Apples to Apples Comparison of Costs
Even Mike Lindell has asked for an “apples to apples” comparison of costs for hand counting versus machine counting. However, since getting the voting machine costs has been impossible, we cannot do “apples to apples.”
What can be done instead is an “apple-slice to an apple-slice” comparison.
We looked at the labor costs for the extra people needed to hand‑count the ballots. For the voting equipment, we took the vendor invoices we were able to obtain from an open records request and pulled very specific costs for preparing the machines for an election: programming, licensing, additional ballot design machines to be able to tabulate, software updates, and cleaning or maintenance of the machines for each election. It was the closest comparison of putting people in a polling place to count compared to putting the machine there to count.
The “apple slice” analysis is based on a 4-year election cycle (2020 thru 2023) in Osage County, Missouri, with just under 10,000 registered voters. For hand counting, the costs for election judges for all the elections during that cycle would be $1.61 per ballot cast.
