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Electronic Voting Machines
I'm a Polling Inspector in San Bernardino County, CA and enjoyed your discussion on electronic voting machines very much. (We use Sequoia machines.)
Rym is correct in saying that government is their only client. I can't see any long-term profit for these companies unless they charge for service contracts.
I spoke with our County Registrar when we first got our machines. I can't remember if she said the county bought 2,000 machines at $4,000 each or 4,000 machines at $2,000 each.
We just elected a new Registrar in California. She is very much against electronic voting as it is currently being conducted, as am I. I'll be curious to see if the counties (taxpayers) end up eating the cost of all of the electronic equipment they have purchased in the last couple of years.
Ironically, most of the money allocated by the feds under the "Help America Vote Act" after the 2000 debacle has yet to be distributed to the states. Another problem with election standards and costs is that there is no uniform set of guidelines for conducting elections. Each state is free to set their own standards. The opportunities for bribery abound!
This is probably much more info than 99% of the folks here want to know, but I thought I'd bring it up as an FYI.
Rym is correct in saying that government is their only client. I can't see any long-term profit for these companies unless they charge for service contracts.
I spoke with our County Registrar when we first got our machines. I can't remember if she said the county bought 2,000 machines at $4,000 each or 4,000 machines at $2,000 each.
We just elected a new Registrar in California. She is very much against electronic voting as it is currently being conducted, as am I. I'll be curious to see if the counties (taxpayers) end up eating the cost of all of the electronic equipment they have purchased in the last couple of years.
Ironically, most of the money allocated by the feds under the "Help America Vote Act" after the 2000 debacle has yet to be distributed to the states. Another problem with election standards and costs is that there is no uniform set of guidelines for conducting elections. Each state is free to set their own standards. The opportunities for bribery abound!
This is probably much more info than 99% of the folks here want to know, but I thought I'd bring it up as an FYI.
Comments
Thanks for the insight.
Whereabouts do you hail from? Nice to know the IE is being represented.
However, the voting clerks never emptied out the machines to clean out the chads from previous elections. The compartments holding the newly punched out chads were often full thus making it hard for people to properly punch their ballot.
Also, the ballot was designed so that it made it hard to tell which candidate the voter was voting for. The portion of the ballot for the Democratic candidates was designed by local Democrats. They had the same types of problems with their ballot format in a previous election there but did nothing to fix it for the 2000 election.
Also, voting clerks failed to remind voters to check their ballots and make sure their card was properly punched and had no "hanging chads."
We used the same machines in California at the time and had none of those problems. We emptied out our machines, had an easy to read ballot and reminded voters to check their ballots for hanging chads. Due to the incompetence of Florida election officials we are now spending billions to correct a problem that was easily correctable using then current procedures - and we still haven't solved anything. We just created new problems with electronic voting machines.
Ahhh ok now I see what your saying...