Actually Oregon was getting high turnout decades before they switched to vote-by-mail. There was one study which showed that Oregon got increased turnout from vote-by-mail, but a more recent study was unable to replicate that. It showed that Oregon's increased turnout was due to a "novelty effect", but it has since disappeared (except for a very small effect in some small special elections).
Furthermore, Oregon's anti-fraud measures are inadequate (e.g., the handwriting analysis isn't done by fully trained people, and has never been subjected to third-party scrutiny). And the much-touted "ballot parties" -- where groups of friends get together and talk about the issues and then fill out and mail their ballots out together -- are a classic example of a violation of the secret ballot and peer pressure in voting. (And remember: this doesn't actually increase turnout.)
Vote-by-mail increases the risks, doesn't effect turnout, and removes the secret ballot. But at least it's cheaper, I guess?
I do agree that online voting increases the risks monumentally, though. Even the much-lauded Estonian system is fundamentally flawed.
1) Motorola brings up possible patent issues with Microsoft in Germany. For the moment we'll set aside if they're valid/invalid or if this is real or patent trolling. But Motorola said, "Hey, Microsoft, that's ours."
2) Possible phase of negotiations in Germany.
3) Microsoft doesn't like how the negotiations are going, so they sue Motorola in US court.
4) Motorola says "I don't think so" and sues Microsoft in German court for violation of German patent law.
5) US judge says "well Microsoft sued here first, so this is where international jurisdiction should reside."
So the lesson here is: regardless of the country of the dispute, and regardless of the merit of the patents, and regardless of how negotiations are going, and regardless of whether you're the plaintiff or defendant overseas, as long as you sue in US court first you can get a US judge to slam the brakes on any patent issues.
Between 70 and 80%. That's a HUGE difference. That means that compared to the other computerized systems out there you're either totally awesome or really suck.
That's like saying, "I did a lap in a Formula 1 car, and I'm either 15 seconds ahead of last year's world champion, or I'm a minute behind the field."
I've interviewed with 10 different people at Google.
[ Disclaimer: I work for Google. ]
I've been here for several years and I've never ever seen an interview schedule with 10 people. Are you including the recruiters, all the people you spoke to over the phone, all your interviewers, and the person who took you to lunch as "interviewers"? Did you interview here multiple times? Because nothing I've seen -- and I've done over 100 interviews here -- matches your description.
I pointed out about six fallacies in a parent post.
You called me a fuckface and threw in some new numbers on 1 of the 6 items.
I took your numbers and recalculated.
Then you called me a fuckface again and dug up some more numbers.
Does that bring everyone up to speed? Good. Let's continue.
If you look at the left side of the graph, your case falls further apart. [Note: right side, but okay.] Urban to urban, your case nearly collapses as the factors vary from 2.5 to 7 (e.g., 9.08 for auto/urban and 65.15 for 80k truck/urban).
The right side with the 9.08 and 65.15 is an attempt to introduce some fuzzy math about "social costs" ("Includes pavement, congestion, crash and noise. Excludes pollution." [Emphasis mine]) I reject this column since it's nearly impossible to accurately determine how they arrived at these numbers. Instead we'll focus on actual pavement costs. In which case the cost ratios are somewhere between 21 (small trucks vs cars) and 819 (big trucks vs cars); Given that these only go to 1 decimal place, it's possible that car costs are in the range [0.05,0.14] and still round to 0.1 cents per mile.
A hypothetical auto owner driving 20,000 miles per year at 25 mpg, and paying $100 in registration fees, ends up paying about $397 per year. So on average, looking at federal and state taxes, a tractor-trailer combination trucks pay about 35 times what a typical auto would pay based on national averages.
Given that the average driver in the US drives about 13,000 miles their costs are around $300/year and not $400. (Note that I'm making my own case worse). So the average truck pays 13900 / 300 ~= 47 times what a car does.
Lastly, your wiki link is unclear. You have gone from "road wear" to "bridge damage".
I was citing the diagram for weight distribution between the axles of a semi, and nothing else. I'm sorry you got confused by that.
