Reply #23: Sarasota Herald Tribune: DRE voting machines costly to use

[Wilms]

DRE voting machines costly to use

Rosemarie F. Myerson
Charles Edwards

February 25, 2005

Upon the recommendation of the Sarasota County supervisor of elections, the County Commission spent $4.7 million for direct-recording electronic voting machines in November 2001. The DREs were supposed to be less expensive to use than other machines.

-snip-

It is obvious from the data that there was an increase of a million dollars per year in average annual expenses of the Sarasota County elections office in changing from punch cards to the DREs. Also, it has cost Sarasota County, on average, an extra $1.2 million each year to maintain and operate the DREs vs. Manatee County's adjusted average annual cost for using optical scanners.

Clearly, using DREs is significantly more expensive than using the punch cards we had before 2002 or optical scanners. There would have been real savings if the Sarasota County Commission had discarded the DREs in April 2004 and spent $600,000 to buy optical scanners, as a citizens' group had suggested to the commissioners. The supervisor of elections said that paper ballots were expensive. Manatee bought its paper ballots for 20 cents each. For 100,000 voters, this amounts to $20,000, a trivial sum compared with the above-mentioned $1.2 million.

-snip/more-

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050225/OPINION/502250391/1029