Since we've got several people here who design gizmos for a living, I was wondering if you guys could help me out. Many current "optical scanning" voting machines (e.g., the Sequoia Optech Eagle) are built with technology out of the early 1980's, at best: Z80 processors, battery-backed RAM (as opposed to Flash), and so forth. The software for many of these things are literally written in Z80 assembly, making them difficult to maintain, much less audit.

So, if you wanted to start from scratch, using modern technology (e.g., 300dpi color scanners, USB memory sticks, StrongARM CPUs, 6" color LCD display for feedback, etc.), what would you estimate the costs would be, both in engineering manpower, manufacturing cost, and so forth? We're talking about a gizmo that scans and OCRs hand-marked ballots for one or two elections per year and otherwise spends its life in a warehouse where it probably has no environmental controls, so it would have to be built to something resembling military specs for durability.

(You can read more about these sorts of voting systems at Doug Jones' comprehensive page.)