So IN CONCLUSION, what you've shown is that if we look at only "urban interstate" traffic, ignore "rural interstate" traffic, and assume that an average semi weighs no more than about 25 tons (as opposed to the 40-ton maximum that shipping companies aim for) then and only then do cars and trucks break even. In all other cases, trucks pay less (proportionally) than cars do. Unless you want to venture from the confines of actual road costs and try to include fuzzy concepts like "societal costs". But I'm sure a guy of such rigorous devotion to hard data wouldn't want to do that.
So now that you've dug up all this data to help me prove my point, what's next?
Greetings and salutations to you, too. I see you're bringing a dizzying intellect to the table.
Taking in account your FIRST TWO FACTORS and the per-axle weight distribution here (6T in front, and CARGO/4 per drives and trailer axle), the 50,000lb truck from my earlier example does a trifling 2,396 times the damage to the road as an average 2-ton car. A fully-loaded truck would do 4,308 times the damage as a single car.
Support your opinion with some honest to goodness first-hand research and don't just parrot what you read.
Indeed. Now that we've done it your way and shown that the truck merely does 2,400 - 4,300 times the damage as a single car, what's next? Are you going to argue that the taxes and fees paid by the working-class Joe on his car are proportional to the taxes and fees paid by the shipping company? I pay about $75/year in federal gas tax (10K miles / 25mpg * $0.184/gal), plus another $125 in state vehicle registration, taxes, and fees. Does each semi truck pay $180K (less weight, gas only) - $860K (fully loaded, gas+fees) per year for road upkeep? (This is using your math, remember?)
And please show your math.
Federal income taxes are deducted from state income taxes.
Wrong. Backwards. State income taxes are a line item deduction from your federal income taxes. Increased state taxes result in less federal income. (See Schedule A).
Strange that states that charge a sales tax with no income tax are doing much better than those that rely in income taxes. Compare Florida to Michigan. Compare Texas to California.
Comparing anything to California is invalid because California has so many Constitutionally-mandated spending requirements and Constitutionally-prohibited tax sources that it's basically a given they're going to be broke year in and year out.
What about Nevada? They have no income tax at all and are currently facing a $1.8 billion dollar deficit on a $3.6B budget; that's even worse than the federal government, as a percentage of money spent.
I drive on the local interstate much more than the top 1%. Sure, those interstates bring products to my local store, but I buy them from there, so I benefit from that as well.
Okay, let's look at that. That truck bringing groceries to your store can weigh (legally) up to 40 tons, but let's conservatively say it weighs 25 tons. That's 12.5 what a good-sized car weighs. Taking into account that road wear is proportional to the fourth power of weight, and one semi bringing groceries to the store causes as much wear and tear as 24,414 cars. Do you think that semi pay 24,000 times as much in taxes and fees on a per-mile basis as you do? If not, then business owners are getting a lot more out of their road and fuel taxes than you are.
My bank account is FDIC insured, just as the rich guy's, but I don't have over $250,000 in any account, so I'm 100% covered; rich people are not.
If you honestly think that anyone well-to-do keeps more than $250,000 in a single savings account then you'd make the world's worst financial advisor. Even the moderately wealthy have their money tied up in investments (not FDIC-protected) and their savings spread across multiple financial institutions in order to minimize risk. That's not even taking into account that the FDIC is broke, and the institutions where the rich keep their investments just get a direct federal bailout when they go under.
So in summary:
You were wrong about the tax deductions
You mislead about the efficacy of income taxes versus sales taxes
You used a misleading metric for "benefit" in a few cases, and
You have no idea how to invest, and when banks go bust the working-class get screwed while the investing-class and upper-class get a bailout.
Would you like to be wrong about anything else today?
Only the intersect between the two parties ideologies would be safe from the axe, and thats probably right where we should be.
It's kind of difficult to do that when the Venn Diagram circle representing the GOP reflexively recoils when the Democratic circle reaches out to overlap it.
While this is a useful data point, it's not conclusive. If the root cause is some electronics error whose symptoms are a sudden acceleration and (according to two victims) no response to the brake, it's not surprising that the black box -- presumably using the exact same input controlling the engine -- would claim that the accelerator was fully pressed and the brake was untouched.
I whole-heartedly support your philosophy of turning what works in your house into a law that applies to everyone. For example, in my house the mother of the kid has sex with me on a regular basis. Clearly there should be a law stating that in these situations, women who have children should sleep with me.
