Re: Hart InterCivic principal bought Bush's Rangers

[Ralph Shnelvar <ralphs@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Evan:

On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 21:49:17 -0700 (MST), you wrote:

>
[snip]
>
>This money should stay here, paying our neighbors to hand count the
>election.
>

The money should go where it would be best used.  In other words, if it
would cost $90,000 to dig a foundation for a hospital using machinery but
$100,000 to pay local residents to do it, the right thing to do is to spend
$90,000 because, otherwise, you end up with $10,000 having been wasted that
could have been spent making people's lives better.

Having corrected the premise and implication of your statement, now let me
prove to you why you are probably right.  Specificality, there is an
economic argument why the ballots should be hand counted.



First and foremost, a hand-count is a good thing by itself.  This, by
itself, has economic value in the maintenance of open and transparent
elections.  I have no idea how much that's worth.  Let's call it $X.

Second, the computers (laughably) should be faster than hand counting.  Let
us call the political/economic value of a rapid count $Y.

The next thing of note is that the Commissioners spent about $1.5 million
for this system.  They paid for this up front.

Yeah, I know that that $1.5 million is ostensibly coming from the federal
government, but, hey, that's still our money.  It's just being recycled
through different dwarves.  Part of America's malaise is that our elected
dwarves view money coming into their budget from some other level of
government as, somehow, "free money."  They just don't see (or care about)
the big picture.

Anyway, had our wise Commissioners simply put that $1.5 million into a 5%
investment, we could have generated $75,000 per year to fund hand counting.

Now note that this is _additional_ revenue that would be coming at Boulder
above and beyond whatever we already spend to run elections.

Thus the only question that is relevant is: Is the following inequality true
or false:

	$75,000 + $X > Labor savings of voting machines + $Y

Our only data point seems to indicate that $Y (i.e. economic value of a
rapid election result) should be zero since it was only today (as I write
this) that the counting was complete.

So that converts the inequality to

	$75,000 + $X > Labor savings of voting machines

But it looks like hand feeding all those ballots was hugely expensive.  I'm
going to make a wild-ass guess that when the bills come in that the
additional cost of the Boulder election will be $100,000.

So, if each hand-counted ballot costs $2 to count and we had 100,000
ballots, then the 
	Labor savings of voting machines
would be $100,000.

So we are left with

	$75,000 + $X > $100,000

If the value of transparency of voting exceeds $25,000 then we should do
hand counting for strictly economic reasons.  If we do hand counting then
"This money should stay here" (even though it won't and doesn't) makes
economic sense.



OK, to be fair, I've made a ton of assumptions.  Nonetheless, there is more
than a grain of truth to the analysis, above.

So, Evan, even though the assumption you make - that, somehow, money spent
paying people in Boulder is somehow better than money spent in other ways
and elsewhere - is wrong, you come to the right economic conclusion about
the efficacy of hand counting.



I don't know who first said it, but there's an old adage that says,
"Capital is a coward: It goes where it's treated well and flees where it's
treated poorly."

If Boulder is to revive (or even survive) then it needs to stop thinking
that it is a world unto itself; that it is immune from economic realities.

Every time a mere million dollars is wasted in Boulder, it puts Boulder at
an economic disadvantage with the rest of the world.  It just becomes one
more thing to make capital flee because it is being treated poorly.

This lesson should be obvious from the last election.  Our Commissioners and
County Clerk decided to spend other people's money without thinking through
the consequences.  If it were CVV's money (and, in part, it was) that was
being spent, I can promise you that a better system would have been
designed.




Ralph Shnelvar