Miami-Dade to Replace Touchscreen Voting with Paper Ballots?

By DHinMI

Could this be a sign of bad things to come for the purveyors of touchscreen voting machines?

Miami-Dade's controversial paperless voting machines cost taxpayers about $6.6 million to operate during last November's presidential election -- about twice what officials had budgeted.

Meanwhile, Orange County, which has a voting population roughly half the size of Miami-Dade's, spent less than $2 million to run its comparatively low-tech optical scan machines -- less than a third of Miami-Dade's cost.

With a newly appointed elections supervisor set to weigh in by the end of this week on whether Miami-Dade should jettison its highly touted, $24.5 million iVotronic touch-screen system, the expenses it generates for each election -- which include programming, setting up and securing the machines and printing backup ballots -- will be a major factor in the decision.

''The cost is something that we're looking at very closely,'' said Lester Sola, who is expected to give his official recommendation by the end of the week. ``That, and voter confidence.''.

Now, as part of its evaluation of whether to keep the iVotronics, the county will have to balance its costs against the optical scanners -- and judge how each would play out in the challenge of running an election in a major urban area, Sola said.

A key selling point for the iVotronic machines in 2002 was the promise that they could cater to the needs of increasingly diverse, logistically complicated elections.

''There was the idea that this would help deal with these issues, when in reality, that may not have been the case,'' said Sola, who was not part of the elections department at the time.

Sola was tapped to oversee Miami-Dade elections after the unexpected resignation of Constance Kaplan, who left in March after revelations that a computer coding error dumped hundreds of votes in an election that month. The same coding error was detected in several other municipal elections during the past year...

Here are some of the big-ticket costs associated with the iVotronics:

• Back-up batteries for each of the 7,200 iVotronic machines -- at $147 a pop -- totaled more than $1 million. Election Systems & Software, the company that makes the iVotronics, recommends replacing the batteries every three to five years.

• Batteries for the 7,600 handheld devices that activate the machines cost $8 each -- or $60,800 total.

• Sola estimates that the county would need another 1,000 iVotronics -- at about $4,000 apiece -- by the next presidential election in 2008. Outfitting the county with an optical scan system could run an estimated $8 million, according to a memo drafted by Kaplan last year.

There also is the issue of the technical support required for the iVotronics.

The original purchasing contract included more than 400 days' worth of project-manager support from ES&S -- but those days were gone by the end of the first year, a period that included the disastrous September 2002 primary.

Now, the county negotiates the rate and number of days for ES&S support in advance of elections. That price has been as high as $1,100 a day, per person.

 

One of the arguments used for touchscreens was that they were supposedly more cost-efficient.  Miami-Dade's experience shows that the supposed savings aren't obvious, if they even exist.  One of the big costs touchscreens were supposed to eliminate was printing and paper, as they supposedly obviated the need for ballots.  But since a lot of people are, well, you know, sticklers for having some form of evidence that their votes can be counted in the event of a system failure, recount or case of fraud, the net savings on paper was much less than originally touted. Add in the fact that you need batteries that are used a few times a year, the problems with software and hardware, and the fact that optical scans require only a few machines at each central voting site but you need far more touchscreens per voter, and the savings are shown to be illusory. 

There are plenty of reasons why touchscreen voting needs to include a paper trail.  The manufacturers of these systems have resisted any attempt to require such a paper trail.  But wouldn't it be satisfying if their recalcitrance ends up contributing to counties and municipalities forgoing the touchscreen part and sticking with or going back to optical scan systems, the most accurate and verifiable form of voting and tabulation?

Comments

[Sara]

You should never never recommend using scanners at a central location. You need to have one per precinct, and the voter needs to place his/her own ballot in the scanner. If it is overvoted the scanner will reject it, and it can be corrected by the voter.

Hennepin County Minnesota has been using optical scanners in precincts since 1990, and has the lowest error rate for any major metro area in the country, and has had since the 1992 election.

If you have a crowded precinct with long lines, all you have to do with in-precinct scanning is to add additional plastic voting booths, which are made of recycled pop bottles (yep) and cost less than 20 dollars apice. They fold up and are easily moved without any security to polling places.

The cost of a good scanner is a little less than a thousand dollars, and the necessary programming is quite checkable.

[DHinMI]

Apparently I wasn't clear, but what I meant was that you didn't need a scanner for each voting booth, just one per precinct or voting site. For instance, I voted at a very crowded site last November, and they had a couple make-shift "booths" for us to complete our ballots that they did up at the last second, but there was no delay in running the ballot through the single scanner they had at the site.

I think the ratio was 7 or 8 booths, with just the one scanner. It's the difference, in that city, between having to buy about 40 machines (scanners) or 300-350 machines (touchscreens).

[smintheus]

I'm hoping against hope that the expense of touch-screen voting systems will kill them off before they kill our democracy.