In 2005 the state of Virginia wanted me to fork over AT LEAST $3,000 (!) to get per-precinct turnout figures. Not per-precinct results; those were free at the State Board of Elections website. But if you wanted to know actually how many voters showed up at each precinct they said it would take 4-6 weeks and "reproduction costs" would be between $3,000 - $5,000 for them to send me a CD with the PDFs. They had per-county/city turnout results (also on the website). But apparently getting it down to the precinct level was going to be a massive undertaking, requiring one staffer to spend three to five weeks full-time collecting this data and then another week to digitize it and send it out.
I still have a problem with this one. Who bought the equipment? The individual counties, or the state in one big purchase? Even if the counties did buy them individually (which I do not believe), they could still all store them in the same place since each machine should be equivalent to the next. I think I could rent half the local climate controlled Uhaul storage compound for less then what they're paying.
Under HAVA (and recent proposed laws) the money would come from the feds and go to the states. The states would then disburse the money to each county/city according to some formula derived at the state level. The method of disbursement and the purchasing methods varied from state-to-state. Some states -- such as North Carolina -- put out a state-wide RFP and each county chose from the menu of equipment; the state then batched the purchases once each county selected their preferred equipment. Other states -- I think PA did this -- simply gave the money to the counties and said "Good luck!" So the answer is "it depends". Also, in many of the more western states counties can span thousands of square miles, so finding centralized storage that is accessible isn't a piece of cake (Apache County in Arizona is nearly 12,000 mi^2). And it's not just climate controlled. You also need security to make sure no one tampers with the equipment. A lot of counties have had to go out and install security cameras, keypads, electronic logbooks, etc, to go with their climate-controlled storage. It adds up.
My point wasn't that moving things costs money - my point was the large fluctuation in costs from year to year on the touchscreens vs the optical. If you need 10 machines in XXY county one year, chances are excellent you'll use 10 machines in the same county next year. Thus the transportation costs should be the same.
It also depends on the type and size of elections each year. Obviously there are the big federal elections -- President every four years and the House every two years -- but there are also primaries and local elections. A polling location that gets 2000 people this year might only get 400 people for next year's mayoral race. If that's so, there's no reason in shipping 14 touchscreens to the polling place for 400 people when 4 touchscreens will do. Whereas with scanners you've just got that one piece of equipment that goes out each time, essentially regardless of the turnout. It's another part of the resource allocation puzzle you get with touchscreens.
You got me again - except that has nothing to do with the voters, that's the training of the judges/polltakers which is a separate line item that I didn't question. You don't train individual users, you train the pollsters to be able to show the users how to do it if they need help.
Well, the bottom line is that it's still more difficult to explain touchscreens to voters than a fill-in-the-bubble sheet. A simple Google search for some combination of voter education and usability will bring up a slew of reports and efforts that detail links between voter education and the accuracy of filling out ballots. How many times have you, as a techie, watched astounded as a friend or relative completely mis-used some "obvious" feature or program? So, yes, voter education is a BIG issue for election officials.
As for the "projected" versus "measured"... I'm pretty sure that in many of the counties they studied they took the actual expenses from before that county switched to touchscreens and compared it against the actual costs after the switch. There were similar studies done in Florida, North Carolina, and New York (IIRC) and all pointed to scanners being the cheaper alternative.
You seem to have at least one fundamental misunderstanding here, and the rest of your issues flow from that. That issue is
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.
In order to vote on a touchscreen machine, you have to stand there to fill out your entire ballot. In order to vote on an optical scanner, the only time you use the machine is when you slide your paper ballot into the machine; actually filling out the ballot is done elsewhere (i.e., tables or desks in the polling location). Let's assume an election day is 14 hours -- 7am to 9pm -- or 840 minutes, and filling out a ballot takes about 5 minutes.
With a touchscreen, that means one machine can service about 12 per hour, or 170 people per day
Assuming it takes ~15 seconds to slide a completed ballot into a scanner, one scanner can handle 4 people per minute, or about 3400 people per day
If you've got a polling location in which 3000 people need to vote, you'll need either (a) one scanner, or (b) ~17 touchscreen machines. It's possible that you'll want a second scanner in case one breaks, but here's another advantage of scanners: if the machine breaks, people can keep filling out their paper ballot and placing those ballots in a ballot box until the machine is working again. At which point, the polling station workers can -- in full view of the public -- announce they are scanning previously-uncounted ballots. If a touchscreen breaks then... well, now you have one less ballot filling-out-station. OpScan is inherently parallelizable; touchscreens are not.
