- Sunday, 8 November 2009
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal - Oscar Wilde
Touch screen voting is stupidly expensive
TOUCH SCREEN electronic voting machines are not only highly vulnerable to vote counting fraud, they're also extremely costly, compared to alternatives.
A study (pdf) conducted by the Maryland voting integrity group SaveOur Votes found that touch screen electronic voting machines are ridiculously expensive.
Stampeded by the Florida 2000 Presidential election nightmare of punch-card "hanging chad" ballots and spurred by the federal subsidy of the Help America Vote Act later passed by Congress, elections officials replaced a lot of paper ballot based voting systems with new touch screen electronic voting machines.
County elections officials justified buying electronic voting machines in part by claiming that they would save the costs of printing and storing paper ballots, in spite of the fact that the voting machines themselves cost about $3,000 apiece.
SaveOur Votes reviewed the costs incurred by Maryland for its 19,000 voting machines to see if the state really saved any money. The costs are staggering.
Maryland bought a single statewide system of touch screen electronic voting machines from Diebold Election Systems in 2002 and 2003. The counties took out $67 million in loans from the state treasury to buy those machines -- loans they will be paying off until 2014, even though the state will discontinue use of the machines in favour of optical scan ballots by 2010 due to security concerns.
The touch screen electronic voting machines built by Diebold and other vendors have been found vulnerable to a variety of attacks that can result in election fraud in tests conducted in other states as well as by independent researchers.
According to the costs compiled by SaveOur Votes, by the end of this election year Maryland will have spent over $97.5 million on the voting machines it's planning to scrap, but only about half of that is down to buying the machines.
Beyond the cost of the machines, the state will have paid Diebold at least $44 million for operating, maintaining and storing the actual machines as well as programming, testing, and transportation services to and from precincts.
Diebold has also been paid for training poll workers how to operate the voting machines and for performing "voter outreach" to promote their use among the electorate.
About 19 of Maryland's 24 counties used optical scan vote counting machines before the state mandated that they purchase touch screen electronic voting machines. Those counties were forced to throw out the optical scan machines and buy touch-screen machines back in 2003. Now they'll have to junk those touch-screen machines and go back to using the optical scan machines again.
SaveOur Votes analysed the cost of touch screen electronic voting machines in those counties. In most of the counties their average costs per voter increased 179 per cent. At least one county saw its costs per voter increase 866 per cent, from a total cost of about $22,000 in 2001 to $266,000 in 2007. µ
L'Inq
Wired
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
Man, down here on Brasil we are using touch screen voting for ages, i belive for the las 10 years or so... 
"highly vulnerable to vote counting fraud" are u joking? i mean wtf was the first bush election on usa? And their all used paper voting, but if u don´t realized they are all counted with computers so what´s the diference in frauds?
We are a third world contry but we got HD televison for free, and touch screen voting that will very soon use optical scan to identify the voters. 
p.s I don´t realy care for grammatical errors. chers.
I really have to wonder what the point is in all of this. Here in Finland all votes are on paper, written by hand, and counted by hand. And counted by hand in 8 hours or so. The election result is quite well known way before that.

Every citizen has the right to vote, and AFAIK the voter turnout is much much better than in the states, so there are quite a few votes to count too.

I also think this is the way it's done in most of the _real_ democracies out there.

The first thing that needs to be changed in the states is the ridiculously complicated ballots. Then you can count the votes by hand, and much faster, too.

And the way I think about automated counting / electronic voting is that it only takes one "bad" person to skew an election, as in the hand counting it only takes one "good" person to prevent a skew from happening.

Elections don't come cheap and I don't think the real cost is actually in counting the votes, but not saving there means the election result is what the people voted.
Listen to the man from Basil!

Electronic voting machines are vulnerable to counting fraud "IF" someone has inappropriate access to the machines to make the changes. Normally, you have both a republican and a democrat present to make sure there is no tampering. Its not as if some voter can walk up to the machine and punch in some keys and change the vote counts for everyone. But put a spook into everyone and the clueless politicians will make a mass change.

So they waste a lot of money because people weren't smart enough to use the punch system, so they go to a modern system that was easy to use, then scrap it because they got spooked.

So who is getting the kickbacks for all this money spent on voting machines?
I'm surprised to see l'Ing refer to chad...

All us old timers that actually used punch cards know that chaff from the punches was the perfect thing to drop in the back of someones shirt.

No chads on us, that's an ignorant reporter's error.
Do you really think electronic voting fraud is done by some twat standing beside the machine? lol too funny....

The vulnerabilty is remote hacking, theyre all networked...

to put in perpective read the following

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars

Any government that pushes electronic voting has a hidden agenda, and therefore is no longer democratic. there is no way to rationalize a system that leaves no "paper" trail for something as important as an election.

Wake up people, before democrasy gets eroded right from under your feet, and you fall through below to whats waiting there for the stupid, gullible and apathetic.