For president you have a piece of paper with two boxes on. You don't even have ranked voting.
Mark an X next to one and put it in a ballot box. Works fine everywhere else.
There's actually nothing wrong with machine counting, I believe it was found to be more accurate also overall less prone to fatigue and mistakes. [0]
The real strange thing in the US is the electoral college system for Presidential elections, surely 1 person 1 vote nationwide would make sense. Afterall the President is supposed to represent everyone equally.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/11/1128197774/research-finds-han...
One might consider that later democracies learned from some of our mistakes.
Are you not even 18 or have you never voted?
Depending on your state there were about 20 candidates for president [1]. The fact that there's more than 2 has caused issues in the past where famously a candidate listed second on the ballot received a significant amount of votes in a county they were widely disliked [2].
[1]: https://ballotpedia.org/Presidential_candidates,_2024
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
Here's an electoral paper with 20 candidates.
https://www.onlondon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Screen...
In this case it's even more complex as you get a second vote if your primary vote doesn't finish in the top two.
Machines aren't needed
Wow.
What happens if you do 3 counts and get 3 vastly different outcomes?
So I think it's reasonable to say that, to paraphrase the earlier comment, putting an X in a box on a piece of paper is how it's done in most of the world.
It's true that the ballots aren't always counted by hand.
Sure with paper systems you might be able to swing upto say 1% of the vote without being detected (probably more like 0.1%), anything more will involve too many people for a conspiracy to remain.
With electronic you can swing 20% without blinking.
Scaling is bad when it comes to voting.
You're going to have to give some citations for that because all electronic votes are usually backed by a paper ballot.. I've not heard of 20%~ swing and getting away with it.
>It's true that the ballots aren't always counted by hand.
I can't speak for other jurisdictions (although I understand that this is pretty common in the US), but where I live (NY) we do exactly that. Well, instead of marking an 'X', we fill in an oval for each item on the ballot and that paper ballot is then scanned and counted.
If there are issues or the vote is very close, as with most places, a recount is done, first by machine and, if necessary, by hand.
How is this different from the rest of the world?
They vote for everything including the president and local school district board members and everything in between at the same time.
A foreign state isn't going to spend millions trying to subvert the vote for the head of "Wyoming School Board 45".
When I was at university our student elections were done on computer. 20 years ago. Nobody really cared about them, it was perfectly reasonable, you'd only have to bribe/threaten 3 people to make the result whatever you wanted.
If you put the national election in the hands of 3 people though, then you have a major problem.
>They vote for everything including the president and local school district board members and everything in between at the same time.
What's more, elections are managed/run at the county level, not at the state or Federal levels. As such, there isn't just one election in the US on election day. Rather, there are 3500+ elections, each with different ballots, different folks managing the elections and different sets of interested parties monitoring each of those 3500+ elections.
While many offices are up for election every two or four or six years, not all of them fall on even-numbered years like the Federal elections.
My state has state elections that happen in concert with Federal elections, but my local government does not. In fact, we're voting for mayor, City Council and every other elective city office in a few weeks, even though the federal and state elections aren't this year.
Since elections are managed and run at the county level, there is little uniformity -- and less opportunity for widespread fraud.