How Much Do Election Machines Cost?

This is a summary of a publicly available contract with a county available at lawinsider.com. The name of the county and vendor are omitted as they have little bearing on the actual analysis.

Background

The county in question has ~ 700,000 registered voters as of 2022 and signed a 6 year contract. The contract includes costs for equipment purchase, software license renewal, warranty fees, professional services, storage and other ancillary costs. To put the size of the purchase in perspective, 300 tabulators were acquired along with all of the supporting equipment and licensing fees.

Analysis

For starters, here is the raw data from the purchase contract.

And here is a break down in tabular and graphical form.

This data is what it is, as they say.

Warranty

The part that jumps off of the page to me is the combined warranty costs for the hardware compared to the cost of the hardware.

Hardware costs - $5,869,080

Hardware warranty costs - $763,000

Warranty/Hardware ~ 13% for a 6 year contract.

Then of course there are other questions.

• How long do the machines last before they reach end of life?

• What happens when they fall out of warranty after 6 years?

• If the warranty can be renewed, does the renewed warranty pricing increase substantially?

• What work on the machines is excluded from the warranty?

• What do the terms of the warranty say about the reliability of the machines themselves?

Cost per Election Cycle

Given that this is a 6 year contract, this equipment will be used 3 times over the six years, excluding, say a special election cycle. This is ~ 2.3MM per election cycle all in for, at most, 700,000 register voters. Given a 60% nominal participation rate, this would amount to ~ $5.50/per ballot/per election cycle.

You could also look at this in terms of the number of days in use as well. Taking a nominal 30 day voting period per cycle, that would mean the system is in use ~ 90 days during the contract period. This amounts to ~ $78,000/day during the election cycle. I have no data on what the insurance costs are on this capital equipment OR if they are on a depreciation schedule.

Conclusion

The decision to not use machines is not only about money. In my mind, we need to transparency and NOT being able to see the machine code prevents 100% transparency.

We need a 100% transparent counting process even, if it is more expensive.

What are your thoughts? Leave them in the comments.