Voting Machine Issues In Kansas

[ReptilianPeon]

Kansas City Star reports.

First of all this:

The county spent more than $10 million to buy the new machines...

Now, I remember being told in another topic on this site that paper ballots are far too costly for the USA. So, therefore, they should be done away with. In fact, here is the website I was direct to by user Tizheruk:
https://followmyvote.com/paper-ballots/

Follow My Vote claim:

Paper ballots also aren’t cheap. We have localities … Fairfax County, for example, they have scanning equipment and the ballots that they got printed. We are talking close to $100,000 just for ballot printing (…) It’s not realistic to expect hand counting after the election, it’s just an incredible task the amount of people and resources required. As Doug mentioned, it also isn’t just as accurate.

The example used is Fairfax County, Virginia with a population of 1,148,433. Johnson County, Kansas has a population of 584,451. So it's smaller than their example.

$100,000 or $10,000,000? US$100,000 sounds like a bargain! Especially when you factor in that paper ballots are far more secure and that voting machines needs to be securely stored and maintain (both large additional costs). Anyway, moving swiftly onward.

I just did the maths...

$10,000,000 divided by a very generous $100,000 is 100. So for the cost of all those voting machines you can have 100 elections using paper ballots. A voting machine is not going last more than 100 years, and that's assuming they are using every single year for an eleciton. I'll just leave snippet of exchange from the other topic here.

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Because even if paper ballots are immune to hacking they have issues of there own. Such as cost and resource constraints

https://followmyvote.com/paper-ballots/

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The USA is a (hopefully still) democracy and a country of checks and balances so I hope I the issues in Johnson Country can be resolved. The person running the Johnson County system is Ronnie Metsker, who was appointed by Kris Kobach. Brent Welder - a Justice Democrat - was winning by a large margin in Johnson County. That's intriguing right?  There we have a potential motive for creating problems with voting machines. Another reason to move back to paper ballots.

You'd hope that election irregularities on this scale would only happen in countries that aren't democratic and that don't have a system of checks and balances. Voting machines make elections less secure.


TYT did a video on this too:

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[Amarok]

I am aware of this too small a scale to many variables and does not deal with inefficiencies

[Angrboda]

I believe the argument for electronic voting machines is their accuracy, timeliness, and the elimination of costly and problematic recounts. No solution is perfect. Nothing is. The question is whether on balance electronic voting is a net good or not. Simply raising the possibility of hacking and talking about costs doesn't really answer that question. Since it's a qualitative question, no dollar amount will on its own tip the scales.

[ReptilianPeon]

I think the bigger issue here is actually that the Secretary of State for Kansas is basically overseeing an election that he is competing in. His crony is in charge of the election in Johnson County. Therefore, it's suspect that there are issues on voting day.