The Costs of E-Voting

Dan Tokaji, guestblogging this week for Rick Hasen, points to an article out of Utah noting the costs of the transition to electronic voting machines.

Democracy isn't cheap, but it sure used to be less expen- sive[sic].

Switching from punch cards to touch-screen voting machines doubled the cost of this year's election.

Everyone is pointing fingers for the costs, towns and small cities are pointing to counties, counties are pointing to the state and the state is fingering Congress and the EAC.

In truth, everyone is right to blame someone else and wrong because they don't shoulder the blame themselves. Let's face, for decades, we have looked not to the most reliable methods of voting, but the cheapest and that says a lot about our democracy. Even now, faced with expenses that seem high, they are once again looking for democracy on the cheap:

Those costs are so prohibitive that many Utahns in next year's local elections will revert to a voting style used for generations: checking a box on a paper ballot.

Utah is trying to work out a solution for short terms needs, but no one seems to be recognizing that the cost of modernization is always steep, and no less so when you are updating 40, 50 or 60 year old technology.

Unfortuneately, the cost trade-off has its own price. America could use a system of paper ballots, marked by hand and then mailed or delivered by hand. This is certainly a time-honored tradition of voting and generally pretty effective. However, the problem is that counting takes a long time and is much more prone to human error. The beauty of voting machines is that, for all their other failings, they do count very well and with far fewer errors than is commonly know.

So the trade-off is this: we can spend money for faster counting machines and satisfy our fix for instant gratification as to who won or we can go low tech, wait a long time to find out who won, and oh, yeah, spend the same amount of money paying people to count the ballots.