An expert on voting machines explains how they work

Just the staff that processes absentee ballots (on normal years, even more so this year) is a large group of people who operate 24/7 in a large warehouse. We're fortunate that the county has the resources to dedicate a large building to the election bureau, in other counties they have to borrow space in community centers or courthouses for counting and it's more of a logistical challenge to get equipment in/out. Yes, many of these same challenges exist and are managed for the physical polling locations, but hand-counting would be piling a lot more workforce and space to manage (I would guess about double) on a county that is already struggling to afford the operation. The use of precinct tabulators keeps the polling-place staff fairly small while meaning that the ballots are already tabulated when they are delivered to the election bureau.

I have been involved in hand-counting ballots and it is remarkable 1) how tedious and time consuming it is, and 2) how error-prone the process is. With our typical ballots (18" long paper with three columns of questions on both sides, typical Dominion design), it takes a while for each ballot and it's a two-person process for accuracy. Even then the election administration feels that the error rate is unacceptable and so takes every measure possible to avoid ballots that must be hand-tallied. Much of this is a result of election code requirements for accuracy that involve typically three-person (and two-party) sign-off on every tally operation. Security restrictions on access to the computer totaling system adds further complexity and has lead the county to abandon "distributed" hand-tally operations, with all handling now being done centrally in the warehouse.

My gut feeling is that countries which hand-count ballots probably have a lower emphasis on absolute accuracy than US election administrators typically do. I have no idea but would also be interested in knowing how common it is for election workers to be paid in Europe vs in the US. My gut feeling, though, is that hand-tallying is not practical in the US without a significant expansion of the budget for election administrators. I'm also unconvinced that hand-tallying has any meaningful advantages over precinct tabulation, since both allow for post-tally audit and in this jurisdiction and many others, hand-tally audit of a sample of machine tabulation is a standard part of post-election canvassing.

As an addendum on something somewhat poorly understood, in most US jurisdictions the long delay between "unofficial" and "official" election results is a result of the canvassing process, which is a combination of hand-processing "difficult" ballots like provisional and mismarked ballots, and a standardized post-election audit which may include hand-tallying a sample of the machine-tabulated ballots (I would like this to be a mandatory practice nationally). Much of this wait is not because the machine tabulation is slow, but because the machine tabulation is not completely trusted and there is an auditing process that takes some time, plus there being ballots which are inherently not suited for machine tabulation. In my area the unofficial tabulation is usually completed overnight after election day, but the canvassing process takes substantially longer because, among other things, every provisional ballot must be manually researched by a more highly trained records team, which is a measure to avoid denying anyone the right to vote because of procedural problems with looking them up in the pollbook.

Finally, as discussed, not all states allow absentee/mail ballots to be processed before polls close. There's a tradeoff here and I don't think this rule is entirely unreasonable, but it does obviously add to the delay.

I don't understand how the US manages the election like a 3rd world country.

The fact that everybody is cheering Philadelphia for only taking 4 days to count a couple hundred thousand ballots is just silly.

[0] https://files7.philadelphiavotes.com/maps/ward-maps/Wards_St...

The problem is mail in ballots, which were significantly more this year. When do you start processing them? In many states, the answer is: before election day.

In other states, notably PA, the law says "day of election". The legislature there deliberately did not take any action to change this. Why?

In a state you might have two state legislative seats up, plus some county offices.

You can't do both #1 and #2 now. An anonymous ballot can't be audited, because it has no provenance -- if somebody slips an extra ballot in, how would you tell?

Auditing means things like paper trails (get an automatic electronic tally, but produce a verifiable paper ballot that can be counted in the case of any apparent inconsistencies). This discourages cheating on the electronic tallies because you never know when an audit may take place.

A fundamental flaw of direct-recording voting machines—that is, ones where you pull the lever on an old mechanical machine or you touch the touch screen on a modern one—all of those machines end up being completely impossible to audit. There’s no way to know whether the machine was honest or not, short of taking it apart and actually being able to inspect the mechanism. We have no good way of doing that with software. The complete lack of any auditable record of the count, so that you had to completely trust programmers, was a real problem. [But] the vast majority of votes in the U.S. today are being recorded on paper ballots that are filled in by hand. That makes me feel reasonably good. And furthermore, a growing number of states have some kind of an audit law.

Broken Ballots book website: http://timbergroves.com/bb/

Douglas W. Jones: http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/

Best of both worlds.

With fill-in-the-bubble ballots, a typical error would be printing the ballot with the candidates in one order but programming the scanner with the candidates in a different order. There was a famous incident of this happening [in] Pottawattamie County, [Iowa], in 2006 in its June primary. The net result was that the numbers that came up were pretty nonsensical and bore no relationship with anyone’s expectation of the outcome of the race. The election officials noticed. They did a hand count, and that completely resolved the problem. And they could because they had paper ballots.

I think like most things there are tradeoffs and the qualities most needed in the system run counter to one another--speed can cause errors to be missed, security reduces access, etc.

Ohio, the only other state I've voted in (many years ago) had electronic machines that produced a paper audit receipt. The problem I see with that is that now you have two sources of truth, and no easy way to count one of them to reconcile them.