How do they prevent ballot-stuffing? (Not trying to invalidate what you're saying, I'm genuinely curious)

Voter lists (allowing for on-site registration with ID or proof of address), tear-away serial numbers, and checks throughout the process, including the election official initialing the back of the ballot they hand you and confirming their initials are authentic when you come back with it filled out. In reality you usually don’t go more than a dozen feet from them to mark it anyway. There’s a good rundown here:

http://www.wheresthepaper.org/CountPaperBallots.htm

It helps that it is very rare to have a referendum question so you are usually just voting for your local member of parliament. The ballots are very clear:

http://www.opinionatedbastard.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/...

It doesn’t take that long to count by hand, and it’s rare that people don’t accept a result or engage in conspiracy theories and court battles for months after an election. Recounts happen if the results are very close but there is usually very little movement in totals.

It is apparently a bit more expensive than using machines but I think it’s worth it. There’s something meaningful and beneficial for a civic culture when everyone votes with a tangible physical act in largely the same way it has been done for 150 years. It’s an unusual but radically inclusive act.

Voting by mail is possible by request, but less common, and uses a double envelope system to achieve a similar outcome.

http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=vote&do...

Australia also has these features in its electoral systems. The measures are simple, highly visible and effective.

Canada's elections are quite amenable to manual tabulation. Color me envious.

Years ago, a group of us activists in the USA tried to understand manual counting better. We timed ourselves on mock elections using the "sort and stack" system. It goes about as fast as you'd expect (and reminded me of being a junior bookkeeper reconciling accounts at the end of period, ahhh nostalgia).

We also self-funded some official manual recounts, just to get better metrics. It wasn't pretty.

USA's elections are generally over complicated, with many races/issues per ballot. To enable efficient manual counting, we'd have to redesign our ballots so that they could be physically separately into federal, state, local sub-ballots, for separate processing.

Replacing FPTP with Approval Voting and Proportional Representation would also help.

> To enable efficient manual counting, we'd have to redesign our ballots so that they could be physically separately into federal, state, local sub-ballots, for separate processing.

This is how Australia does it. It works fine.

What if it just took 3 days to count the votes? People looking over each ballot and calling out the results, seconding them, and having someone keep a tally on a big chalkboard. They could even close the markets during the counting process to prevent the rampant speculation from causing wide swings. Does it need to be that efficient? If America can wait 2 months to swear in the new president, surely it can wait 3 days for the results to be counted. It's not like the world stopped spinning in 2000 when it took several weeks to finish the Florida count.

Florida is a pretty bad example because the Supreme Court ruling was that (1) Bush had to be declared the winner because if the original declared winner was overturned people would lose their faith in the voting system, and (2) resolving the case was taking too long so Florida had to stop trying.

All true, but the fact that “hanging chad” became part of the national lexicon for a while really speaks to a poorly design ballot.

There are a lot of examples of incompetence. eg the butterfly ballots where the candidates and the circles don't line up.

With the "hanging chads", the administrators hadn't cleaned the machines for years (after each election, turn over the machines and shake out the chads), so the holes filled up with chads, preventing new votes. Otherwise, the punch ballots weren't the worst option.

Sorry to geek out about this stuff. It was my thing for a while.