Get enough people to count them in that timeframe.
We use paper ballots here in Australia and get the election results that same night. The USA has 12 times our population and around 6-7 times our voters so proportionally it should be easier for the USA to achieve this than for Australia.
>Get enough people to count them in that timeframe.
Whos going to pay for that? The US is essentially 50 different countries with 50 different budgets. The federal government could try to mandate this and help pay for it but states have rejected free heath care money because they don't want the federal government encroaching on their state and some states may push back and do the same. Therefore you'd potentially waste all this money and still have the problems that were solved with the electronic system.
>We use paper ballots here in Australia and get the election results that same night. The USA has 12 times our population and around 6-7 times our voters so proportionally it should be easier for the USA to achieve this than for Australia.
Easier? It would be much harder. The solution that many states are taking is electronic with verified paper trail(ie. the voter sees the printed ballot and verifies it before committing the vote).
The cost of running this year's EU election in our country where this system is used (paper ballots without any electronic counting), adjusted for the difference in median income between our country and the US, was reported to be around $15 per voter.
The 2020 US presidential election gathered 160 million votes, which would put the price of this system at $2.4 billion.
According to figures contained in a report by the MIT Election Lab [1], the cost of running a nation-wide US election is estimated to be between $2 and $5 billion.
By 2024 the majority of the country has switched to DRE with electronic paper trail. The country is still by and large spending money on electronic systems...just better electronic systems.
We use paper ballots in my jurisdiction (NY) and they’re counted electronically with a scanner. This gives a real time tally, but preserves a paper trail that can be audited.
This Optical Scanning system is a disaster in tight races. I would know. I was a volunteer in the Tiffany Caban queens election back in 2019 and I saw first hand how in a close race this system allows the more politically connected parties to push outsiders out by disregarding ballots that may have had any possible ambiguity: For example, there was a mustard stain on a ballot and the scanner tossed it out as invalid, it was only discovered after a lawsuit was filed and a manual count was done. In the end there were enough ambiguous ballots where they could not reach the voter that it swung the election to Caban's opponent.
Instead if you had DRE with Paper Trail generated by the machine like NJ has switched to, then you could have a clean concise re-count with no ambiguity.
It would not matter when you have verification of paper ballots by the voters + risk limiting audits. The voters keep the machines honest and the machines keep the humans honest. Thats the ideal system. Two way verification.
