Memo
To:

Brad Raffensperger, Secretary of State

From:

Chris Harvey

cc:

Jordan Fuchs, Deputy Secretary of State

Date:

2/25/2019

Re:

Statewide Voting System Pre-printed Hand-Marked Ballot Solution

Some in the legislature have advocated for a Hand Marked Paper Ballot solution for our new
statewide, uniform system. As part of our due diligence, your staff has worked to analyze
available data to ascertain the costs of implementing such a solution.
Initial Costs
Any solution will require uniform equipment and machinery in all 159 counties and 2365
precincts to actually run any election.
Here is the list of necessary equipment and initial cost attached to it.
Device
Units
Unit Cost
Unit Cost
Total Cost
Low
High
Low
ePoll Book
8,000
$1,000
$1,200
$8,000,000
Polling
3,500
$4,000
$6,000
$14,000,000
Place
Scanner
Central
163
$30,000
$50,000
$4,890,000
Scanning
Device
Ballot
4,730
$3,500
$4,500
$16,555,000
Marking
Device (for
ADA
Compliance)
Total Initial
$43,445,000
Equipment
Costs

Total Cost
High
$9,600,000
$21,000,000

$8,150,000

$21,285,000

$60,035,000

 Keep in mind this is initial purchase costs only. There is no allowance for implementation,
training, warranties, maintenance, security, election management software integration, election
reporting software integration, etc.
Paper Costs
The ongoing costs of pre-printing ballots to be hand-marked by voters is a variable cost. We
made some assumptions to compare apples to apples for a statewide implementation.
First, we estimate $0.55 per ballot for the costs of pre-printing ballots. This cost will vary among
our 159 counties. The $0.55 is believed by our office to likely be on the low side.
Second, not being able to know the potential outcomes of elections, we can not know how many
runoffs we will see locally or statewide. Also, we do not include any other elections in the
analysis such as special elections, municipal, SPLOST, etc. We just know there will be many
over a 10-year period.
Third, we assume static population change. So for this analysis, we are settling on 7,100,000
voters. However, we are aware that there will be over one million new voters over the next ten
years.
Fourth, for this cost of pre-printed ballot analysis we focused on the statewide elections over a
10-year period. When doing pre-printed ballots, we have to print a potential ballot for every
active registered voter and print extra to account for Advanced Voting, Provisional Voting and
Ballot Spoilage. That additional number normally runs about 20%. Also, for Primaries, there
have to three types of ballots printed; Democratic, Non-Partisan, and Republican.

Type of
Election
Presidential
Preference
Primaries
Primaries
Primary Runoffs
Generals
General Runoffs
Total 10-year
Print Costs

# of Types of
Ballots
2

Anticipated # of # of Ballots
Elections
Printed Total
2
34,080,000

Total Cost over
10 years
$18,744,000

3
3
1
1

5
3
5
2

$70,290,000
$42,174,000
$23,430,000
$9,372,000
$164,010,000

127,800,000
76,680,000
42,600,000
17,040,000

These print costs are exclusively borne by the counties running the elections.
Conclusion
The low-end cost of equipment and printing is $207,455,000 and on the high-end cost is
$224,045,000. It should be noted that these costs for printing will fall to the counties. Further,
executing such a solution will be logistically difficult and expensive for the counties to bear.

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