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What does it cost to throw a presidential election?
November 7th, 2008, 6:00 am · 4 Comments · posted by Teri Sforza, Register staff writer
Perhaps more than you think. Consider all this before you make your guess:
- In Orange County, there were a staggering 1,181 polling sites.
- Those polling sites were equipped with 9,600 electronic voting machines.
- Those machines were overseen by some 10,000 poll workers.
- About 1,128,000 Orange County voters cast ballots.
Planning for Election Day 2008 began more than a year in advance at the Orange County Registrar of Voters office on Grand Avenue in Santa Ana. The Registrar is czar of the electoral process here. Workers had to be trained, paper ballots had to be printed and delivered, voting machines had to be transported from warehouses to polling places and back again. “There are quite a few trucks, and they’re coming in morning noon and night for the last 10 days,” said Brett Rowley, spokesman 
for the Registrar. ”There’s a lot of logistics, a lot of recruitment and training that goes on.”
The final tallies for 2008 won’t be in for a few weeks, but the cost of the 2004 election - including overtime, poll workers, trucking vendors, printing, etc. - was (drum roll, please)…
…about $4.7 million, Rowley said. If we’re in that ballpark again, it would translate to some $3.60 per voter. Or the cost of a fancy coffee at Starbucks.
Not counted in all this is the cost of the equipment:
- The initial purchase of our e-Slate electronic voting machines was $26 million.
- The retrofit - adding paper printers to each machine, so there’d be a paper trail - cost $12 million.
- More systems were bought this year, costing $2.3 million.
That’s more than $40 million - or some $4,150 per machine.
Hey, no one said democracy would be cheap! And those little “I Voted” stickers for your lapel? Priceless, indeed.
More Watchdog:
- Tremendous voter turnout nationally; so-so in OC
- Church and state collide at this polling place
- Same-sex measure rankles polling places
- Blind man struggled to cast ballot in OC
- No purging here, says OC Registrar
- Alleged ‘carpetbagger’ wins water race
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The title and premise is misleading. Yes, there is dispersal of voting machines and personnel (in Orange County, but less so in San Diego, Riverside, and Los Angeles County this year, where they did a central count). When evaluating “what it would cost to throw an election” you look for the narrowest part of the pipe, you don’t draw everyone’s attention to the widest part. The narrow part of the pipe is that the election is initially programmed by just one or two individuals, and at the end of the day, the results coming in from all the polling places are transferred to a different software run by just one or two people.
The system used in Orange County, Hart Intercivic, contains a “manual entry” function in that last tally system, allowing the one or two people to overwrite anything and everything in any polling place or vote category (ie, absentee, or even “absentees that arrive after a certain date”). It’s not a hack. It’s a menu item and all that’s required is the ability to type.
Looking at the narrow parts of the data pipeline, Orange County is vulnerable. The public has transferred from PUBLIC control to centralized control, giving just one or two people the ability to alter results. This is not what the founders had in mind.
Can we break down this number and look at how much is spent printing ballots for other languages?
How much of that 4.7M could be saved if English was the only language?
How much of that 4.7M could be saved if those unable to use a standard voting machine had one centralized location equipped for their needs instead of 1,200 machines (one for each location) for them to vote in their neighborhood?
How much would of been saved in the purchase of specialized machines?
How much would be spent printing and mailing ballots to those that needed alternate forms of voting?
This is a very good topic that is brought up in a State wide effort to cut expenses. Thanks for bringing this to the forefront.
**It was worth every penny!
What OC Register is trying to point out is how much of this expense could be reduced.
How much is waste?
those little “I Voted” stickers for your lapel? Priceless, indeed.
Are the I voted stickers too costly?
What items can we reduce?
The author also pointed out earlier that every polling place has a special voting machine for handicap. At 4,150.00 per machine this cost the County an extra $4,980,000, at least seeing these machine likely come with a much higher price tag then the average.
In the last article she made a good argument that we need to spend additional monies to have backup units available at each polling place. This would cost us (taxpayers) another $5,000,000.
However, it would eliminate or reduced hassles that resulted in numerous volunteers and the Community coming together to help someone vote by delivering a voting booth and setting it up in his home. Again an amazing story of People going over and above.
Should be spend additional monies to purchase additional specialized units?
Or do we get rid of the special little extras that are priceless and centralize the efforts to regional voting locations specially designed for handicap people with trained staff that can help them and reduce the $4.98M? Actually, this should of been something to review before the purchase. However, it still might be a good idea to have such locations as I would feel better knowing that specialized trained people and equipment could make this a little easier for People that need the assistance to vote.