Thursday, February 10, 2005
understanding the true costs of voting machines
Voting machines, we are told, "save money" over unreliable humans.
Ok, imagine I make to you this proposal:
In order to save money, we're going to spend millions of dollars on machines.
That will be used for one day.
Every few years.
Oh, and by the way, for all of the hundreds of days between each use, they will need to be stored. And you can't just stick them in a warehouse somewhere and forget about them. Because they must work perfectly, on that one day. Working perfectly means NO ONE has made unauthorized changes to them. And none of their systems has been damaged due to sitting in a freezing warehouse, or a leaky warehouse, or any kind of warehouse that doesn't keep them all nice and snugly protected from any possible harm.
So now I hope you're thinking: hmm, not so much with the saving money.
RTE News (Ireland): PAC discusses cost of storing e-vote machines
Ok, imagine I make to you this proposal:
In order to save money, we're going to spend millions of dollars on machines.
That will be used for one day.
Every few years.
Oh, and by the way, for all of the hundreds of days between each use, they will need to be stored. And you can't just stick them in a warehouse somewhere and forget about them. Because they must work perfectly, on that one day. Working perfectly means NO ONE has made unauthorized changes to them. And none of their systems has been damaged due to sitting in a freezing warehouse, or a leaky warehouse, or any kind of warehouse that doesn't keep them all nice and snugly protected from any possible harm.
So now I hope you're thinking: hmm, not so much with the saving money.
RTE News (Ireland): PAC discusses cost of storing e-vote machines
The ongoing cost of maintaining electronic voting machines was discussed again at the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee today.
Questions were raised about the big variations in the cost of storing and insuring the machines in different parts of the country.
The total cost of maintaining the machines is likely to run to €1 million each year for the next 20 years.
[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 8:41 pm
Comments:
Greetings from Mars...But the most important thing is that the votes are counted much faster. Slow counting leads to cheating and fraud.
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