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.
Nope. Elections in the U.S. are generally run by counties and cities, not the state, so the bill for storage falls to the counties. And remember the numbers; given that a single scanner and a single touchscreen take up similar amounts of space (2' x 2' x 1'), you'll need space for either 'X' scanners or O(10 * 'X') touchscreens. You can store 100 scanners (enough for a small city) in the back room of the elections office. You'll need a climate-controlled warehouse for 1000 touchscreens.
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.
One scanner fits in the trunk of a car (so do two). Ten touchscreens (~400 ft^3) and all the wiring require a truck of some sort. Fifteen or twenty (600 - 800 ft^3) and you're looking at a van or some moving service. So, yes, moving costs are a factor.
Voter outreach is 2x more for touchscreen as it is for the optical assumptions. I don't see how that cost would be different.
Put a fill-in-the-bubble ballot in front of John Q. Public and they're pretty good at figuring it out. Put a computer in front of them -- especially with a crappy UI like the ones these machines tend to have -- and now you're asking for trouble. Put a "plug in this scanner and record the numbers at the end of the day" OpScan in front of your average 65-year-old pollworker and they can manage. Ask them to set up 15 touchscreen computers, a ballot encoder, and a laptop poll book and... yeah, you're going to need some training and education there.
Can't they hire the same project managers for the touchscreen rollout as for the optical? People management is people management, no real difference.
Hiring a person to roll out and test 100 machines -- one per polling location --
But why should the theater owner be put in that position?
Yes, God forbid that the manager of a business whose goal it is to get the public into their building and watch movies on their screen actually know how to deal with the public in a reasoned and civilized manner. What's next?
"Well, officer, the next thing I knew those kids were talking really loud during the movie. My assistant manager suggested that I simply kick them out of the theater, but why should I be put in the position of acting as judge and jury? Then, on top of that, as they walked across the street they crossed against the signal. I knew right then and there I had to call the cops and press charges. My hands were tied. Creating a public nuisance and jaywalking. Book'em, Danno."
It's called common sense and judgment. It wouldn't kill the manager to use some.
Are you suggesting that if a carrier came out with a lower price, people wouldn't flock to it because people are okay with the prices they pay to Cingular and Sprint?
No, they wouldn't. Because the cost of the new provider would also include the highway-robbery-esque early termination fee for jumping ship from Cingular or Sprint. It's pretty simple: if the cost savings of the new carrier is less than the early termination fee, why change?
Your anti-war demonstration scenario is only going to get your property frozen if it's a violent demonstration.
Unless, of course, the SecTreas decides that attendees of your demonstration pose a significant risk of committing an act of violence.
Why am I suddenly picturing the SecTreas, SecDef, and SecState hooked up to machines that dispense balls saying whether or not you're guilty of an as-yet-uncommitted crime?
As one of the people involved in the crafting of the North Carolina law and supporting Joyce's lawsuit, I can clarify a bit. We suspect Diebold pulled out of North Carolina not because of the source code escrow issues (which they claim to have complied with in Georgia) but because the CEO of each voting company had to sign a legally binding document saying that the source code his company installed on our machines was the same code that would be placed in escrow and provided to the examiners. On the day this document was due Diebold pulled out of the state, sending a "helpful" letter to the State Board of Elections offering to help "reform" our newly-passed law.
I'm guessing you're the kind of person who would complain if
a) you were using a laptop b) the laptop was usually hooked up to broadband at work/home/whatever c) you were now using dial-up at your Aunt Millie's place d) you did 'yum install somepackage', and e) yum started downloading that 45M package without any further prompting.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Oregon was getting high turnout decades before they switched to vote-by-mail. There was one study which showed that Oregon got increased turnout from vote-by-mail, but a more recent study was unable to replicate that. It showed that Oregon's increased turnout was due to a "novelty effect", but it has since disappeared (except for a very small effect in some small special elections).
