Reply #12: In Miami-Dade, FL, Touchscreens cost 5 times as much as Optical Scan [View All]

[nodictators]

Miami-Dade County could have purchased optical scan machines for $5 million. Instead, they paid $25 million for ES&S touchscreens.

It costs about 25 cents to print a op-scan ballot. M-D has about 1 million registered voters and primary and general elections every other year. Thus, they could have printed ballots for 55 years with the money saved by buying op-scan machines rather than the touchscreens. And that is assuming that they print 1 million ballots in the odd-numbered years for municipal elections, which is unlikely.

Those damn touchscreens won't last even half that long.

Worse yet, with the problems they had in the 2002 primary election, the touchscreens probably cost the M-D county election supervisor his $150,000 per year job!