Re: Federal Government buying voting machines: The Federal Government can buy or provide money to buy the machines. They cannot mandate there use. Or mandate any other specific way of voting, for that matter. Their responsibility is to ensure equal access to whatever system the States want. Under the Constitution, unless the right or duty is given to the Federal government, it's reserved to the States. So the Feds could offer a grant to states to buy machines and the Supreme Court can be used to ensure that the right to vote isn't impeded, could even set standards that might lead to a limited field of technology, but that's about it. In Florida, that's the power of the State Elections Office. They establish general standards. The Counties have the right to decide how to meet those standards. Like it or not, that's how the law works.

Some real-time numbers for costs:

My county upgraded to a scantron like system last year. The software and hardware (not including the voting booths themselves) was $399,930.00. This included the scanners, modems to transmit counts from precincts to the Supervisors office, initial training and one year, a server to collect the data and one year warranty.

On going warranty and upgrades to firmware are estimated at $45,000/year. If you assume a 10 year live span, that's about $850,000 total life cycle cost. That's about $7500 per precinct up front and $850 per precinct annually. Add to that cost, the fact that poll-workers are paid. They volunteer and they get paid to work the polls, ranging from %525 - $6.15/hour.

We have 53 precincts and 86,000 voters. And even with the scantron system we have lines at some precincts, btw.

troll,

McGrath is right. Who did or didn't want the votes counted is not the issue. At issue is should they have been counted. And despite waffling, the Supreme Court said, yes, all things being equal and time allowing, there should have been a recount.

Arguing about what the results of the recount might be is futile speculation, but given the opinion of the Supreme Court, I'll have to say that the attempts to block recounts by Bush were wrong. I happen to think that the attempts by Gore to block the absentee ballots were wrong too.

The bottom line is that there is a good probability that votes that were cast in good faith weren't counted. That is the central issue to the vote, not who won or lost.

It seems to keep getting lost in the "who can we blame game". (Yes, Pogo was right but that takes the fun out of it). As if blaming one side or the other somehow takes the animus out of a highly probable disenfranchisement of voters.

The article was indicative of a problem that is national in scope. (Glad you finally learned how to cut and paste without a call to the help desk). And while I agree that hand ballots probably wouldn't work, I could also argue that it probably wouldn't be much worse than the current mess.

Since candidates spent roughly 2 billion dollars on campaigns this election cycle, even handouts seem cheap in comparison.

Regards John