Even philanthropic efforts to produce public benefits in the form of civic technology have real costs associated with software development.  The open source model, however, means the costs are significantly less than current proprietary commercial alternatives, while the innovative benefits, unconstrained by commercial mandates, can be significantly greater.  More importantly, there is some reality distortion over the real costs to building civic engagement IT, such as election administration and voting systems.  They are markedly different than many other civic engagement tools that require only APIs and interactive web services leveraging government data stores to better engage and serve citizens.  Tuesday's post by Ms. Voting Matters on our Voter Services Portal ignited comments and questions about the real cost to build the Voter Services Portal.  The VSP is not "yet another simple web site," but a collection of software to provide services to voters that integrate with back-end legacy systems, and set the foundation to drive a series of voter service innovations as well as other election management tools in the near future.  We breakdown the cost model and actual costs here...