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Comment by herbstein | Hacker News Reader

> I believe there are people who want results sooner rather than later

In Denmark all ballots are hand-counted. It takes about 6 hours from polls close to every precinct reporting a preliminary result. Wanting it faster isn't really necessary, other than to feed the 24/7 news machine.

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Denmark has a smaller population than New York City, America is a very large place.

Italy has 60M people and paper ballots, results are out the next day. Population does not matter since polling stations can be scaled up proportionally.

I've been in voting where we had a dozen ballots per person (referendums) so this would be more than the total paper ballots in the US, it works fine.

Minor miscounts happen but nobody has ever seriously questioned the overall vote results.

Uh no. This election I had a president, two senators, a state senator, a state assembly, a county executive, city council, school board, prosecutor recall, and half a dozen ballot measures. It took four legal size paper surfaces.

Some of the regional elections in Germany have comically large ballots with dozens of options and a very complicated counting system (16 votes that can be split between individuals or party lists). The hand-counted results are generally available by the next morning. There is really no excuse for using electronic voting. In Germany it has been ruled unconstitutional since it cannot be checked by the voters.

Those could easily be prioritized. First count the federal elections, then the state elections, then the county elections. You get the presidential and congressional results within a day, the state election results within two-three days, and the more local ones within the week. Is anyone going to seriously complain that it took a week to find out who is on the school board?

Right, so there are more people to count the vote

There are a LOT of elections in the US. Where I live we have ~30 different things to vote on this election.

So the incentive to automate things are bigger here.

So does Denmark, why do you assume it's any different? Counting doesn't take that long when you split it across 10K voting districts, which is what the U.S. did for most of its existence. We want ACCURATE elections free from corruption and hacks. You can't undo a fucked up election.

I'm from Sweden where we only have 3 things to vote on (national, county, and city). I assumed Denmark was similar.

Europarlament too?

That's on a separate day.

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