget. How about the increased difficulty to implement a working e-voting solution due to voter reluctance ? That's a tough one!
cp reality speculation
vi speculation
diff reality speculation
Yeap, not easy to estimate the net impact of any change on your whole concept of reality. The e-voting fiasco's true cost cannot be quantified, though in the grand scheme of things it's a small line-item.
-Billco, Fnarg.com