Furthermore, Oregon's anti-fraud measures are inadequate (e.g., the handwriting analysis isn't done by fully trained people, and has never been subjected to third-party scrutiny). And the much-touted "ballot parties" -- where groups of friends get together and talk about the issues and then fill out and mail their ballots out together -- are a classic example of a violation of the secret ballot and peer pressure in voting. (And remember: this doesn't actually increase turnout.)
Vote-by-mail increases the risks, doesn't effect turnout, and removes the secret ballot. But at least it's cheaper, I guess?
I do agree that online voting increases the risks monumentally, though. Even the much-lauded Estonian system is fundamentally flawed.
By "in the middle of" you mean "not yet in control of and had no power over," right?
So the timeline is:
1) Motorola brings up possible patent issues with Microsoft in Germany. For the moment we'll set aside if they're valid/invalid or if this is real or patent trolling. But Motorola said, "Hey, Microsoft, that's ours."
2) Possible phase of negotiations in Germany.
3) Microsoft doesn't like how the negotiations are going, so they sue Motorola in US court.
4) Motorola says "I don't think so" and sues Microsoft in German court for violation of German patent law.
5) US judge says "well Microsoft sued here first, so this is where international jurisdiction should reside."
So the lesson here is: regardless of the country of the dispute, and regardless of the merit of the patents, and regardless of how negotiations are going, and regardless of whether you're the plaintiff or defendant overseas, as long as you sue in US court first you can get a US judge to slam the brakes on any patent issues.
How is that reasonable?
Between 70 and 80%. That's a HUGE difference. That means that compared to the other computerized systems out there you're either totally awesome or really suck.
That's like saying, "I did a lap in a Formula 1 car, and I'm either 15 seconds ahead of last year's world champion, or I'm a minute behind the field."
You haven't done this before, have you?
I've interviewed with 10 different people at Google.
[ Disclaimer: I work for Google. ]
I've been here for several years and I've never ever seen an interview schedule with 10 people. Are you including the recruiters, all the people you spoke to over the phone, all your interviewers, and the person who took you to lunch as "interviewers"? Did you interview here multiple times? Because nothing I've seen -- and I've done over 100 interviews here -- matches your description.
Reminds me of Oliver Wendell Jones from Bloom County
Nah, I haven't been arrested yet.
Let's recap, fuckface.
Okay. I believe it went
Does that bring everyone up to speed? Good. Let's continue.
If you look at the left side of the graph, your case falls further apart. [Note: right side, but okay.] Urban to urban, your case nearly collapses as the factors vary from 2.5 to 7 (e.g., 9.08 for auto/urban and 65.15 for 80k truck/urban).
The right side with the 9.08 and 65.15 is an attempt to introduce some fuzzy math about "social costs" ("Includes pavement, congestion, crash and noise. Excludes pollution." [Emphasis mine]) I reject this column since it's nearly impossible to accurately determine how they arrived at these numbers. Instead we'll focus on actual pavement costs. In which case the cost ratios are somewhere between 21 (small trucks vs cars) and 819 (big trucks vs cars); Given that these only go to 1 decimal place, it's possible that car costs are in the range [0.05,0.14] and still round to 0.1 cents per mile.
A hypothetical auto owner driving 20,000 miles per year at 25 mpg, and paying $100 in registration fees, ends up paying about $397 per year. So on average, looking at federal and state taxes, a tractor-trailer combination trucks pay about 35 times what a typical auto would pay based on national averages.
Given that the average driver in the US drives about 13,000 miles their costs are around $300/year and not $400. (Note that I'm making my own case worse). So the average truck pays 13900 / 300 ~= 47 times what a car does.
Lastly, your wiki link is unclear. You have gone from "road wear" to "bridge damage".
I was citing the diagram for weight distribution between the axles of a semi, and nothing else. I'm sorry you got confused by that.
So IN CONCLUSION, what you've shown is that if we look at only "urban interstate" traffic, ignore "rural interstate" traffic, and assume that an average semi weighs no more than about 25 tons (as opposed to the 40-ton maximum that shipping companies aim for) then and only then do cars and trucks break even. In all other cases, trucks pay less (proportionally) than cars do. Unless you want to venture from the confines of actual road costs and try to include fuzzy concepts like "societal costs". But I'm sure a guy of such rigorous devotion to hard data wouldn't want to do that.
