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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!!!
The article claims that you need 10 touch screen machines to replace a single optical reader device. I have a few questions about that...
1. Why do we need touch screen - what is wrong with a mouse. Even the most retarded computerphobic morons can figure out how to use a mouse in 60 secs.
2. Use some sort of remote desktop/web service to accomplish this. Buy the cheapest thin clients possible to connect to a "server" that could be run by a P4 2ghz computer at each site.
3. Even better than #2, create a web service for each county - again reducing the amount of equipment.
4. Extrapolate #3 even further. Hire cheap techs for each county to ensure they have internet connectivity - State runs the servers.
It isn't the electronic voting... it is how they implemented it. It doesn't take a genius to realize that $3000 computers to perform basic calculations is overspending. I wonder how much the servers cost?
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
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.
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.
I lived in Carroll County, Maryland when the change to electronic voting occurred, and after years of optical scan voting, many people I knew were confused by the move to e-voting. Our system had always worked fine, was simple and easy to understand, and had a paper trail. All you needed was a marker, a sheet of paper with spaces to fill in, and bam, you voted. I'm shocked to see that the state's push for e-voting inflated the cost of voting in Carroll County from $22k to over $200k! That is simply unacceptable.
There's no good reason for evoting machines to cost between $15,000 and $30,000 per precinctper precinct because the "booths" cost $3,000 each. The equipment costs are now one tenth that and the difference represents the tremendous overhead cost of doing things the non free way. For all of that, I've read that Dibold never made much money of these things and wants out of the business.
Who's going to pay your buck-o-five? You are, multiple times.The larger costs are security and reliability problems that's gotten these overpriced machines banned despite sunken costs. Voters were willing to pay the price when they were lied to and they are willing to lick their wounds and get rid of the things now. It would be nice if the same machines could be fixed with free software.
What about outsourcing the counting of votes to a cheaper country?
Has anyone from the open source community tried to write secure software for this? I suspect that it may not be possible(thus no one is trying) but has there ever been a real, open, reviewable effort to try? Maybe the real answer is that the problem is insolvable thus the only "solutions" are ones that cannot be verified (closed source, proprietary etc). Personally the whole idea gives me the creeps. Everything I have read shows that this whole idea is bad. What I find amazing is that very smart people whose whole careers rely on putting computers to good use are the ones who most strongly recommend that computer systems in this arena are bad. In any case I just wonder if there ever has been an open effort to provide software/hardware combination that those security experts would agree upon. I have seen requirements for voter verified paper trail etc, but are there any open systems out there that meet these requirements?
Perhaps an American /. reader can explain to the rest of us why you use machines at all? I don't mean just electronic voting, I mean all its predecessors - pulling levers, "butterfly ballots", punch cards and their infamous hanging chads.
In the middle of that 35-day recount thing in 2000, the Canadian electorate finished their (six week, from declaration of the election to the vote) national election with a vote that was over in 24 hours, from first poll open to last vote counted. The mechanism: pencil and paper.
I once volunteered for a local political party in a provincial election to "scrutineer" the ballots. It looked awfully foolproof to me, as all the scrutineers from all the parties watched each vote being counted in each box, some of us keeping our own tallies as they were added up. We were done in an hour or less.
Needless to say, the ratio of ballots to humans in the room was in the hundreds, not hundreds of thousands. We just employ a lot of humans in our elections, paid and volunteer. Few of our neighbourhood polling stations record more than 1000 ballots, and they have 3-4 employees, plus "N" volunteer scrutineers, depending on the number of parties running.
So why doesn't America just do that, is it the money? Somebody gave me the opinion that it's because Americans vote for so many offices - judges, DA's, sheriffs, local officials at the same time as federal. That this all came from previous centuries, farmers having to walk 10 miles to vote, so they only wanted to do it once every four years, and then register 25 votes at that time, making it hard to do on paper.
That didn't fly with me. Farmers have to come to town every week or three for supplies and so forth anyway. And if you want to vote for 25 offices instead of trusting one elected party to appoint them all, what's wrong with realizing that has COSTS and paying for more people to count them by hand with scrutineers from the campaigns watching every piece of paper go by? To turn around the old phrase, you can't take your choice without paying your money.
The paid human time (the N scrutineers are volunteers) to count one vote on paper is a second or so. One penny at $36.00 per hour, even, and most elections temporary staff are retirees making half that, giving you two seconds to the penny. Isn't counting one vote worth one penny to you? (Needless to say, the piece of paper is way under a penny, and the cost of the metal boxes is amortized over 20 elections; the high school gyms are free to use.)
I'm not saying the total cost of our elections is a penny per vote, that's the incremental cost of the counting process. We probably spend a buck per vote or more on the whole thing, organizing the operation, paying the permanent staff at Elections Canada to hire the retirees, print the ballots, etc. But the difference between having everybody pull a lever on some complicated counting machine or just putting an X on paper and putting it in a box, after all the setup is done, can't be over a penny per vote as far as I can see.
I got to sit in on a lecture by a high ranking official from the US DOE. His opinion was that paper production was the fifth largest consumer of electricity in the United States. One of his pet projects could turn it around into a net producer of electricity but the mills were not interested and considered the equipment dangerous. Here's a reputable source of information that pegs paper production at 12% of US electricity consumption.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
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