DRE voting machines costly to use
Herald Tribune. February 25, 2005. By Rosemarie F. Myerson and Charles Edwards

Upon the recommendation of the Sarasota County supervisor of elections, the County Commission spent $4.7 million for direct-recording electronic voting machines in November 2001. The DREs were supposed to be less expensive to use than other machines.

To measure the accuracy of this, we have analyzed and compared the annual expenditures of the supervisors of elections offices for Sarasota and Manatee counties for the fiscal years 1999 through 2004. (Manatee County purchased optical scanners in 1997. Because the registered voting population of Manatee County is approximately 20 percent smaller than Sarasota's, we increased Manatee's annual costs by 25 percent to correct for this disparity.

Sarasota County's average annual expenses for 1999- 2001 were $1.8 million and, for 2002-2004, $2.8 million.

Manatee County's adjusted average annual expenses for 1999-2001 were $1.3 million and, for 2002-2004, $1.7 million.

It is obvious from the data that there was an increase of a million dollars per year in average annual expenses of the Sarasota County elections office in changing from punch cards to the DREs. Also, it has cost Sarasota County, on average, an extra $1.2 million each year to maintain and operate the DREs vs. Manatee County's adjusted average annual cost for using optical scanners.

Clearly, using DREs is significantly more expensive than using the punch cards we had before 2002 or optical scanners. There would have been real savings if the Sarasota County Commission had discarded the DREs in April 2004 and spent $600,000 to buy optical scanners, as a citizens' group had suggested to the commissioners. The supervisor of elections said that paper ballots were expensive. Manatee bought its paper ballots for 20 cents each. For 100,000 voters, this amounts to $20,000, a trivial sum compared with the above-mentioned $1.2 million.

Both writers reside on Longboat Key.