So now that you've dug up all this data to help me prove my point, what's next?
[no it isn't, fuckface]
Greetings and salutations to you, too. I see you're bringing a dizzying intellect to the table. Taking in account your FIRST TWO FACTORS and the per-axle weight distribution here (6T in front, and CARGO/4 per drives and trailer axle), the 50,000lb truck from my earlier example does a trifling 2,396 times the damage to the road as an average 2-ton car. A fully-loaded truck would do 4,308 times the damage as a single car.
Support your opinion with some honest to goodness first-hand research and don't just parrot what you read.
Indeed. Now that we've done it your way and shown that the truck merely does 2,400 - 4,300 times the damage as a single car, what's next? Are you going to argue that the taxes and fees paid by the working-class Joe on his car are proportional to the taxes and fees paid by the shipping company? I pay about $75/year in federal gas tax (10K miles / 25mpg * $0.184/gal), plus another $125 in state vehicle registration, taxes, and fees. Does each semi truck pay $180K (less weight, gas only) - $860K (fully loaded, gas+fees) per year for road upkeep? (This is using your math, remember?) And please show your math.
Federal income taxes are deducted from state income taxes.
Wrong. Backwards. State income taxes are a line item deduction from your federal income taxes. Increased state taxes result in less federal income. (See Schedule A).
Strange that states that charge a sales tax with no income tax are doing much better than those that rely in income taxes. Compare Florida to Michigan. Compare Texas to California.
Comparing anything to California is invalid because California has so many Constitutionally-mandated spending requirements and Constitutionally-prohibited tax sources that it's basically a given they're going to be broke year in and year out. What about Nevada? They have no income tax at all and are currently facing a $1.8 billion dollar deficit on a $3.6B budget; that's even worse than the federal government, as a percentage of money spent.
I drive on the local interstate much more than the top 1%. Sure, those interstates bring products to my local store, but I buy them from there, so I benefit from that as well.
Okay, let's look at that. That truck bringing groceries to your store can weigh (legally) up to 40 tons, but let's conservatively say it weighs 25 tons. That's 12.5 what a good-sized car weighs. Taking into account that road wear is proportional to the fourth power of weight, and one semi bringing groceries to the store causes as much wear and tear as 24,414 cars. Do you think that semi pay 24,000 times as much in taxes and fees on a per-mile basis as you do? If not, then business owners are getting a lot more out of their road and fuel taxes than you are.
My bank account is FDIC insured, just as the rich guy's, but I don't have over $250,000 in any account, so I'm 100% covered; rich people are not.
If you honestly think that anyone well-to-do keeps more than $250,000 in a single savings account then you'd make the world's worst financial advisor. Even the moderately wealthy have their money tied up in investments (not FDIC-protected) and their savings spread across multiple financial institutions in order to minimize risk. That's not even taking into account that the FDIC is broke, and the institutions where the rich keep their investments just get a direct federal bailout when they go under. So in summary:
Would you like to be wrong about anything else today?
Only the intersect between the two parties ideologies would be safe from the axe, and thats probably right where we should be.
It's kind of difficult to do that when the Venn Diagram circle representing the GOP reflexively recoils when the Democratic circle reaches out to overlap it.
Don't worry. If you've got an electronic version stored somewhere, they've already grabbed a copy.
While this is a useful data point, it's not conclusive. If the root cause is some electronics error whose symptoms are a sudden acceleration and (according to two victims) no response to the brake, it's not surprising that the black box -- presumably using the exact same input controlling the engine -- would claim that the accelerator was fully pressed and the brake was untouched.
I whole-heartedly support your philosophy of turning what works in your house into a law that applies to everyone. For example, in my house the mother of the kid has sex with me on a regular basis. Clearly there should be a law stating that in these situations, women who have children should sleep with me.
Completely true.
In 2005 the state of Virginia wanted me to fork over AT LEAST $3,000 (!) to get per-precinct turnout figures. Not per-precinct results; those were free at the State Board of Elections website. But if you wanted to know actually how many voters showed up at each precinct they said it would take 4-6 weeks and "reproduction costs" would be between $3,000 - $5,000 for them to send me a CD with the PDFs. They had per-county/city turnout results (also on the website). But apparently getting it down to the precinct level was going to be a massive undertaking, requiring one staffer to spend three to five weeks full-time collecting this data and then another week to digitize it and send it out.
