The GOP Way: Always Use The More Expensive, Less Efficient Way

Three benefits: Makes government look ineffectual; gets public money into the wallets of cronies in the private sector; and, in this case, debases our votes if not flat-out control electoral outcomes. (The last is another reason McCain is as good as elected; there will be just enough hacking to vote him in.)

Truly, the Golden Age is upon us....

Wired:

One reason election officials around the country have given for purchasing touch-screen voting machines is that they say the systems save money -- both in the cost of printing paper ballots and in storing them after an election. Officials have made this claim, despite the fact that the machines carry a steep price tag (about $3,000 per machine).

So SaveOurVotes (.pdf), a voting integrity group in Maryland, decided to see if the 19,000 touch-screen machines their state purchased really did save money. The results aren't really a surprise -- the machines are wildly more expensive than anyone anticipated. But just how expensive they are makes their analysis mandatory reading for any legislators and state or county budget committees that approve voting equipment purchases.

Maryland uses one system statewide -- touch-screen machines made by Diebold Election Systems -- which it purchased in batches in 2002 and 2003. A loan of about $67 million was taken out from the state treasury to pay Diebold for the machines, which counties are still paying off. They'll continue to pay for the machines through 2014, even though the state has since decided to scrap the touch-screen machines, due to security concerns, and change to optical-scan machines by 2010.

Nonetheless, according to SaveOurVotes' figures, by the end of the presidential election this year, Maryland will have spent more than $97.5 million on the machines it's abandoning, but only about half of that can be attributed to the actual cost of purchasing the machines.

At least $44 million of it went to Diebold just for operation and maintenance of the machines, which covered repairs (the cost of which increases as machines age), storage of the machines as well as programming, testing and transporting them to precincts on election days. In the case of transportation, the state contracts with Diebold to deliver the machines from warehouses, but Diebold doesn't do the deliveries itself; instead it subcontracts the service to other vendors (see this story about one of the delivery companies Diebold hired whose owner is the former chair of Maryland's state Republican Party).
Diebold has also been paid to train workers to use the machines as well as do voter outreach to familiarize voters with the equipment -- and in the process essentially selling voters on the merits of their machines.

Rebecca Wilson, co-director of SaveOurVotes, says, "I think people don't understand that e-voting is a bad idea not just because of its insecurities but because it's really bad public policy to have these really expensive machines. The cost never goes down. In fact the cost only goes up as the machines age and need more parts and upgrading.

"They take up huge amounts of warehouse space in warehouses that need to be air-conditioned," she continues. "They have to recharge the batteries every six months. And (yet) we only haul them out about once a year (for elections)."

Prior to purchasing the touch-screen machines, about 19 of Maryland's 24 voting districts used optical-scan machines (yes, the state's recent decision to scrap touch-screen machines means that counties that were forced in 2003 to scrap their optical-scan machines and purchase new touch-screen machines are now being told they have to go back to 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.

Optical-scan machines, which use a paper ballot that is run through a scanner, are less expensive because counties need fewer of them. A county can opt for one scanner per precinct (at a cost of about $4,000 per unit) or use several dozen central-based scanners at the county election headquarters to do the task. Counties that use touch-screen machines, however, have to buy between 5 and 10 machines per precinct (at a cost of between $15,000 and $30,000 per precinct).

This explains in part why voting machine companies have heavily marketed their touch-screen machines over their optical-scan products and have only recently been pushing their optical-scan machines since states have begun to ban touch-screen machines due to security and reliability concerns.