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Comment by cafard | Hacker News Reader

I should say, the speed of tabulation. An American election can include ballot lines for president, senator, member of congress, state senator, three state representatives, a county councilmember or two, a member of the board of education etc.

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If the speed of tabulation is the main reason then why are results no longer known by election night? They're saying it might be days again. When we had paper ballots, we knew that night. (For America)

>When we had paper ballots, we knew that night. (For America)

You forgot about 2000. Also, the main reason for the delays are mail-in ballots, which could be delayed for days/weeks, depending on how lenient the deadlines are.

2000 was punch cards and it came down to a razor thin 500 votes in a single swing state.

By law the mail-in ballots have to be in by election day.

More bits of paper. The ballot papers around here are bloated oversize monstrosities (picture A3 sized) due to the number of parties and candidates but you get a separate one for each election. Unfortunately not every area is paper only.

Here we don't even put names on the ballot, instead there is number assigned for each, this scales up to hundreds of candidates. This does prevent write ins, but I see no reason why you could not have own ballot for each purpose and then say colour code them and append letter or two in front of each candidate for each election.

I don't see how the median voter can be confident in making no mistakes. Not even programmers are willing to write out a list of opcodes anymore.

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