[LINK] Blind voter demands secret vote

[Saliya Wimalaratne]

On Sun, Aug 26, 2007 at 06:19:28PM +1000, Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> Saliya Wimalaratne wrote:
> >  
> Well ... I still don't see the urgent need to introduce the electronics, 
> even for the input, with the exception of cases such as the blind. 
> What's the "pitch"? The benefit? Something that's really worth the extra 
> dollars?

Hi Richard, 

You mean 'if we're still sticking to paper tallies, why electronics at all?'

* Disabled voting, of course
* Deletes the current trailer-tarp-sized voting paper
* Early results indicators (non-authoritative, of course)
* Making the whole process easier to understand and navigate
* Graphical display of 'this' person and 'these' policies
* Proper buttons labelled 'Donkey' and 'Informal'

would be a few. No doubt there are more...

Good enough to spend $300mil extra ? Perhaps, perhaps not. 

> Let's do the envelope budget. There are roughly 8,000 polling places in 
> the country; let's allow ten "booths" to replace the current booths; and 
> allow $5,000 per voting computer, one per voting booth. That's $50,000 
> per polling place, or $400 million nationwide. The last election cost 
> $70 million, the next will cost $90 million, so what's the point of the 
> other $310 million?

I'm presuming you're allowing for the cost of a booth fitted out with
the latest dance/dance revolution or whack-a-pollie interactive voting
selector rather than the simple pc+touchscreen+printer that I'd envisaged.

I'd have budgeted closer to $1500 at current retail prices; this turns
the guesstimates into about $120M (add another $16M for a braille printer
at RRP at each polling place). And RRP is not what this could be done for;
there's probably another 5% that could be skimmed fairly readily. The
hardware could be reused at the next election, or donated to education, 
or...

Whack-a-pollie _does_ sound like fun, though. 

Regards,

Saliya