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.
