The Cost of Electronic Voting 158
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."
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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Elections should be much more secure than money transactions.
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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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Any
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Then in a manual system to corrupt the vote you have to corrupt nearly every polling stat
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Why would Democratic counties (as in, predominantly democratic party leaning, that is) choose to be involved in a conspiracy to enrich a company that was accused at the time of planning to manipulate the election in favor of Republicans?
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I studied the issues and got a real lesson in the process. It's way more interesting than I ever thought. I volunteered to be a poll worker for the primary election, and whatever I learned about voting before then, I got an entirely new set of less
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I've done it. I might do it again, probably not this year, though. Now, granted, when I did it we had the mechanical lever machines where were absolutely horrible (much, much worse than touch-screens. They were talking about switching to touch-screens, but went with scantron-type in my district.) The absolute worst thing about the day was, after telling people going in to only pull the curtain-lever when they're ready to lock in their votes, having to then tel
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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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Elections here in Malaysia are nonanonymous (from what I observed anyway), and I actually had no problems with the incumbent Gov knowing exactly how I voted in my country's past elections. And this is in a country which the western media liked to portray as controlled by an Authoritarian Government.
I fine with them knowing I gave them a "D Minus"
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.
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I once had to cast a provisional ballot due to moving before the election. Simpl
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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 mach
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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. T
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Well that one at least is easy.
EVERY voter must use a touch-screen to vote, and if your touch-screen goes down, nobody can vote. You only need one optical scanner
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Perhaps you get to name the winner :)
Actually there's so much complication and misdirection that it might be a bit more than a joke instead of a combination of price gouging, low level corruption (bribes for contracts) and incompetance. Voting machines are something we really could outsource to India where they have shown that the things can be cheap, can be limited to small numbers of votes (to cut down on the infune
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.
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an instance of growing or making greater, as quoted from my dictionary. For instance, if you started out with one apple and someone gave you another apple, we would say that there was an increase in the number of apples you had. Applied to democracy, if the people (the "demo" in "democracy") were not able to vote, and then they were given the ability to vote, we would say there was a democratic increase.
Carroll County 22k to 260k! (Score:3, Interesting)
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Technophile just means someone who likes technology. It's independent of how well someone understands technology or the consequences thereof. But excepting the use of that word, I agree with the intent. It's usually the people who are most capable with a technology who best understand when not to use it.
Outsourcing (Score:3, Funny)
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Captcha: "Patriot".
A real open source solution? (Score:2, Interesting)
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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 ?
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
Speaking of broken voting.... (Score:1)
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.
Re:Can somebody explain why you use machines at al (Score:2)
My guess is that in these situations there's someone pulling the strings behind the scenes to precipitate these events. Diebold et al. stand to make a lot of money off these things, obviously, so it wouldn't be surprisin
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And after a look at your income distribution on gapminder.org (see my presentation about cheap new computers and world development at
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/pmc [cuug.ab.ca] - Brazil shows up around slide #48
"Electronic" voting..? (Score:2)
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The optical scanners are simply counters, and their purpose (compared to hand counting) is to be less labor intensive and more accurate. Touchscreen and other all-electronic systems get rid of any permanent physical medium for making the vote. Lacking a macroscopic physical medium, there is no meaningful way to inspect ballots or do a recount that has any significance.
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
serious advantages (Score:2)
However, by now, everyone on
If trust can be solved, aren't there advantages to e-voting that may be worth the cost?
Why look at the cost (Score:2, Insightful)
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 con
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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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As for the computer voting, I see it as the end result of two flaws: (1) Lack of understanding by politicians of how computers work and/or how easily they can be hacked, erased, corrupted. (2) Scientific and technical illiteracy by government school graduates (aka voters) who are not really sure what "computers" are.
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I'd be happy to pay, if they payee could tell me what they're doing with my money. Black-box "Vote and we will generate a random number that satiates our policital sugardaddies" does not satiate me.
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.
Not just diebold (Score:5, Insightful)
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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How about wireless network chipsets and ACPI? I agree that hardware support these days is almost a given but you never know what kind of surprise a Dibold may have left you with in their $3,000 computer. These are special machines.
The more common wifi chipsets require binary blobs. It might be better to have these things unplugged. others might want them hooked up all the time and not having to roll out an ethernet network every time you set up for voting would be a real time saver. Sooner or later, you
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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.
Re:Not just diebold (Score:4, Insightful)
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profplump is absolutely correct. An electronic voting machine should receive and count votes, but should also spit out a scantron style output that looks ju
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Really? I agree that it's more expensive and probably more prone to failure, but I would argue that a system should provide better, faster, AND more verifiable results.
Better: If you have a "voter marks a ballot, machine counts ballot" system, that will have recognition errors. These can be upwards of 99%, but there are important elections where the margin is smaller than that. A computer votin
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But I don't think we have the same things in mind when we say failure.
No, I mean that the machines are more prone to breaking down than marking a ballot with a marker. (Though probably less so than some punch machines.)
To me, failure is not in failing to elect the most popular candidate (by whatever measure of popularity). To me, failure is when the elections process puts someone in office who is more interesting in using the system to his or her own purposes than in being a public servant. T
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CastrTroy wrote:
I agree that one of the problems with using computer systems is that they tend to lead to overcomplication (just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it), which makes errors more likely. Also, the problem I
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Well, no way to mathmatically guarentee (Score:2)
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As a start: If you had a end to end E-Vote solution, you could easily get end to end verifiability. Something as simple as allowing the voter to enter their own random string at the vote screen. With redundant open back-end server algorithms, if you generated a encrypted packet with that string, and your votes, and encrypted with sever generated PGP-key. A very
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if you understand the current system, I would bet your one of less than 2% of voters. IE know all of who/how/what/where did your vote get from the ballot box to TV final results?
1) system needs to work
2) enough people know how the system works, and can verify it works to instill confidence.
Get the algorithm to be understood/testable by every person who passes college level calculus, get the system to where the rest know how to use it.
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at some point some people have to be trusted, obviously no small group will get away w
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I'm not sure the costs will balance out but community developed and monitored software would be more secure. Sooner or later, the counts go to a computer already and paper ballots have the infamous "hanging chad" uncertainty that fraudsters can work within to steal elections. Paper, though energy intensive and wasteful to make, is still awefully cheap.
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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
Uh, no. (Score:2, Interesting)
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 [aceee.org].
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Now this program I viewed said that they were looking for ways to gasify the wood in order to directly feed the generators on demand instead of burning it to produce steam and then turning the generators. I guess the steam had a heat loss factor and wasn't nearly as efficient because
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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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~Dan
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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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It is, however, crazy.
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evoting is only attractive to governments people because it can be hacked easily and more importantly without trace (ram is good like that) no pesky tonnes of paper to dispose of in a ditch.
While Mr. Coward's post is entitled "Solution looking for a problem" he also accurately points out that it is, in fact, a solution perfectly matched to the only problem it can ever really solve - the problem of what to do about all those damn voters. The technology will not be going anywhere without assistance from a pitchfork-wielding mob marching on Washington DC. America needs more angry, pitchfork-wielding mobs ready to fuck shit up... politicians would be considerably more receptive to the will of t
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who doesn't mind waiting 3 days to count paper votes by hand ? what difference does it make to your lives that it cant wait less than a week ?
Funny, I live in Canada and this is how we do it, and we get the results the same day.
Everyone is assigned a poll station, which is then divided up into polling boxes (which is also assigned). As I understand it, each box is then assigned two people to manage it, and count the results when the polls close. I also think there's something where each official party also sends one representative to oversee the entire polling station to ensure there's no bias in the count.
The larger the population in an