Votes are counted at the district level, with only totals being submitted up the chain, in order to protect privacy.
It's simple and it works.
When some battleground states routinely come down to less than 1% of voters, incredibly marginal effects matter.
The US still has institutional trauma from Hanging chads.
Just look at all the varied reasons mailed ballots are rejected, especially in tight races.
With paper and pencil, what happens if a mark got erased? If the circle is half filled? If the circle is quarter filled? All of these are questions that will be the subject of lawsuits in a mix of jurisdictions.
> what happens if a mark got erased? If the circle is half filled? If the circle is quarter filled?
When I sit down to vote, there is a very unambiguous set of instructions on how to fill it out: mark an X in the circle.
- we all know perfectly well that pencil erasers aren't perfect
- It's not a Scantron™ ffs! Is that what you're imagining? That's just a voting machine with extra steps! Every single ballot is counted by a human! https://electionsanddemocracy.ca/canadas-elections/canadas-e...
What do you do if someone marks something like a Y and it looks like the ink ran out?
(My local elections are indeed a Scantron-style procedure, incidentally. Bubble in the entire circle.)
> First, election officers open the ballot boxes and count the ballots.
Note the plural.
Safeguards for Counting Votes and Reporting on Results: https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=int/co...
Votes are counted by humans. It's not "fill a circle", it's "draw an X in a box". It's not ambiguous.
France has much stronger controls on ID checks at the voting booth and vote by mail (in fact for most elections there is no vote by mail, you can only delegate your vote to a person who cannot act as a delegate to more than two people to prevent ballot harvesting).
After the vote, you can check the status of the ballot's serial number at the appropriate city/county website. It won't tell you who voted or the votes cast, but that it was received.
So while the website won't link you to your votes, the city/county could absolutely make that connection since they control the serialization and the mailing. One hopes that they don't do this, and I'm sure they're not suppose to, but trust and wishes are the best surety we have for vote by mail ballots... there are ways to defeat the loss of anonymity in this case, but they involve not voting by mail or providing false signals (i.e. swapping ballots with someone else in your district).
It's one of those things that sounds bad in theory but is rarely an actual problem in practice.
The boxes are opened for counting as part of a public process, with independent observers.