In the UK all ballots are hand counted, and the counting is done within a day.
I would expect that the amount of time it takes to tally a paper election is related to how many people you have counting.
I would expect that the amount of time it takes to tally a paper election is related to how many people you have counting.
You might also vote for someone to represent you in the devolved Welsh/Scottish/Northern Irish governments if you live in those countries, but that's only 15% of the population and those elections aren't necessarily on the same day as the general election.
Spend: In the UK, price of counting ballots is far lower than price of paying poll booth staff. It costs approximately £0.10 per person (note, not per ballot) in the UK to count ballots in a nationwide election (as opposed to about £0.35 on keeping polling booths open). It’s likely that if the number of ballots went up by a factor of 10, further efficiencies would be found, but simple ‘ballots counted per hour’ metrics imply that the marginal cost should be relatively affordable.
Difficulty: While running a fair and free election is undeniably challenging, it naively would appear to be much less work than E.g. the USPS does each day to deliver the daily 300M pieces of mail.
The people running elections don't charge voters for voting.
So I'm not sure it's useful to compare the two?
(That the Americans feel like they need government mail when the supposedly more socialist Europeans mostly managed to privatise their former monopolists probably tells us.. something?)