Let’s take a deep dive into the election machine contract data from NJ from the following counties: Bergen, Hudson, Passaic, Salem and Union.
In my prior article here, I was also able to look at the tabulator logs for each county. For NJ, I do not have the logs however so we will focus on the cost and the registrants.
Registrants Break Down per County
Here is the registration summary
Bergen - 657,355
Hudson - 391,778
Passaic - 322,948
Salem - 47,246
Union - 364,933
Contract Line Items
Below is a screen shot of the contractual line items pulled from the contracts. Please refer to the original contracts in these jurisdictions for the original data as this was manually transcribed from scanned pdf’s and may contain minor errors.
Analysis of Contracts
Let’s walk through the analysis column by column.
Counties: 5 data sets were available from the specified counties.
Vendors: the vendors are listed
Contract Value: the value was extracted from the contracts
One Time: the line items in the contract were classified by the author as “one time” where applicable.
Year 2: this specifies the costs associated with maintaining the systems in Year 2 from the contract where supplied. This figure was used to extrapolate costs of 6 election cycles.
Registrants: the number of registrants for 2022
Contract Value/Reg: the value of the contract overall divided by the number of registrants
One Time/Reg: the value of the one time costs divided by the number of registrants
Year 2/Reg: the value of the Year 2 costs divided by the number of registrants
All In 6 Cycles/Reg: this is the projected cost over an ASSUMED equipment life cycles which is ASSUMED to be 6 cycles or 12 years. The actual equipment life cycles may be longer or shorter.
All In 6 Cycles/Ballot: this is simply (All In 6 Cycles/Reg)/0.7 which assumes a 70% turnout of registrants on average per election thus driving up the costs.
Summary
All In 6 Cycles/Reg Range: $1.95 - $13.06
All In 6 Cycles/Ballot: $2.79 - $18.66
I will leave it to the local folks in NJ to dig into the reasons for the range in costs. The objective here was to provide a high level snapshot for perspective on cost ranges given certain assumptions.
thanks for focusing on NJ EDA, i'll incorporate this into some further analysis being done