[LINK] Blind voter demands secret vote

[Richard Chirgwin]

Lord heavens above, reasonable debate! My ulcer thanks you, Sal...

[snip]
> * Making the whole process easier to understand and navigate
>   
I wonder ... it surely depends on the interface designer. Yes, the 
"tablecloth" senate paper is a pain, but then again, how would we turn 
that into a GUI without causing confusion? And I frankly didn't budget 
for interface design and test in my $400 million guess...
>> 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; 
There are a couple of reasons not to "go retail", so to speak. Cheifly, 
I would emphasise that we want boxes good for trucking anywhere in the 
country.

Story: in the dim-distant past, one of my roles was to "harden" music 
equipment to make it transportable for rock & roll tours. I really 
wouldn't like the challenge of making any retail PC survive dirt roads 
and the Nullabour Plains when we want 8,000 or 16,000 or whatever make 
the journey and be "live" at a given moment on a given day. Even stuff 
that's built to be transported doesn't much like it.

Also, for the $5 k per booth I was assuming you needed some software, 
some personnel around to hit alt-ctrl-del during the day, and so on.

Cheers,
RC