Not much of a diary - yada yada. But a heck of a realization.
I was listening to the Ed Show on MSNBC tonite and heard a discussion about the voting lines in the swing states - the last vote in some FL county was 01:30 am Weds!
As I typed this, Rachel talked about it as well..
My mind wandered to a stray fact about Lockheed Martin's F-35 'Fighter' Jet costs.. These things can cost about $250 Million each!
More below the Lockheed Martin Orange Money Portal...
I did a quick search for the cost of voting machines . The Santa Barbara data showed it cost $1.3 Million dollars for 200 machines. Each of these machines were expected to be used for 500 votes per election - this translates to about 40 votes per hour - a reasonable number given a reasonable sized ballot, mitigated with early voting options.
So the Santa Barbara data for machines that cost about $6500 per machine projects to a cost of about $250,000,000 to accommodate 20,000,000 votes on an election day.
The weird thing is that the voting machines can be used for several years, and the F-35's have yet to be 'used' for their mission (damn the Taliban and their Air Force Free selves).
The sad news is that the MIC intends to make over 2,000 F-35s.
Could we use the nearly 40,000 machines somewhere in the US on election days that represent a single F-35 White collar welfare 'Fighter' Jet?