Crippling Cost of HR 811 Leaves States Exposed and Defenseless

Due diligence warrants a secondary inquiry to the vendors as to why they have – within a matter of months – issued completely conflicting statements on this matter.

According to the industry’s own sworn testimony, it is questionable that such a read back product exists; integrating a new, untested, uncertified technology and step into the voting process raises many management concerns, many of which were explained above.

In financial terms, the cost of adding new technology to every polling place in the country is estimated to be much higher for this single item than the $1 BIL appropriated to cover every requirement in HR811 .

Estimated Cost of New Technology Using Automark

Here is a rough cost estimate for the HR811 mandated read back technology alone (in other words, this cost estimate does not take into account management costs such as training, storage, and other normally budgeted line items associated with election equipment.)

The cost of the Automark is about $6,000 per device.

• Election jurisdictions, typically conservatively budget for a minimum of 10 years. We will be a bit less conservative and budget for 5 years in this estimate.
• Operating costs for the device, with its complex software configuration requirements for the tens of thousands of ballot configurations and interfaces, will conservatively run $1,000 per year.
• There are roughly 180,000 precincts in the nation, approximately 75% of them do NOT have the Automark already, so these are all NEW operating costs for those jurisdictions.
• 75% of 180K=135,000 precincts needing to purchase the device at $6,000
• Adding in a VERY conservative 5-year budget (although most budget for 10-20 years) at $1,000 per year gets us to 135,000 jurisdictions spending $11,000 for a total conservative cost estimate of $1.5 Billion. For the first year ONLY.

But then there's the matter of the next generation of federal standards, which will be effective in 2-3 years, with its new requirements, such as software independence, and everyone will have to buy a whole new product, as yet nonexistent and unpriced, to meet those requirements.

Or, they can, as described above, simply not comply and let the courts decide what to do with our elections.

Voting Machine Certification Requirements

HR811 requires all states to implement voting machine certification programs. For many states this is a mandate to initiate and operate an entirely new state function. What are the costs of an entirely new state certification function?

At a minimum, states will need to finance their certification department’s most basic needs, such as:

• Overhead and administration: The certification department will require offices and everything that goes into maintaining those offices.
• Staffing: The certification department will require highly skilled professionals, including management, computer security and programming, and administrative personnel.
• Information technology infrastructure and resources: The certification department will require servers, desktops, and whatever other high tech toys are required in order to enable them to test and certify extraordinary complex hardware and software with hundreds of thousands of lines of codes.

There are states that already have a certification process in place, but this technoelection bill makes the process more complicated due to its mandates for complex new technology and the prohibition to use machines with recent fixes unless they have been completely recertified.

The complexities of the mandated technologies and the establishment of The Commission’s standards as the only “safe harbor” offered to the states means a lot of new bells and whistles on the machines, doubling or tripling the code with all the new requirements, and making the whole testing and certification process that much more complex and expensive.

Additionally, the more code, the more last minute fixes you end up needing. And then you need to retest and recertify all over again.

With hundreds of thousands of lines of code, this takes multiple man years to review. How can states even afford to budget for these multiple man-years in the budget? The new standards call for what is known as "red team testing", a high cost test, and with every patch, every fix, it will need to be done.

Every state will need to reconfigure and budget for this increased resource allocation for certification. They will need to multiply their budgeted resources by X amount, an unknown but undoubtedly very high multiple.

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