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The Cost of Electronic Voting
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Apr 06, 2008 11:08 AM
from the also-known-as-moneyflushing dept.
from the also-known-as-moneyflushing dept.
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."
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It isn't e-voting, it's how (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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This doesn't work very well when RIAA and NSA feels that it's necessary to monitor and read all network traffic in order to stop the terrorists.
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Why do the U.S. needs machines to count? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Humans are guaranteed to make mistakes, and make them regardless of whether a ballot is well-formed or not. Machines should, in theory, only ever make the same kind of mistakes (so the mistakes should be easily caught, eventually). Obviously, they're a lot faster than people are, and that time costs money. Unless all your vote-counters are volunteers, but then you'll find it very difficult to recruit people who are both A) proficient and B) don't have an agenda.
What the hell
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So it's not as simple as, say, a British general election where each constituency's officials are counting votes for a single parliamentar
Cost shouldn't be the biggest issue (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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heck, I can't watch the "counting" easily for my own vote while I'm there in the voting booth. Most voting machines, including the manual pull-the-lever type, lack the most basic check: Verification by the voter doing the voting. The infamous "hanging chads" were a good
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a President
a US Senator
a US Representative
a Governor
a State Senator
a State Representative
a State Supreme Court Justice
a State Treasurer
a State Auditor General
a Mayor
2 City Council members
3 City Charter alterations
2 State Constitutional ammendments
2 School board members
and some other stuff I can't remember
And that's about par for the course. (At least since I've moved I no longer need to vote for the local Coroner and Health Inspector.)
How many things do you vote
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1. When you register, you get one "vote card" and a thin envelope. Make the vote card special say with a watermark so it's hard to fake extras.
2. You go into the booth, insert card and make a selection.
3. After it's asked you if you're really really sure, prints it in cleartext and as a barcode (or those better-than-barcode things, I forget).
4. Take the card out and verify your printed vote against the cleartext.
5. The vote should be left on screen until you click "ok, it matche
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Pen and paper still the best (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You really gotta wonder sometimes.... (Score:2)
Of course the beast is man and the image is his invention of computers.
But its stuff like this you have to wonder how in the hell did it ever come about this spending huge amounts of money on a different way of voting?
And a way that just is not so secure, but rather easy to manipulate.
Hmmm, so I bet it was an electronic vote that "forced" purchase and use of such systems???
But one thing is for sure, its another strik
I just love statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It's new; of course it's more expensive! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Carroll County 22k to 260k! (Score:3, Interesting)
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Outsourcing (Score:3, Funny)
A real open source solution? (Score:2, Interesting)
Citizens should be able to sue (Score:2)
How about cuttings costs per vote by 500 dollars and then paying us to vote. I predict the turnout to be over 90%. That is democrac
Kim Zetter rules (Score:2)
um... (Score:2)
I think I'll wait until 11. For the film.
Cost of Getting It Wrong (Score:2)
Can somebody explain why you use machines at all? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
"Electronic" voting..? (Score:2)
Perception is everything (Score:2)
The whole issue here has to do with perception. In other words, the voting public needs to feel that the count actually does represent the will of the voters that voted on that day. And the money that was spent in researching, developing, buying and using the new machines was spent due to a perception that, in the year 2000, the end result of the vote did not accurately portray the will of the voters that voted in the Presidential election.
Now, quite frankly, many of the issues were blown out of proportion
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Slavery is more expensive. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 th
Re:Slavery is more expensive. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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It should be cheaper and more secure. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Not just diebold (Score:5, Insightful)
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Bad hardware. (Score:2)
What I worry about is that the existing hardware was "Designed for Windows" so that it might not be possible to fix with free software. System hardware should be chosen based on the availability of free software driver support. The smallest binary blob should be rejected because it can conceal malice.
The highest cost of non free electronic voting is an easily thrown election.
Re:Bad hardware. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Not just diebold (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you get the benefits of electronic input -- like access for the visually impaired, to alternate-language ballots, the ability to correct mistakes, etc. -- without relying on the input device to do all the vote-counting correcting. I expect it would provide a count for quick access to the results, but you wouldn't have to rely on it.
And because the output is computer-generated you can do things to actually improve audibility over traditional hand-written ballots. For one thing, you could print the output onto an optical-scan form, or other machine-and-human-readable, high-accuracy format. You could then buy an optical-scan counting machine from another vendor, and if at the end of the night the numbers from both machines matched up, you could all go home without hand-counting anything. You could also have the machine sign its output so that ballots can be traced back to a particular device, and can be verified as authentic and non-duplicated -- the public could be provided with copies of the ballots to independently verify the results.
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Re:Not just diebold (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, no way to mathmatically guarentee (Score:2)
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Around here we've been using optical scan forms for years, and they work pretty reliably. The only thing that they can't do which the electronic ones can is spit out a receipt.
They provide a built in paper trail, as long as they don't get lost in the mail or in a back room. They can usually be scored in bulk via an auto feeder.
And the cost is significantly lower. As my state switches to an all mail voting process, the equipment is just as useful now as it wa
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Good point. A voter verified paper trail is an important safety system for electronic voting. It should be possible for local election committees to count votes by hand if they suspect a problem. I suspect rolls of paper would be cheaper than carefully prepared forms but these two things could cancel each other.
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the vast majority of papermills run entirely on burning the bark which is completely unusable in the production of paper. chainsaws, or robotic tree cutter/branch strippers use a lot of fuel, but remember 120 years ago, we used hand (usually 2 man, for big trees) saws, or axes, and mules etc, trees can be harvested on entirely biofuel, but this costs more than even the robotic tree cutter/branch strippers...
paper from trees use a lot oh highly toxic chl
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I've argued with Bev Harris previously on Slashdot as a matter of fact. She's relatively over th
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