My lawn.
Off it.
Now.
P.S. To the ~0.8% of you to whom this does not apply: sorry.
I still have a problem with this one. Who bought the equipment? The individual counties, or the state in one big purchase? Even if the counties did buy them individually (which I do not believe), they could still all store them in the same place since each machine should be equivalent to the next. I think I could rent half the local climate controlled Uhaul storage compound for less then what they're paying.
Under HAVA (and recent proposed laws) the money would come from the feds and go to the states. The states would then disburse the money to each county/city according to some formula derived at the state level. The method of disbursement and the purchasing methods varied from state-to-state. Some states -- such as North Carolina -- put out a state-wide RFP and each county chose from the menu of equipment; the state then batched the purchases once each county selected their preferred equipment. Other states -- I think PA did this -- simply gave the money to the counties and said "Good luck!" So the answer is "it depends". Also, in many of the more western states counties can span thousands of square miles, so finding centralized storage that is accessible isn't a piece of cake (Apache County in Arizona is nearly 12,000 mi^2). And it's not just climate controlled. You also need security to make sure no one tampers with the equipment. A lot of counties have had to go out and install security cameras, keypads, electronic logbooks, etc, to go with their climate-controlled storage. It adds up.
My point wasn't that moving things costs money - my point was the large fluctuation in costs from year to year on the touchscreens vs the optical. If you need 10 machines in XXY county one year, chances are excellent you'll use 10 machines in the same county next year. Thus the transportation costs should be the same.
It also depends on the type and size of elections each year. Obviously there are the big federal elections -- President every four years and the House every two years -- but there are also primaries and local elections. A polling location that gets 2000 people this year might only get 400 people for next year's mayoral race. If that's so, there's no reason in shipping 14 touchscreens to the polling place for 400 people when 4 touchscreens will do. Whereas with scanners you've just got that one piece of equipment that goes out each time, essentially regardless of the turnout. It's another part of the resource allocation puzzle you get with touchscreens.
You got me again - except that has nothing to do with the voters, that's the training of the judges/polltakers which is a separate line item that I didn't question. You don't train individual users, you train the pollsters to be able to show the users how to do it if they need help.
Well, the bottom line is that it's still more difficult to explain touchscreens to voters than a fill-in-the-bubble sheet. A simple Google search for some combination of voter education and usability will bring up a slew of reports and efforts that detail links between voter education and the accuracy of filling out ballots. How many times have you, as a techie, watched astounded as a friend or relative completely mis-used some "obvious" feature or program? So, yes, voter education is a BIG issue for election officials.
As for the "projected" versus "measured" ... I'm pretty sure that in many of the counties they studied they took the actual expenses from before that county switched to touchscreens and compared it against the actual costs after the switch. There were similar studies done in Florida, North Carolina, and New York (IIRC) and all pointed to scanners being the cheaper alternative.
You seem to have at least one fundamental misunderstanding here, and the rest of your issues flow from that. That issue is
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.
In order to vote on a touchscreen machine, you have to stand there to fill out your entire ballot. In order to vote on an optical scanner, the only time you use the machine is when you slide your paper ballot into the machine; actually filling out the ballot is done elsewhere (i.e., tables or desks in the polling location). Let's assume an election day is 14 hours -- 7am to 9pm -- or 840 minutes, and filling out a ballot takes about 5 minutes.
If you've got a polling location in which 3000 people need to vote, you'll need either (a) one scanner, or (b) ~17 touchscreen machines. It's possible that you'll want a second scanner in case one breaks, but here's another advantage of scanners: if the machine breaks, people can keep filling out their paper ballot and placing those ballots in a ballot box until the machine is working again. At which point, the polling station workers can -- in full view of the public -- announce they are scanning previously-uncounted ballots. If a touchscreen breaks then ... well, now you have one less ballot filling-out-station. OpScan is inherently parallelizable; touchscreens are not.
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.
Nope. Elections in the U.S. are generally run by counties and cities, not the state, so the bill for storage falls to the counties. And remember the numbers; given that a single scanner and a single touchscreen take up similar amounts of space (2' x 2' x 1'), you'll need space for either 'X' scanners or O(10 * 'X') touchscreens. You can store 100 scanners (enough for a small city) in the back room of the elections office. You'll need a climate-controlled warehouse for 1000 touchscreens.
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.
One scanner fits in the trunk of a car (so do two). Ten touchscreens (~400 ft^3) and all the wiring require a truck of some sort. Fifteen or twenty (600 - 800 ft^3) and you're looking at a van or some moving service. So, yes, moving costs are a factor.
Voter outreach is 2x more for touchscreen as it is for the optical assumptions. I don't see how that cost would be different.
Put a fill-in-the-bubble ballot in front of John Q. Public and they're pretty good at figuring it out. Put a computer in front of them -- especially with a crappy UI like the ones these machines tend to have -- and now you're asking for trouble. Put a "plug in this scanner and record the numbers at the end of the day" OpScan in front of your average 65-year-old pollworker and they can manage. Ask them to set up 15 touchscreen computers, a ballot encoder, and a laptop poll book and ... yeah, you're going to need some training and education there.
Can't they hire the same project managers for the touchscreen rollout as for the optical? People management is people management, no real difference.
Hiring a person to roll out and test 100 machines -- one per polling location --
I'm not really a language expert on either, but I'm tried to learn Japanese and its really tough.
Perhaps you should try and nail down English first. :)
Cheers,
-jdm
But why should the theater owner be put in that position?
Yes, God forbid that the manager of a business whose goal it is to get the public into their building and watch movies on their screen actually know how to deal with the public in a reasoned and civilized manner. What's next?
"Well, officer, the next thing I knew those kids were talking really loud during the movie. My assistant manager suggested that I simply kick them out of the theater, but why should I be put in the position of acting as judge and jury? Then, on top of that, as they walked across the street they crossed against the signal. I knew right then and there I had to call the cops and press charges. My hands were tied. Creating a public nuisance and jaywalking. Book'em, Danno."
It's called common sense and judgment. It wouldn't kill the manager to use some.
Are you suggesting that if a carrier came out with a lower price, people wouldn't flock to it because people are okay with the prices they pay to Cingular and Sprint?
No, they wouldn't. Because the cost of the new provider would also include the highway-robbery-esque early termination fee for jumping ship from Cingular or Sprint. It's pretty simple: if the cost savings of the new carrier is less than the early termination fee, why change?
Your anti-war demonstration scenario is only going to get your property frozen if it's a violent demonstration.
Unless, of course, the SecTreas decides that attendees of your demonstration pose a significant risk of committing an act of violence.
Why am I suddenly picturing the SecTreas, SecDef, and SecState hooked up to machines that dispense balls saying whether or not you're guilty of an as-yet-uncommitted crime?
-jdm
Make sure your wife's outta the room by 0:36:00, that's when the horse arrives.
If someone borrows a DVD from you, just after midnight you'll send a horse to their place?
You must have a lot of horses.
-jdm
As one of the people involved in the crafting of the North Carolina law and supporting Joyce's lawsuit, I can clarify a bit. We suspect Diebold pulled out of North Carolina not because of the source code escrow issues (which they claim to have complied with in Georgia) but because the CEO of each voting company had to sign a legally binding document saying that the source code his company installed on our machines was the same code that would be placed in escrow and provided to the examiners. On the day this document was due Diebold pulled out of the state, sending a "helpful" letter to the State Board of Elections offering to help "reform" our newly-passed law.
-jdm
I'm guessing you're the kind of person who would complain if
h our-download-without-asking-me-it-doesn't-make-any -sense-$MYDISTRO-wouldn't-do-this-$MYDISTRO-RULEZ! !!!!111!!"
a) you were using a laptop
b) the laptop was usually hooked up to broadband at work/home/whatever
c) you were now using dial-up at your Aunt Millie's place
d) you did 'yum install somepackage', and
e) yum started downloading that 45M package without any further prompting.
"I'm-on-a-modem-why-the-hell-is-yum-starting-a-4-
Clearly a summary of the counter-suits and dismissals of RIAA cases:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=17AZp0B89iQ